The Commuter Challenge

A “line-unit palindrome” is a piece of poetry that forms a palindrome on the line level. Each line appears twice (excepting the middle line if the poem has an odd number of lines), with the second half in the opposite order of the first half. Perhaps the most well-known line-palindrome poem in English is J. A. Lindon’s “As I was passing near the jail”.

Write a line-palindrome poem of at least twelve lines. As with Lindon’s creation, you are allowed to vary the punctuation in the repeated lines, but the words and their order must be the same. The subject matter is left open, with the exception that, like a proper haiku, it must include a seasonal reference.

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Submit both cartoons and captions for our own Cartoon Caption Contest.

Step 1: Submit at least two captionless one-panel drawings, preferably without word balloons. They may be as intricate as you like, or as rudimentary as xkcd or explodingdog. You can carefully construct detailed illustrations, or you can slap some clip art together, or you can draw stick figures; any approach is acceptable. Any topic is fair game, but keep in mind that a good drawing for this challenge would involve a certain amount of ambiguity that even you don’t know how to resolve to its maximum humorous effect. The burden of making your cartoon funny will fall on the other participants, so you don’t need to draw anything with a built-in punchline. Draw a moose in a bubble bath. Draw a politician shaking hands with a robot. Draw an anthropomorphic book saying something to an anthropomorphic deck of cards. Draw anything at all.

Step 2: Submit captions for at least two of the illustrations that were submitted by other participants. You should not submit captions for your own drawings at any point.

Although any level of participation is encouraged, the suggested minimum requirements of this Challenge involve the submission of at least two cartoons and at least two captions. The deadline schedule is:

• March 17 – Submit the drawing for at least one captionless, one-panel cartoon. The submissions will be posted here.
• March 24 – Submit the drawing for a second captionless, one-panel cartoon. The new submissions will be posted alongside the earlier cartoons.
• March 31 – Submit caption suggestions for at least two of the illustrations that were submitted by other participants.

If you don’t want to draw but you do want to submit captions (or vice versa), please do so. And of course if you want to submit more drawings or more captions than the suggested minimum, please do so.

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Create a black-and-white illustration — not a grayscale drawing of various levels of shading, but an illustration consisting only of areas of solid black and solid white. Use ink, paint, or whatever medium you’re comfortable with. (And although you should be drawing by hand, you are free to use software to, for example, increase the contrast so as to remove gray-valued areas.)

The only other requirement is that your drawing’s space should be, as well as you can reasonably manage it, equally divided between black and white areas.

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Make a self-portrait. The medium must be (or at least incorporate) something traditionally considered an art material and/or process usually associated with young children – crayons, or fingerpaints, or play-doh, or macaroni art, etc.

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Create one (or more) pages for a calendar for the year of 2013, like the ones that seem to fill up the chain bookstores around this time. It can be a wall calendar, a desk calendar, or something else entirely.

Your only constraint is that the calendar must in some manner reflect the fact that it is meant for the time after the 13th baktun.

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Write one original sentence that is in some way extraordinary – preferably extraordinary in terms of format rather than content.

Examples:

• Write a sentence that is a word palindrome.
• Write a sentence that uses all of the consonants in order.
• Write a sentence that only contains words of eight letters or longer.

Try to make the sentence as cogent/comprehensible as possible despite its extraordinary characteristics. Cheating is allowed. If there is no way to fit it all into one sentence, it can spill over into another. Other ‘cheats’ are fine too, as long as the sentence is an original creation.

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Write a speech that you’ll be giving to either:

1. formally apologize on behalf of your company for a recent PR gaffe, safety violation, large-scale ecological disaster, or the like; or
2. concede the loss of an election to your opponent.

The people, organizations and incidents that your speech addresses can be either real or fictional. The text of your speech can be anywhere from 500 to 5000 words long.

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This month’s challenge is Spooky Sonnets:

Write two or more spooky sonnets. The subject of at least one of the sonnets must be a typical Halloween character/monster (vampire, witch, mummy, werewolf, etc., use your best judgment). The other sonnet(s) can also be about Halloween monsters, or they can describe a creepy landscape, or a grisly situation, etc.

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This month’s challenge is: Sketchfight!

Throughout the month of August, we will follow the challenges on songfight.org, but instead of recording songs we’ll be drawing sketches.

If you’re unfamiliar with songfight, how it works is simple. Periodically a song title is posted to the website. During the next seven days anyone can compose, record, and submit an original song with the given title. All the submissions are then posted to the website, and voted on to determine the winner.

We’ll be skipping over the voting part of the process, but otherwise we’ll be following their lead. When a new title and deadline is posted, you have that much time to create an illustration with the given title. All entries will be posted to our website immediately following the deadline.

There are no requirements as to size, materials, style, etc. That said, you should take an informal approach to your submission, as appropriate to a “sketch”. Think first drafts as opposed to final drafts.

Finally, note that songfight.org also accepts cover-art submissions for reach songfight. You are very much encouraged (but not required) to submit your sketches as cover art.

Sketch Fights

• Due August 4th: “She Calls Everybody Baby” [warm-up round]
• Due August 20th: “Hatchet” [standard round]
• Due August 31st: “No Brakes” [“scribblefight” round]

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Compose and submit three original jokes and/or riddles. Each of the three jokes must be in any well-known format, such as:

• How many         does it take to change a light bulb?
• What do you get when you cross a         with a        ?
• Why did the         cross the road?
• A        , a        , and a         walk into a bar …
• Yo momma so         …
• Knock knock. Who’s there?         …
• What’s black and white and red all over?

Et cetera. You may use your own judgement regarding what you understand to be a common type of joke.

All three jokes/riddles must be utterly original inventions by you, and they must each be completely new this month.

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Recreate an existing creation as if it had been done by somebody else.

Unlike last month, this time you’re not limited to poetry. How would Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” read if it had been written by Philip K. Dick? What if Salvador Dali had been commissioned to paint the Sistine Chapel? Or answer the burning question: How would your nine-year-old niece have carved Akhenaton’s statue?

And instead of focusing on dead artists this time, one or both of your creators should be relatively recent — 20th century at the earliest. Bonus points if both artists are still alive today.

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Be a favorite dead poet (almost).

Write an original poem, in any format and of any length, in the style of one of your favorite dead poets. Try to emulate that poet’s style as convincingly as possible. If you prefer lengthy/epic poetry, a shorter version (in that poet’s style) is acceptable. Or you can provide an excerpt of a poem whose original version may or may not actually exist, or you could create a ‘missing verse’ to a famous poem. Other than style, the only constraint is to include at least one element that ruins the illusion – for example, if you are borrowing the style of Sappho (d. circa 570 BC), include a reference to Oklahoma (est. 1907). Or if you are emulating Allen Ginsberg (d. 1997), mention the Patriot Act (2001).

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