The alternative is to start an Obfuscated T-SQL contest where entrants have to write an obscure query either to acheive a given result or which people have to work out what it does without actually running it.

A couple of us (briefly) tried to think of a scenario where the number of characters in the month of a student's date of birth would be significant and hence the query would be appropriate, but couldn't come up with a beleivable one.

The only idea that came close was printing the dates on certificates (or similar) where someone needed to decide which ones would need to be offset by half a character in order to center them. But it's a very contrived situation.