caption contest, man with pants down in public

New posts were in short supply last week with the extended holiday — there were a lot of Thanksgiving dinners to attend — but now things are back to normal.  So let’s kick this week off with a caption contest, as is our custom.

This week’s photo is quite unusual.  I really have no idea what’s going on here, except that a guy is standing in the middle of the road with his pants down and his shirt off.   There are a lot of other people around, but at a distance.  Since I have no context whatsoever for this picture, we’ll just have to make it up.  That’s where you come in.  Explain what could be going on here, whether realistically or not.  Just make it funny, and keep it clean.

(To see the other caption contests, click on the “Say What?” category in the sidebar.)

combining Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas

This year, it seems people got into decorating for Halloween a lot more than normal.  And as you’ve probably noticed, retail department stores are pushing the Christmas decor on us before Thanksgiving.  It’s getting crazy.  I like to keep the holidays separate — my rule is no Christmas music or Christmas decorations before Thanksgiving.  But stores seem to not be informed of my rule.

Before long, these holidays will all become merged by the unstoppable commercialization process.  Figuring out how to market the holidays together might seem difficult, but fortunately someone has already figured all this out.  In the article I’m about to link to, Chris Carlisle combines Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.  For a mascot / symbol, he creates a “ninja robot Mecha Santa Claus”.  If that’s not enough to get you to read the article, I don’t know what is…   Plus it’s funny, and he has a good way of explaining all this.

Holiday Ninja Action Force Unite!  [link broken]

caption contest, Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel

Most of the caption contests here use pictures loaded with randomness, but this week I’m going to use a political photo, so we can try to make some political humor.  This photo is of President Barack Obama relaxing, while his Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is on the phone.  I have no idea what the actual context of this picture is, but who needs context?  We get to make it up, which is what makes it fun!

Just remember to keep the comments funny and clean.  You can make political statements, but make them funny (whether laugh-out-loud or satire or irony).  This isn’t the place for serious long-winded rants about why your preferred political party is great and/or the other party siphons.  (Comments violating this rule may be deleted, per the site’s rules.)   Of course you can reference current political events, or you can make up any context you want.  Have fun with it!

Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel

(To see the other caption contests, click on the “Say What?” category in the sidebar.)

how to prevent hurricanes

If you know much about weather, you know that mankind does not possess the ability to stop a hurricane.  Hurricanes are kinda like a migraine headache in that regard — unstoppable once it gets going.  In fact, a migraine feels kinda like a hurricane in your head.  Or a tornado.  But I digress.

Anyway, we cannot stop a hurricane once it gets started.  I’ve heard that Hurricane Katrina contained the energy equivalent of 150,000 atomic bombs, and released enough of that energy to power the United States for a year.  Amazing!   If only we could capture a fraction of that power.  But that’s another discussion.  (I almost digressed again…)

satellite photo of Hurricane Jeanne from 2004So obviously the key to stopping a hurricane is to prevent it from forming.  That may sound impossible, and it almost is, but I learned from The Discovery Channel where hurricanes (affecting the U.S.) come from.  The whole process starts from hot, dry air from the Sahara Desert.  Pockets of that hot, dry air get released over the ocean about every three days, and then convection and evaporation and condensation and stuff take place, and hurricanes are formed.  So one possible solution would be to destroy the Sahara Desert.   I know, that sounds crazy, but think about it — the climate of the Sahara is such that its inhabitants have to live elsewhere.  So who would it inconvenience?  It would save a lot of money when we don’t have destructive hurricanes!

I can see some people opposing that plan.  Fortunately there’s another potential way to stop hurricanes.  During the convection process, clouds form and begin to rotate because of the rotation of the Earth.  So obviously if we stopped the Earth’s rotation, that would prevent hurricanes from forming.  However, this plan would have some major side-effects, like perhaps altering gravity, and we might lose the Moon.  I’m sure some other bad things would happen too, so I can see this idea being vetoed.

Perhaps instead of destroying the Sahara Desert, we should just cover it with solar panels to capture the heat.  And since the Sahara Desert is one of the hottest places in the world, this could also reduce global warming, and it would be a clean, green, unlimited, renewable energy solution.  Sounds perfect, right?  That could be quite expensive, which is probably why it hasn’t been done.  But it would produce untold amounts of clean energy, which everyone wants these days.  Since a large up-front investment is needed, you can start sending in donations, and I’ll do this whenever I get enough money, and it’ll be a win-win for everyone.  You can give using various denominations of cash, check, credit card, and bacon.