March 2010

Submit the worst possible caption for this New Yorker cartoon.

Rules & Tips

WINNER (THREE-WAY TIE)

"Did someone in here order a jug band to play a plaintive, Depression-era folk tune about downward class mobility?" --Trout Almondine

"You think you've got it bad? We're just the latest in a long line of redneck caricatures created for the sole purpose of making New Yorker readers feel culturally superior."-- clannish

"My name's Brigham Young and these are my wives. We've come to complain about the rapid and deep decline in prophets. And your spelling."-- TG Gibbon

For 2nd, 3rd & 4th place as well as all the many Honorable Mentions and a comment for each one go here.

2:45 AM

NY Times Self-Censorship Watch, from this weekend's article on the Runaways:

The Runaways' classic hit from their four-year career is the 1976 jailbait anthem "Cherry Bomb"; the quintet's combative sexuality -- surprising for rock at the time -- seemed to both alienate and titillate audiences. Though they were talented musicians who helped write their songs and were ferocious live, they were often written off as a slutty, manufactured novelty act by the dude-dominated '70s rock press and heckled by male musicians, even those they appeared with. (Creem magazine infamously dismissed them with three unprintable words.)

Ooooo! The '70s! I bet it was REALLY dirty!

Well, Google should help me find out what they were ...

"These bitches suck"? That's it?

Only two unprintable words, not three. And only if you're a pussy.

10:21 AM

If reading Rapture Ready – or at least the chapter that appeared in The New Yorker – has left you with an interest in all things Bible-publishing related, you'll want to check out this article by Chris Faraone in the Boston Phoenix on how many of the innovations in e-reading on the iPhone are coming from Bible aps.

If you want to see what a 21st century reading experience should look like — one that enables you to bookmark, notate, listen to, and share passages instantly on Facebook and Twitter — the marketplace you're looking for is e-Bibles. ... [O]ne version with a social-networking component even allows believers to search for other folks who want to chat about specific chapters. More so, it can tap a smart phone's GPS to locate local prayer groups with similar affinities.

And it is e-Bibles that have helped push technology forward, by allowing users to seamlessly flip between scanning on an iPhone and reading on a laptop (without losing their page). Ditto the ability to switch, mid-stream, between Standard English and dozens of translations, or jump to an audio-book version, while keeping place to the sentence. Learned readers can even teleport from one particular chapter/verse in the King James Version to the same place in the New International Version. The future is now.