Eight cartoons by Jacqueline Kennedy were auctioned off earlier this month at the Wright Auction House in Chicago. The First Lady apparently completed the drawings as she waited to be interviewed for the July 4, 1961 issue of Look magazine. Here is one of her noticeably uncaptioned images. I think you know what to do.
Submit the worst possible caption for this New Yorker cartoon.
•Last week's results. •Rules and tips.
First Place:
"Court is a depressing place, where the permanent regime reinforces its absolute power with a due process charade that no longer bears even the appearance of legitimacy."—J.D.
Second Place:
"Dwayne. Dwayne the bathtub, I'm dwowning... in the legal morass without tort reform. I guess you could say I went a long way to make that joke."—LK
Third Place:
"Since when is it a crime to be a professional muff diver? ...oh, since that long ago? Interesting."—Francis
Honorable Mention:
Continue reading "The New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest #199" »
Hey everybody. Since I didn't post the original, I'm posting my results as a separate entry, so now you can comment on my amazing choices. Also, new rule: You can only enter 5 times, although I'm pretty sure this is already a rule. I'm lookin' at you, Sam L.
First Place:
"I think the guy on the roof farted." —The Confidence Man
Second Place:
"You should keep your eyes on the road. We didn't even remotely secure that guy."—t.a.m.s.y.
Third Place:
"Look, no matter what the joke is, there's no way it's going to explain the fact that I haven't shaved in 3 days and am sipping a fuckin' frappuccino."—Phil G.
Honorable mention:
Continue reading "The New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest #198 Results" »
A spokeswoman for the Commerce Department said Friday that initially plans were made to only visit Brazil, but Sanford asked for extra meetings in Argentina.Sanford said the trip was legitimate but he put the agency in an awkward spot "based on what I did in terms of eating dinner down there."
Just as posting has begun to pick up speed around here and it's beginning to seem like I wrote my own blogituary prematurely, I'm taking off for a summer break. This could be good news. I mean, it's definitely good news for me, suckers, but it could be good news for readers of this site as well, because I've invited several extremely capable and funny people to guest blog in my absence. You may remember the terrific stuff they came up with last summer. It kind of put me to shame.
On the other hand this could be bad news, since none of them have actually, formally accepted the invitation. Including the guy who's supposed to be handling the anticaption contest. If it doesn't show up here, I'm sure you'll be able to find it somewhere.
Either way, when I return I should have more time for blogging that I have in a while, so whether it's tomorrow or after July 13, this blog's best days are ahead of it.
Possibly.
Here's the cover of The Post New York Post, a 1984 parody about how the tabloid would cover a nuclear holocaust. It was edited by, I believe, Tony Hendra and Robert Vare and Lewis Grossberger with Kurt Andersen and Warren Leight. I remembered it today for obvious reasons, and not finding an image online I dug it out of my closet and took a few pictures with my iPhone. And not the new iPhone with the decent camera, sorry.
Excerpts and images from the cover story after the jump.
[h/t]
I don't care who's on other front pages. This blog makes room for Sky Saxon.
Update:
If it's ever not made sense to you what the big deal was, this is what the big deal was. This performance, in May 1983, was, in its time, probably almost as significant as the Beatles on Ed Sullivan.A lot of this stuff — all this regrettable, awful stuff with him over the last 20 years or so, and the continuing fascination with it, has roots in this moment.
They shut down the Internet. They arrested the reporters. They beat us in the streets. But they will never overcome our sleeve faces.
[h/t Frank K.]
More here, there, and everywhere.
I like to think that there's always been some seriousness of purpose stowed away inside those jokes about protest babes. But whatever the appeal is, they have become a trademark of this site. Which is why even though there's nothing I can say that you haven't heard already or felt yourself, I feel compelled to post this small tribute to a genuine beauty, and to acknowledge that while a sense of humor is important even in dire situations, there's a time for tears, and rage, as well.
Update. I changed the photo since there's some dispute over whether the one I posted yesterday is actually Neda.
Submit the worst possible caption for this New Yorker cartoon.
•Last week's results. •Rules and tips.
From an AP article on grammar instruction:
Jack Bovill of the Spelling Society, which advocates simplified spelling, said Saturday he agreed with the decision. ... (This version CORRECTS spelling of Bovill, sted Bovell, in graf 4.)
"At 102, Mr. Millstone left a deep and lasting imprint here in his hometown." —From a New York Times article about St. Louis businessman Isadore Millstone, who last month jumped to his death.
Everyone's making a big deal about how the Iran uprising is being driven by Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. What really makes it a web phenomenon is the crossover with Hot Chicks with Douchebags.
From the official protest babe thread of the reformist movement.
Submit the worst possible caption for this New Yorker cartoon.
•Last week's results. •Rules and tips.
First place
"I'm gellin' alright. And by gellin' I mean dropping napalm on noncombatants." —therblig
Second place
"What a strange plane. It lacks a propulsion system."—mypalmike
Third place
"Yeah, they're last year's, but you know how long the procurement process takes." — J. Warner
Continue reading "The New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest #197" »
Rough translation of BBC News caption: If we're gonna keep running photos of this shit, you're gonna have to come through with more protest babes.
Send me links if you find any. This site is not about to abandon its beat in a time of crisis.
(New pics after the jump)
Continue reading "Media: Iranian uprising suffering from lack of hot chicks" »
It's been a whole two and a half months since I last peeked under the dressing room door at the Clique Girlz, I wonder how the new kid is getting along.
Whoops! Apparently Sara got the boot six weeks ago. Whether the problem was that her name was too old-fashioned for sisters Destinee and Paris Monroe or that Jews are no longer the hot ethnic group for a teenybopper band, the Girlz may soon remedy the situation by acquiring a wise Latina named Keana Texeira. OK, Keana isn't officially in the group but she is the girlz' new BFF (though that last F is very conditional for Paree and Dentist). Also, I don't actually know if she's Latina. I just think she looks feisty and lacking in judicial temperament.
Anyway, it's getting to be a regular Thunderdome over there. If I were one of the Monroe sisters I'd be sleeping with one eye open.
The other day I noted that while the web site of the New York Times won't print obscene words like "fart," it will host reviews and explicit trailers for vintage softcore porn films such as the 1974 Belgian farce Erotic Diary of a Lumberjack.
Obviously the site's listings are maintained by some external content provider (the reviews are from All Movie Guide) so the paper could let them stand and simply maintain that it has no editorial responsibility for the occasional flash of bush that might appear in them.
But that's not what it's doing. After Gawker picked up the item, no doubt sending the Times web site more traffic than it's seen in years, the paper huffily took down not only the explicit trailer for Lumberjack, but the entire listing — which was unobjectionable unless the Times intends to convey that even acknowledging the existence of softcore pornography is detrimental to the dignity of its readership.
Mind you, the paper didn't go through all its listings and scrub the erotica genre. It just took down the one listing that people had suddenly found out about. The site still contains information about and skintastic footage from movies ranging from the campy 1960 romp Blaze Starr Goes Nudist to the merely sleazy 1998 Hotel Exotica. Both those links, while they work, are safe for work, though the embedded trailers are not, particularly the one for Hotel Exotica, which depicts everything from hot girl-on-girl action to cold ice-on-nipple action.
Click while you can, but there's plenty more where that comes from. Just for the fun of keeping the IT department hopping, readers are hereby invited to submit the most obscene content they can find on the New York Times web site, not counting Judy Miller's reporting.
A fan of our self-censorship series points out an interview with The Daily Show's Jason Jones in today's New York Times ArtsBeat blog that replaces the word fart with [flatulence]. The interview is pegged to a Daily Show segment about how the Times is a lumbering and increasingly irrelevant dinosaur of interest only to octogenarians, and while the policy of refusing to print the word fart didn't specifically come up, I can't imagine it helps.
Although in fact this might not be policy so much as an oppressive culture of self-censorship that has writers and editors cowed beyond even what's necessary. After all, it's not like the paper never prints the word fart. It first did so at least as far back as 1972 in an essay on Samuel Beckett that quotes a monologue by the playwright in which the word is used six times. For good measure, the author of the essay then repeats it twice more in his discussion of the work. Ironically, the headline on the essay is "As Close to Silence as a Man Can Get."
And just a couple of months ago, there it is again in another essay about Beckett, this time from one of his letters regarding "a sebaceous cyst in my anus, which happily a fart swept away before it became operable.” The writer did precede this quote with "brace yourself," for which some readers may actually be grateful, and which in any case is preferable to bleeping or paraphrasing.
I say fart appeared in the paper "at least" as far back as 1972 because the Times search engine returns more than 10,000 hits on the word fart, most due to misfires in what is apparently an automated process of rendering printed text into digital files. That is, most of the farts in the history of the paper have actually been parts, facts and forts. Sadly, therefore, the search engine is incorrect that the word appears in a World War One dispatch headlined Great Gas Attack by Foe.
But again, the Times has laid its share of intentional farts. William Grimes let one fly in a book review last December, as did Jim Holt last July. Virginia Heffernan squeaked one into the Magazine in February 08.
And those were in the more strict printed paper. Times bloggers cut the cheese even more regularly. Fart has been in the Wordplay blog, the Bats blog, the New Old Age blog, and even in a headline on the Freakanomics blog. On a related note, how many fucking blogs does the New York Times have?
Apparently the Times also gives more leeway to its non-original content, as when it posted the first chapter of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, with a whole opening paragraph about farts. I've never read the book, but all of a sudden the title makes a lot more sense. Also, the paper's movie listings reprint an AMG review of the 2000 comedy F.A.R.T., although apparently the film (I can't believe you don't remember it) was also released under the title Big Wind on Campus, which is how the NYT officially catalogs it.
And it is in this area that the paper's overseers may wish there were some more oversight. Because it turns out that if you know what to search for — say, the 1974 Belgian softcore comedy Erotic Diary of a Lumberjack (an old Skinemax staple, SFW) — you can find trailers (NSFW) featuring not just a couple of naughty words like fart but simulated sex and full-frontal nudity. Next time you see a demure refusal to print an "obscene" word on the web site of the family newspaper, you can have a chuckle at the knowledge that this is only a click away on the same site.
In case you were wondering what last week's excuse for the lack of blogging is, I've just returned from Los Angeles where I spent three or four days at E3, the world's largest and awesomest video game convention. On reflection, this is an odd excuse for not blogging, since it's pretty much one of those events that everyone who attends is required to blog about. In that spirit, and in a tip of the Raider Wastehound Helmet (DR +5) to the awards every gaming site gives out at the end of the show, I offer my own highly subjective, utterly meaningless 2009 E3 awards.
Most buzz for something almost nobody actually saw: Project Natal
OK, a handful of people saw it in person and were blown away by it. Everyone else professed intense skepticism — would it really work the way Microsoft said in the promo vid? would there be any non-gimmicky games for it? — but nobody was ignoring it. The Nintendo developer who shrugged it off as "Wii too syndrome" didn't sound quite as confident as he wanted. Still, the general tenor of the buzz remained: let's see how it looks next year.
Best game with no buzz whatsoever: Joy Ride
Off to one side of the Xbox booth was a single station set up with this cartoony racing game. I must have passed it a dozen times before finally picking up the controller for what may have been my most purely enjoyable ten minutes of the show. A near-perfect pick up and play game — it's a cute as hell use for your XBL avatar and pretty much crash-proof — Joy Ride features not only the usual racing modes but a giant freeplay sandbox for performing ridiculous stunts. The best thing about Joy Ride is that it'll be a totally free XBL Arcade download. Xbox hopes to make money on micropayments for things like new tracks and fancy paint jobs for your car, but the basic game won't cost a cent for XBL Gold OR Silver members.
Game I most wish I could play tonight: Batman: Arkham Asylum
A brutal fighting game — not visually gory, but the thudding sound of the Caped Crusader pounding his fists into bad guy's faces will stay with you — Arkham is also an imaginative stealth game and a well-acted adventure puzzler. I got to play all three modes and they blend together organically and seamlessly. Maybe not the most original game out there, but done in a very satisfying way. I got stuck on a three-tiered room full of thugs, trying to take them out one at a time without being spotted using gliding attacks from the rafters and well-placed baterangs. Never did manage to do it, but I've been thinking about new strategies ever since.
Hottest booth babes (schoolgirl fetish division): G4
Also seen above playing The Beatles: Rock Band, which brings us to...
Continue reading "And the award for most arbitrary E3 Awards goes to..." »
We already talked about the minimal posting going on here for at least the last and next few weeks. And if you came by Monday looking for the anti-caption contest, you may have thought I was even going to skip that for another week. As well I might have if The Chicago Tribune hadn't given it a shout-out in an article about the New Yorkrer contest's first three-time winner. The thought of all those Chicagoans coming to this site looking for a contest that is "not as much of a challenge" as the New Yorker one (as if) and finding a blank page was too sad to contemplate, so I threw it up at the last minute. Today I'll even judge it.
I probably would have blogged about that ChiTrib article even if it hadn't mentioned me because of this:
So, yes, there's some grumbling about the mainstream nature of the contest. Best was a dead-on Web piece by Charles Lavoie suggesting that a more vulgar version of "God, what a jerk" could win the contest every week.
Noted for future reference: In Chicago, "Christ" is more vulgar than "God." At least there are no black people there to read that.
Submit the worst possible caption for this New Yorker cartoon.
First place
"I love how they dress in their cute little lab coats and talk about their little experiments and go home and murder their fucking bitch wives in their sleep and carry their little clipboards and ..." —Joshua
Second place
"Clearly the serum has made them much smarter. Now let's find out if they taste better." —Steve_O
Third place
"I've injected Ritalin, smallpox, Xanax, yellow fever, Botox, black plague, Viagra, HIV, smartmouth, Ecstasy, heroin, estrogen, Ebola, and AnusTite. The results have been remarkable."
"I'll say! Any more tests on the mice?"
"The...mice?" — Damon
Continue reading "The New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest #196" »
