HONORABLE MENTIONS
For additional Honorable Mentions and a Judge's Comment for each one go here.
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.
Pouring blood on the streets is a novel idea, but we all know the only way to really get the world to take notice is with protest babes. And if this is the best the Thai protesters can come up with, I might have to side with the junta. As always, send better photos if you find them.
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.
Submit the worst possible caption for this New Yorker cartoon.
•Last week's results. •Rules and tips.
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.
Is it? The first set of features would translate well to other books – the ability to bookmark and annotate is already common on e-readers – and might even improve the quality of my Twitter feed. (New York magazine book critic Sam Anderson, is already tweeting the best sentence he reads each day, though presumably he has to type all 144 characters himself.) But would anyone really use their GPS to find a book club nearby that's discussing the latest Dan Brown or Elizabeth Gilbert opus? Or toggle between a half-dozen translations of Homer or Tolstoy? Even Faraone recognizes that some of these extras may only be useful for the Bible:
Still, the Bible's greatest asset for e-book adaptation is its age-old annotation, and e-Bible developers have been inspired by operability. Users can switch between languages and translations because the Bible has been parsed the same way forever. (Trying to accomplish the same thing with, say, the unabridged James Patterson collection would be considerably more labor intensive.)
But why would anyone would try that with Patterson's novels? Isn't the plain text enough? Yes, some non-fiction could use the extras – I'd probably be getting a lot more out of Alex Ross' The Rest Is Noise if I had the companion media from his website more readily available – but most books, both fiction and non-fiction, are written to be read as is. And while we may start to see collectors' edition e-books full of DVD-type extras – deleted chapters, early drafts, editors' comments, author interviews – the way most of us do the majority or our reading will not change simply because the form of the book is now digital.
Which is fine. E-readers, like iPods, will change the way we buy, carry, and store books. [This is a potential boon for those of us who find our apartments overwhelmed with hardcovers and paperbacks, though some folks are upset that we won't know how smart they are unless we see Poe and Artaud on their shelves. Linda Holmes thinks we should rely on "rely on behavior and conversation for that," but that's far too much work.] But the way we read will probably stay the same. The E-Bibles succeed not because they transform the particular way we read the Bible, but because they match it. E-readers will succeed based on how well they do the same for the rest of literature.
Submit the worst possible caption for this New Yorker cartoon.
For a whole bunch more honorable mentions, a judge's comment for each one AND an explaination on why it's a tie go here.
WINNERS
FIRST PALCE (Tie)
The American People are telling me that they want him bankrupted and inadequately cared for--Walt
First PLACE (Tie)
"He keeps muttering, 'Foregive them father for they don't know what the fuck they're doing.'"--:Rob
HONORABLE MENTIONS
"Look, Em, I don't know what was in the time portal or those slippers, but that thing is part Cairn Terrier and part alcoholic girl from Kansas."--: Zeke
"His vitals are good and once a day we give him spare change."--: Rob
Submit the worst possible caption for this New Yorker cartoon.
•Last week's results. •Rules and tips.
First Place:
"OK, I brought you to Rome. Now blow me." -- Anonymous
Second Place:
"Wait a minute, the Coliseum is in a densely populated area with many buildings surrounding it, this doesn't make any sense." -- Dave W
Third Place:
"Oh good, we're at VIVIIIIXXXI Street. It's the next left." -- Rose Fox
Honorable Mention:
"Really? This is the shit they're giving us to work with this week?" -- Stephan Cox
"Because VII VIII IX! Ha ha ha ha!" -- Glenn
"What did I tell you? Isn't that tree spectacular?" -- Richard H
"I can't stop! There's no zero!" -- glimester
The "Sucking Up to the Judge" Award (actually some competition this week):
"The powers here were Byzantine." -- CRC
