Monthly Archives: September 2006

Cartoon Caption Contest: The Game


Crying all the time because your captions never make it in? This should dry your tears. If you can believe this, people once had to make do with homemade cartoon caption contest games, as the always sharp-eyed I Hate the New Yorker pointed out way back in December.
So what’s the story with the game? From the Cartoon Bank:

Here’s all it takes—a captionless New Yorker cartoon is shown and everyone gets to make up a punchline. The trick is to advance your game by guessing who wrote which caption or by having your caption chosen as the funniest. No drawing necessary! Part humor, part intuition, all fun.
With an introduction by Bob Mankoff, Cartoon Editor of The New Yorker, original board design by Jack Ziegler, and produced by All Things Equal, Inc.

I think I’d play it. Speaking of entertainments, I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to write about this yet, but The New Yorker Book of Cartoon Puzzles and Games, released over the summer, is genuinely hours of fun—surprisingly so, for me at least, since puzzles usually bore me silly. It was extremely diverting for everyone in the cabin on a lake where I spent a week in July, and it would entertain a smart kid for an entire car trip, I swear. We could not stop doing them, and you wouldn’t have to be a rabid New Yorker fan or or know any of the cartoonists’ work, or even be a reader of the magazine, to dig it. It’s been road-tested by my friends and relatives, including my clever young cousin George (whose game taste usually runs more toward pixelated Harry Potters), so pick it up!

February 17! 1925!

That’s the founding date of The New Yorker, as I’m sure you know. I wonder what that not very friendly guy who won the eBay auction for the debut issue is doing tonight? What merriment is that not very friendly guy who won the eBay auction for the debut issue pursuing tonight? Anyway, at least according to Wikipedia, these are other notable February 17 events, selected for fascinating aptness perhaps striking only to me:
* 1621 – Miles Standish is appointed as first commander of Plymouth colony.
* 1895 – Swan Lake, with music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, is first performed at full length in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
* 1913 – The Armory Show opens in New York City, displaying works of artists who are to become some of the most influential painters of the early 20th century.
* 1933 – The magazine Newsweek is published for the first time.
* 1933 – The Blaine Act ends Prohibition in the United States.
* 1947 – The Voice of America begins to transmit radio broadcasts into the Soviet Union.
* 1958 – Pope Pius XII declares Saint Clare of Assisi (1193~1253) the patron saint of television
* 1972 – Sales of the Volkswagen Beetle model exceed those of Ford Model-T.
* 1974 – Robert K. Preston, a disgruntled U.S. Army private, buzzes the White House with a stolen helicopter.
* 1996 – In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, world champion Garry Kasparov beats the Deep Blue supercomputer in a chess match.
* 2000 – Microsoft released Windows 2000.
Those sly devils Newsweek and Microsoft! Always trying to get in on other people’s debut dates. Meanwhile, in another corner of the world on February 17, 1925, this is what Ruth Campbell Smith was up to:

I felt better and stronger today. Scrubbed the linoleum and cleaned up the house and spritzed my clothes but didn’t get to iron till after dinner. Mama came over and sewed on buttons and patches. We sent Dale and Dick to the dentist. Dick had a new tooth behind a baby tooth and couldn’t seem to get the baby tooth out so it didn’t take the dentist long. He filled one for Dale and gave them tooth paste.

Presumably, the dentist’s office didn’t have a copy of The New Yorker in its waiting room, since the magazine was only a few hours old, or possibly Harold Ross and Jane Grant were still in labor. But who was Ruth Campbell Smith? She lived in Indianapolis; she was the mother of six; her granddaughter, Carol, has been posting RCS’s 1925-27 entries on her blog. Isn’t that great? I love old diaries; one of my favorite books is The Faber Book of Diaries, which I read often, since you can just pick a date and read the entries of, say, Samuel Pepys, Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolf, and some ’70s British celebrity you’ve never heard of. Great stuff! (Only one copy left at Powell’s, where the link points, so here are some more at Alibris. You really want this book, I assure you.)
I’m sorry to report that while Michael Jordan was born on February 17, 1963, and Chaim Potok, Ruth Rendell, and Randy Shilts were also born on 2/17 (1929, 1930, and 1951, respectively), it’s also the birthday of Paris Hilton, who was dropped from a passing ship of chortling aliens in 1981. On the other hand, according to whoever thinks these things up, it’s also Random Acts of Kindness Day, about which our friend Clive has something to say, in the form of a review of a new game called Cruel 2 B Kind, in which, as the game designers write, “Some players will be slain by a serenade. Others will be killed by a compliment. You and your partner might be taken down by an innocent group cheer.” This is a game (sort of) in the real world, by the way. Might you be competing already without even knowing it?

New Yorker Hard Drive: NYT Gets the News

Here’s the brief story, by John Biggs:

If E. B. White and Joseph Mitchell had known that their essays would end up on metal platters spinning at 5,400 r.p.m., they would probably have asked for a bit more per word. Their writing — along with articles by hundreds of other contributors to The New Yorker — is now collected on one 3-by-5-inch portable hard drive.
The 80-gigabyte drive has Eustace Tilley, the magazine’s top-hatted symbol, engraved on the case. It connects to Macs or PC’s using a U.S.B. cable and contains 4,164 issues of The New Yorker, dating back to 1925. The drive has 20 gigabytes set aside for updates that will be available online.
The $299 device is available at www.thenewyorkerstore.com. Installation is simple: plug it in, allow it to install a special reader on your computer and then search or browse issues by author, date or content. Each article appears just as it did in decades past, and the archive includes all the advertisements, cover art and, of course, the cartoons.
You can even personalize your drive with two lines of text, creating an heirloom to be passed on from cyborg to cyborg, far into the future.

Crumb, Not Crumby

Isn’t that how “crummy” is spelled in Catcher in the Rye? I’ll have to check. But good news: There’s a new Aline Kominsky Crumb b..ok, called Need More Love: A Graphic Memoir, coming out on Valentine’s Day ’07 from MQ Publications. From PW:

The 400-plus-page book includes her recollections of growing up in a dysfunctional 1950s middle-class Jewish community on Long Island; her first visits to New York’s Greenwich Village, and the art, drugs and sexual escapades of the 1960s. It chronicles the early days of the underground comics movement and, of course, meeting and falling love with R. Crumb. She discusses motherhood (daughter Sophie is now a notable young comics artist) and their move to France, where the Crumbs have lived since 1990. And there’s even a chapter at the end called “The Kominsky Code,” offering Aline’s beauty, exercise and fashion tips—not to mention some smart photos of the svelte A.K. Crumb today. And the book is full of photographs and memorabilia from every period in her (and Bob’s and Sophie’s) life, all supplemented by her ever-candid commentary and reflection.

Jonathans Are Illuminated: Stepford Jonathans!

The always wonderful Patricia Storms, who previously gave us the gift of “The Amazing Adventures of Lethem and Chabon,” has created another Jonathans-related drama in cartoon form, set this time in a topsy-turvy world where writers of chick lit, that is to say “chick lit,” on an innocent retreat are attacked in a dastardly fashion by a dominatrix impresario with something up her sleeve.
Also: Meryl Streep grew up reading The New Yorker, so what does she think of The Devil Wears Prada, the book and the movie? The Guardian‘s clever Emma Brockes finds out. Streep swears a lot, which is charming.

Not a Drop to Drink

Michael Kimmelman looks at the New Orleans photographs at the Metropolitan Museum, taken by Robert Polidori for The New Yorker. From Kimmelman’s piece in the NYT:

They are unpeopled scenes: New Orleans as our modern Pompeii. Mr. Polidori stood near the corner of Law and Egania Streets where a plain, single-story cottage with a hole in the roof rests beside a telephone pole. A crisscross of power lines forms a shallow X against the empty blue sky. The house, pale green and white, recedes, diagonally.
Except that — the image can take a second to decipher — there are two cottages, one green, one white. During Katrina, the green one, like Dorothy’s house, floated clear across Egania Street from who knows where, stopped perpendicular to its neighbor by those electric lines, which acted like arrestor wires on an aircraft carrier, ripping open the hole in the roof.
If this sounds confusing, that’s the nature of chaos, which can be as hard to photograph as it is to describe. Fortunately, Mr. Polidori is a connoisseur of chaos, and the beauty of his pictures — they have a languid, almost underwater beauty — entails locating order in bedlam.

Related on Emdashes:
Dan Baum on WNYC [on the piece in which Polidori’s photographs are featured]

Cate Blanchett to Play “Cancer Vixen”

The actor who played both sides of the frame in Coffee and Cigarettes now follows Harvey Pekar in jumping the life-cartoon-life divide. From Reuters UK:

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – Cate Blanchett is attached to star in “Cancer Vixen: A True Story,” based on an upcoming memoir of the same name by Marisa Acocella Marchetto, a cartoonist fashionista for Glamour and the New Yorker.
Marchetto’s autobiography, which has been generating buzz ahead of its release by Knopf on Tuesday, describes how she fell in love with a celebrity restaurateur and was planning their wedding when she was diagnosed with breast cancer and realised that she had let her health insurance lapse. Her friends — stylists, gossip columnists, designers — rallied around her as she wore killer shoes to chemo sessions and strove to get married on time.
Blanchett and her husband, Andrew Upton, are in talks to serve as producers of the Working Title Films project.
Blanchett stars with Brad Pitt in “Babel,” which opens October 27, and “The Good German,” which will be released December 8. She won an Academy Award last year for her supporting role as Katharine Hepburn in “The Aviator.”

Here’s Newyorkette on Marchetto’s book.