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Cards Against Humanity has filled in its giant hole to nowhere

Hole lotta nothing? Turns out the hole, a Black Friday-week stunt, was in Oregon, Illinois, and its short life has now ended.

Gael Cooper
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.
Expertise Breaking news, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, food, shopping and deals, product reviews, money and finance, video games, pets, history, books, technology history, generational studies. Credentials
  • Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year"​ award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.
Gael Cooper
2 min read
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Goodbye, holiday hole. We didn't really know you at all.

Screenshot by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper/CNET

There was a useless hole, and now it is no more. The people behind the Cards Against Humanity board game have filled in the giant hole they dug over Black Friday weekend, and there's now little or no trace of one of the weirder holiday stunts of 2016.

The company dug for 52 hours, extending the time every time someone donated another $5, ending up with a total of $100,573. It was only the latest Black Friday stunt from the game company, but the first that featured a livestreamed event that anyone could watch.

Why dig a hole? The company was vague, though we got the idea there was a comparison being drawn between throwing one's money away on Black Friday shopping and throwing money away into a giant pointless hole.

The company would only say that the hole was "in America," but since the company was formed by a group of alumni from Highland Park High School in Illinois, it was a pretty good bet that it was hole-y located in the Land of . And according to news site SaukValley.com, the hole was dug just outside of Oregon, Illinois, 90 minutes west of Chicago, and as of Friday morning, it was almost completely filled back in.

"Soon they're going to cover it with black dirt and get it seeded," the paper quoted Mike Reibel, an Ogle County planning and zoning administrator, as saying Friday. "It didn't appear to harm anything."

The contractors hired to dig the hole thought it was a little weird, but they did not need to reason why.

"To dig a hole and then just fill it back in isn't really our normal work scope," Myers Excavating owner Rob Diehl told SaukValley.com, noting that six men manned the digger. "But we did it."

Before leaving the hole, Cards Against Humanity's Claire Friedman, who dubbed herself "hole mom" on Twitter , fed the hole a banana.