Write a Random Rubaiyat. That is, go to Wikipedia, click on the link titled “Random article”, and write an interlocking rubaiyat on the subject of the article that comes up. No, you may not click on the link a second time if you don’t like the one that comes up. Seriously. If you happen to get a Disambiguation Page, then you should use the first link as your subject. But otherwise, you must accept what first comes up.
Submit a caption for each drawing in the New Yorker Caption Contest throughout the month of November. This will involve writing maybe one sentence (or sentence fragment) per week, so make it good. Each should be brilliant and original; shoot to make yours the winning entry, or at least one the top three chosen out of the thousands upon thousands of submissions each week. New cartoons are posted each Monday. You have until the following Sunday to submit a caption.
Create an illustration to a scary story. As usual, you can use ink, oils, photography, pencil, crayon, Photoshop, needlepoint, ASCII-graphics … whatever medium works best for you. A realistic style is not required, but try to avoid the purely abstract. The idea is for the illustration to be recognizable, at least to someone familiar with the story.
You can use any story you like as the source for your illustration. Include with your illustration a pointer to the story, and the specific scene you’ve chosen to illustrate. For well-known, freely available stories (e.g. something from Poe or Lovecraft) you can simply supply a sentence from the story as a caption, as was commonly done in full-page illustrations in 19th-century books. For stories less widely familiar, please include a short excerpt from the story that your illustration should accompany, so that we may appreciate your artwork in context.
Write a set of three double dactyls. (Consult Wikipedia for a concise explanation of the constraints of the double dactyl.) You can pick anyone and anything for your subjects. However, what you do not get to choose are the nonsense lines, and the single-word lines. Instead, you must use the ones given in these lists:
Flibberty gibberty Inferiority Thurible durable Investigational Insulin globulin Characteristically
Use each one only once, so that you use all the selections in course of your trilogy. (Of course, it is still up to you to decide which nonsense lines goes with which word, and in which line in the second stanza your word should be placed.)
Create your own Onion-style article (see http://www.onion.com if for some reason you don’t know what this means), complete with an accompanying photo, illustration, or chart of some sort. You can make it set in the past, present or future. You can make it timely or apropos of nothing. You can use a photo you take yourself, or some sort of photoshopped collage. Fill it with inside jokes if you like. But try to make it really funny.
Pick a painting, drawing, photo, poem, story, novel, song, film/video, or anything else that is in the public domain. If it is a poem, story, novel, or song, create one or more illustrations (or photo, or video) for it. If it is an image or film/video, write a poem, short story or song for which that image will be the illustration.
For this month, create one or more pages from an alphabet book. There are many different kinds of alphabet books, and you are encouraged to look inside a few on amazon.com or a local bookstore for ideas. The most traditional type is to illustrate each letter with a single object, such as an animal, flower, or food. Other alphabet books tell a story, along the lines of the traditional “A was an apple pie”. Still others are meant to be read by adults instead of children. Your page (or pages) can contain images, text, poetry, or all of the above, or maybe something else entirely.
For this month, we’re turning back to illustration. The challenge is to create a depiction of machinery. No other explicit constraint is offered, other than that it be two-dimensional. Use the medium of your choice: ink, paint, pencil, crayon, needlepoint sampler, Photoshop, ASCII graphics … whatever you enjoy working in most.
Create a drink, and provide both the recipie and your fabricated account of the history/origin of the drink (unless you have actually made an original drink and have a good anecdote about its creation, in which case the history doesn’t need to be falsified). Look into the histories of drinks such as the Gibson, Zombie and the Gin and Tonic for examples and inspiration.
Be as fanciful as you like. Whether or not you attempt to mix or taste your creation is up to you; the drink does not have to be palatable. The ingredients don’t even have to exist. You may make up different ingredients and liquers if you like – consider the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.
Create a paradelle. More specifically, the most cogent paradelle you can.
What is a paradelle? A paradelle is an unusual poetic form invented in the 1990s by Billy Collins. It was intended as a joke (the name is a combination of “villanelle” and “parody”). He presented a paradelle in a collection of his poetry, entitled “Paradelle for Susan”, and accompanied by the following footnote:
The paradelle is one of the more demanding French fixed forms, first appearing in the langue d’oc love poetry of the eleventh century. It is a poem of four six-line stanzas in which the first and second lines, as well as the third and fourth lines of the first three stanzas, must be identical. The fifth and sixth lines, which traditionally resolve these stanzas, must use all the words from the preceding lines and only those words. Similarly, the final stanza must use every word from all the preceding stanzas and only these words.
Design one or more cards. Create and submit a new design for a playing card, or Tarot card, or any kind of card. For example, you can draw your own version/interpretation of the King of Hearts. If you want to do more, re-design the Queen of Hearts and Jack of Hearts, too, or even more cards. Or get extra creative and design an entirely new facecard, like the Bishop, and create designs for one or more suits. Or make a new suit, like the ankh or fleur de lis, and design cards for the suit. Use whatever medium you like: ink on paper, watercolors, photoshop, collage, pencil on bar napkin, embroidery, crayons, ASCII graphics, anything.
Submit a caption for each drawing in the New Yorker Caption Contest throughout the month of December. This will involve writing maybe one sentence (or sentence fragment) per week, so make it good. Each should be brilliant and original; shoot to make yours the winning entry, or at least one the top three chosen out of the thousands upon thousands of submissions each week. Submit online each week, and also forward the text of your submission for posting on the Commuter Challenge website.
New cartoons are posted each Monday. You have until the following Sunday to submit a caption. The first contest for this Commuter Challenge will open December 4th.
Hint: don’t go for the easiest gag – if a seemingly good caption immediately jumps to your brain, ask yourself whether or not it’s likely that dozens or hundreds of others had the same thought. If so, then you should probably consider trying something different.