CARTOON CAPTION/ANTI-CAPTION CONTEST CONTINUES! Good news for Adam Szymkowicz of Shoreham, Vermont: After years of having to spell out your last name for strangers, you can now tell 'em to look it up in The New Yorker! Your winning caption for Contest #27 (business meeting with guys who have parrots on their shoulders): “Shut up, Bob, everyone knows your parrot's a clip-on.”

In Contest #29 (Gahan Wilson drawing of a DC guy — let's call him "Cheney" — going over a weird map of the United States in front of another DC guy — let's call him "Bush"), New Yorker Timothy Tanner whipped up one of the contenders: "Stay with me, sir. It's almost recess."

You might recall that the Anti-Caption Contest winner for this cartoon was another "stupid" joke: Patrick Broderick's "...to sum up, complex patterns are an effective way of differentiating adjacent areas on a map when color printing is unavailable." My own submission was "Not even the President can put a caption here, sir." Meta, right?

As for The New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest #30 (doctor and patient consulting while guy in trenchcoat hovers in the background), Zudz wins again. The anti-caption: "My intern — he's shadowing me. Get it? 'Shadowing'— like a spy! Heh, heh. He's not really a spy. We just try to keep it light here. Anyway, Mr. Peterson, you're dying." TMFTML wrote two finalists ("Cancer? That's terrible, doc. What's the good news?" and "You know the guy behind me? With the shades and the trenchcoat? I'm fucking him.") while Wendy wrote one ("We are dressed in the clothing of various professions, are we not?").

And now, Contest #31. This meta-caption comes to mind: "If it weren't for anti-discrimination laws, we'd never get into a New Yorker cartoon."

Image by David Marc Fischer using Samsung cameraphone