My Entry in the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest #532—Almost

I was quite busy this past week and couldn't manage a single blog post about last month's trip to Ireland. Furthermore, despite having one week more than usual to devise a caption for the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest #532, I didn't submit anything at all. If I had, the caption for the August 8 contest might have been something like this one. Or maybe not. The drawing is by Danny Shanahan.

"For a beached whale, I'm totally crushing it!"

August 22, 2016 Update:  The Finalists

August 26, 2016 Update:  The Rankings

In the ongoing pursuit of caption contest transparency, the New Yorker's cartoon editor Bob Mankoff has released the rankings to all the captions submitted in Contest #532 based on the online voting here. No one submitted my exact caption—including me—so it is impossible to tell where it might have ranked. Here are some similar to mine with rankings all over the place:

So much for that. More interestingly, the first of the three finalists ranked 79th in the voting. This shows that the voting is being used by the editors to stratify the submissions, but they are still actively making the final selections. Here are all the captions beginning with "I got your...":

The second caption finalist ranked somewhat higher at 7. Here are the captions beginning with "We should...":

The third caption actually ranked third. Here are the captions beginning with "Yeah, well...":

So what were the top captions based exclusively on the online voting? I'm glad you asked. Here are the top three. For some reason, the algorithm produced a caption ranked 0, and it certainly seems good enough to merit the top ranking.

Here are a few other random very highly-ranked captions: 

And a few from near the bottom of the rankings:

And, if you really must know, here is the caption with the absolute lowest ranking of all:

I couldn't have said it better. Or could I?

August 29, 2016 Update:  I like that first caption, but consistent with my previous behavior in this contest in failing to enter, I failed to vote.

September 5, 2016 Update:  Winning Caption

Note:  I may not have added anything to the blog this week, but I still garnished a mention Friday on Ink Spill. Read the post here.

Last time around in the Caption Contest, cartoonist Will McPhail really stuck his neck out. My caption just didn't measure up. See the long and the short of Contest #531.

Review this blog's archives to see why Danny Shanahan is the Herman Melville of cartoonists.

Check out the Attempted Bloggery's index to see why I am the Bartleby of bloggers.

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