DDN's 'Open Mike'

A few months ago, the DDN opened up another portion of its op/ed pages to the whims of its reading audience. In their continuing effort to placate the 'DDN is a liberal rag' faction, the paper announced the start of a weekly contest, called Open Mike, to help caption a cartoon drawn by their Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Mike Peters. He does all the artwork but then leaves a 'word balloon' above one of the character's heads to allow the reader to supply what they believe to be the funniest or most satirical line. I'm guessing that newspaper readers (including me) have secretly desired the power to do this and now the DDN has given us our chance.

Every Saturday, a new panel is unveiled for the readership to review and submit their entries for. There is no limit on the number of submissions per person but that portion of the contest is halted on noon the following Tuesday. At that time, the editorial board picks their five favorites and posts them on their website to allow readers to make their choice of their favorite. If selected, you will be recognized when the panel is reprinted the following Saturday along with a new panel for that week. They also receive an original copy of the cartoon from Peters

The first contest I participated in had a panel with President Bush sitting behind his desk in the Oval Office. Next to his desk, a large hole in the floor is visible with a word balloon coming from someone down in the hole. Because it was in the early weeks after Vice President Cheney's notorious quail hunting incident, many of the entries had to deal with errant discharges of firearms. While these seemed to be very popular, others referenced the Cheney reference to the infamous 'secure undisclosed location' or the administration's constant search for Iraqi WMDs or the plummeting approval ratings for the president since Hurricane Katrina. I must have submitted over a dozen lines myself and I patiently waited until late Tuesday to see if one (or more) of mine was (were) selected. When they posted the finalists that evening, I could not believe what inferior choices (IMHO) the board made. I did not see any satiric wit or 'gotchas' in the entire lot. Despite my disappointment, I did choose one of the 'lame five' and wasn't at all surprised when even THAT one was not selected the winner for that week.

I haven't returned to the contest page since then, although I do look at the Saturday edition of the DDN to check out that week's winner as well as the new panel. It wasn't until the one this week that I felt compelled to jump back into the ring; however, when I finally got around to going to their site, the deadline had already passed.

Here is last Saturday's panel and the editorial board's five favorite reader captions:

Out of these five, the last one is extremely lame (the WH press secretary isn't sworn in with the Presidential Seal in front of him on what appears to be the Capitol balcony) and the fourth one a little less so (harkens to Bush's weakness on remembering people and countries during the 2000 campaign). I do 'get' the second one but Iraq is the most pressing issue for today's military today--not ballistic missile defense. That puts the first and third ones as the most logical choices of the five and I predict that people will vote based upon their party affiliation (although I do think the 'democrats' one is more true than funny).

In the spirit of cyber-democracy, I have cast my ballot (it's still a voter's privilege not to reveal their choice); however, if I would've been more proactive, this is what my entry was going to be:

In the spirit of my blog's original raison d'être, I will now start posting my entries, submitted or not, here on a weekly basis. And who knows...if I ever learn to draw, maybe Mike Peters could get a future run for his money!