There are many things you might do when it gets REALLY HOT in this town. Make granita with tangerines stolen at midnight from your neighbor's tree. Crank the AC and get trashed on homebrew while you watch YouTube clips of new Laker point guard Steve Nash. Or do something slightly more productive and enter Al Gelato's gelato contest.

The 34-year-old Beverly Hills gelateria is giving away an entire year of free gelato to one lucky customer. The contest began this week — just in time for the 100-degree-plus temperatures that have been hitting the valleys of L.A. To enter, email Al Gelato with the phrase “I Want Free Gelato!” (to differentiate your emails from those Al Gelato is getting from, I don't know, vendors or relatives or other normal people) and your name. For more details — and to find out what kind of flavors of gelato you might be eating all year — check out the restaurant's website or Facebook page.

If you can't be bothered to get up from your fainting couch in this heat, no worries: You have until Oct. 31 at midnight to enter (something to do on Halloween, maybe). The winner will be announced Nov. 1.

What do you get? A pint of your choice of gelato every week for a year. Not a bad payoff for an email, especially if you consider that the gelato is house-made, probably by somebody from one of the three generations of the Lisuzzo family who have owned and operated the shop since its founding in 1978. Matriarch Clare Lisuzzo came over from Calabria, after learning how to make gelato in her native Italy. And when you head over to retrieve your free pint, you can always pick up a pizza or some soup or one of the giant meatballs the restaurant makes — or an apple pie the size of a hat box. For when it cools off and you're not subsisting entirely on blackberry gelato.

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