Winner of Eli’s Cartoon Caption Contest No. 1

Arghhh! This is going to be tougher than I thought. I had a winning caption all picked out when BAM! . . . two people suddenly came up with an almost word-for-word duplicate of my original caption. Uncanny. What can I do? I guess I'm forced to declare the two of them co-winners of Contest No. 1.

Here they are:

(1) "I said medium rare!"

(2) "Dammit Dan, I said Medium Rare!"

My original caption: "Harry! I said medium-rare!"

So congratulations to winners Sharon (1) and PoochyCor (2). You can bask in the glory of being two of the funniest people around.

A great majority of the captions submitted were of the "retribution from God" variety, and the one I wanted to declare the winner was "Izzy, did you forget to buy the kosher hot dogs again?" (from Kelasher). I thought it was particularly inventive and clever, and you have to pay attention to any caption that contains the name "Izzy". In the same vein, I also appreciated "I didn't think that PETA was that powerful." (from Ed Smith).

Great job from all of you who participated and right here I have to say the usual stuff about how sorry I am that you can't all be winners, etc., etc. Maybe you'll do better next time. Contest No. 2 will start about a week from now.

One more thing: After looking at all of your entries, I tried to put myself in your place. That is, I tried to come up with a caption that hadn't already been covered by somebody else. I think I was finally successful. All of you assumed that the two characters in the drawing were husband and wife. I started musing about what if they weren't, and then this caption emerged: "You'd better hide — that's the signal that my husband is on his way home." I kinda liked that slant. Make the woman sexy and voluptuous and you've got a cartoon almost suitable for Playboy magazine.

My point in telling you this is to let you know that it's always possible to "think outside of the box". Even if you feel that all the good captions have already been submitted, you can probably top them with just a little more effort.