Wherein I play on stereotypical notions of French cuisine, and bitch about Internet security. (Captioning A New Yorker Cartoon)

It's time again to Caption A New Yorker Cartoon, the blog post where you get a feel for what it's like to be me as I... um, caption a cartoon.  OK, I mean this would be more exciting if that sentenced had finished up with "Surf a Tsunami" or "Battle The Incredible Hulk with my bare hands" or even "do anything but caption a New Yorker contest" but, then, that's life for you.

Or, rather, THIS is life for you, because you're still reading.

And, as before with this feature, I find myself irritated at the outset because as usual, the INCREDIBLE LEVELS OF SECURITY NECESSARY TO CAPTION A CARTOON have ENRAGED ME, so maybe I will become the Hulk? No, I need gamma rays.

I sat down over 15 minutes ago to do this caption, and noted right away that The New Yorker, which apparently has not only comics to caption and occasional comments by Henrik Hertzberg but also must be storing $140,000,000,000 in gold bullion, probably moved there to stymie thefts because Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis are busy, as I was saying, The New Yorker, upon my clicking to caption the cartoon, notified me that there was some new log-in procedure whereby I could use my regular log-in, rather than my cartoon contest log-in.

That's right: In the past, The New Yorker required two different sign-ins to caption a contest, but apparently with Bin Laden dead, we can all breathe in the sweet fresh air of liberty and sign in only once to make a funny (?) line about a caption.

The problem was, I could not remember my log-in.  Remember all that fuss about Google Chrome storing your passwords? I wish.  It's been so long since I last captioned a New Yorker cartoon -- nearly 7 months since this last attempt didn't win -- that I don't even use the email that I used to log-in last time anymore.

That email was my Yahoo! ID, and as we all know, Yahoo!, which was never a great company to begin with, has gone completely to hell in a handbasket in the past year, beginning with the fact that their email security was the exact opposite of the many levels of challenges needed to access a Cartoon Caption Contest at The New Yorker.  Apparently, Yahoo! had a policy of letting anyone use anyone else's email, judging by the number of times my email was hacked into to send advertisements for fat-burning drugs to my friends and business contacts and relatives, only some of whom actually had a need for those products.  (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE!)

So I had long ago sworn of Yahoo!, even though it was the only exclamation-point-based email system out there, but my The New Yorker sign-in was through my Yahoo! email, and I couldn't remember my password for The New Yorker, mainly because since February I've changed my passwords a few times to things, which is what people tell you to do, only if you don't access a website every day, and if Chrome DIDN'T remember your passwords, which Chrome DID NOT for me on this one, then you're screwed.

Because my option was to tell Yahoo! that I wanted to sign in with Gmail, thereby exposing my Gmail address and passwords to the Yahoo! "security" system, a 'system' that simply guarantees Yahoo! will hand my passwords over to Russian hackers who will turn my computer into a zombiebot.  OR I could answer the 'secret questions,' and so guess which one I opted for?

And so guess which one Yahoo! said was 'not available until September 6, 2013'?

That's right: Yahoo!, apparently playing hard-to-get, decided that if I really wanted to take a stab at answering my own secret questions and get access to my own email, I would have to wait a day.

So, reluctantly, I tried to sign in using my Gmail information, only to be told that I would have to "upgrade my account" by creating a new Yahoo! ID and password.  There was no option to bypass this step.  LOVE US, Yahoo! demanded.  I could not retrieve the email that would let me reset my New Yorker password without first upgrading my account to prove to Yahoo! that I was truly committed to having an account there.

I'm not dumb -- I'm sure that Yahoo! simply uses this stuff to boost its statistics, as the millions of people who were tired of having their identity stolen because Yahoo! was bought out by Nigerian princes tried to recapture a password, Yahoo! could boast that it had created X number of new accounts each day -- so I tried to just do a standard Yahoo! account, and it told me to choose a password between 8-12 letters or numbers.

So I tried.  I will tell  you what password I tried, with each result:

HITHERE-- invalid.
HITHERE8 -- invalid.
HITHEREGUYS -- invalid
HITHEREGUYS81-- invalid
THISSUCKS-- invalid
THISSUCKS-- invalid
IQUITNOW -- invalid.

NO combination of words that I tried was accepted as a password I was trying to create for my own account, but I did have to twice re-login using my gmail address, so if you get an email from my Gmail account suggesting you are fat, ignore it, unless you are fat.

As a result, I have been unable to log in to Yahoo! to get my The New Yorker password to log in to The New Yorker to get my official entry to the caption contest, so this is really a moot point here, as I will likely have to later on try to contact The New Yorker to reset my log-in, but that is the price you pay for freedom.  What was it Ben Franklin said, again? Those who are unwilling to constantly memorize and never ever ever write down a random string of characters in order to access a cartoon caption contest are nevermind the joke got old.

Let's caption this monkey!  (I'm toying with the idea of calling things, monkeys, as an affectation. Did it work for you?)

So we've got a centaur and a Centsnail. Snailtaur? Let's toy with that.  How does one become a centaur? BEST NOT TO GOOGLE THAT.  How about we pretend that centaurs are like machines:

"This is just a loaner."  

You know, like there's a Centaur Body Shop.  Go with that.  Ok, ok.

"I had to move to something smaller after the recession."  Possible.  Plays on the financial crisis, which is always funny, right? People love jokes about how terrible their lives are.

Look again.  Snails versus horses.  What about something like Zeus got distracted no, wait:

"I'm from the French version of your myth."

YES. That is it.

THIS TIME I AM DEFINITELY GOING TO WIN. (Caption A New Yorker Cartoon)

Allow me, if you will, to get into just how completely annoying and overwhelmingly irritating every single website in the world is, with these user names and passwords and different rules for everyone of them so that  even where you have a system for passwords and user names the entire world seems to have conspired against you to make you constantly frustrated and #*#%$&$ off just trying to enter a caption contest on a website.

Because, you know, that's a secure thing.  We can't have just anyone entering a caption contest!  What if someone entered under my name?

WHAT IF SOMEONE STOLE MY IDENTITY AND ENTERED A CAPTION CONTEST AT THE NEW YORKER?

Well, I mean, the world wouldn't change at all, but still: The New Yorker, which is increasingly getting me angry by their never accepting my poems to print and then never accepting my captions to win, is now really high up on my Enemies List

(Yes, I have one. Everyone should.)

because they have again changed their log-in and password system to enter the caption contest.

Here is the exact text of the email I got from the New Yorker recently:

This message contains graphics. If you do not see the graphics, click here to view.

This e-mail was sent to you by The New Yorker Advertising Promotion Department. To insure delivery to your inbox (not bulk or junk folders), please add our e-mail address, thenewyorker@email.newyorker.com, to your address book.

Dear Captioneers, These days, there's not much you can do without a user name and password.
And that includes entering our Cartoon Caption Contest. You already know that, of course, because you've entered it. That's also why you're getting this e-mail. Because if you want to enter again, you may have to re-register your user name and password. Or create one, if you haven't used one thus far. We're merging our caption registration with our over-all newyorker.com registration, so one login will allow you to comment on blog posts and enter and vote on all contests, including the Caption Contest. The easiest thing to do is to go to contest.newyorker.com and create a registration—and that's it. Presto chango, you can now enter all future contests with your newyorker.com user name and password. If you already have a newyorker.com user name and password, you can simply log in atcontest.newyorker.com. If you're having trouble with your password, please reset it here. For more help, please contact customer support at 1-800-825-2510. I'm told they're very supportive. Cheers, Bob Mankoff, Cartoon Editor

First of all the easiest thing to do is not require a name and password and log in just to enter a contest.  I get it that you want to create an email list and know who to market to, but do you really think that the caption contest is drawing in people who would not otherwise buy The New Yorker in the first place?

I would bet you a thousand dollars that every single person who enters the New Yorker Cartoon Caption contest knows about that contest because they already subscribe to the magazine, so what you are doing is not broadening your marketing base.  You are alienating your current subscribers by making it harder to enter a contest.

Here is exactly what I have had to do, so far, to comply with Bob Mankoff's easiest things to do, in order to enter a cartoon caption contest.

First, I put on the song "The Quiz" by Hello Saferide.

That is not technically a required step, but that song is peaceful and pleasant and soothing and I knew I would need it.

Then I went to their website.  When you go to the contest spot, you have the current cartoon:

And below it is a box, and two columns.  The box is to type in your caption.  The two columns are:

-- on the left: you can enter a bunch of information about yourself like your name and address and your display name so that if you win The New Yorker will put the name you want on the site ("Briane1213WisconsIN0012").

-- on the right is a login and password, which tells you AND I QUOTE

Log in below to avoid having to fill out the rest of this form. Your information has already been saved to your account.

So I went to the site and I typed the email for the login, and typed what I believed to be the most current version of the password I use, having just done this only about three weeks ago and so I was reasonably sure I know what password I am using now, but, of course, the password box doesn't remind you of whether this password needs a capital, or a number, or both, or none.

(Once, I spent 20 minutes trying to log in to my student loan account, getting more and more frustrated until I finally was able to recover my user name and then change my password, after which I realized that I was leaving off the number on the end of my password.  I was typing the password but had not typed 1 at the end of it.)

After putting in my user name and what I thought was my password, I was denied log-in because I had left some fields empty, including the caption box itself, and including all the demographic information on the left which I was told I didn't have to fill out if I just logged in.

As for the caption box, the reason I didn't enter my caption for that yet is:

(A) I don't have a caption yet, I haven't even begun to think about it, I'm still TRYING TO LOG IN and

(B) Sometimes, if you type your caption in and then log in and the login doesn't work you have to retype everything, including the caption, like a sucker.

STEP TWO.  Try again, this time using a capitalized first letter and adding a numeral after my current password.

This time, I am told to

Please log in with with your NewYorker.com email and password.

The typo is theirs.

And also told that I must enter a username and a country, and my caption.  It is not clear if I have logged in, though, as the log-in box is no longer available for me to please log in with my New Yorker password:

So I picked my "Display name" and my country...

noting for the first time that

Any resident of the United States, Canada (except Quebec), Australia, the United Kingdom, or the Republic of Ireland age eighteen or older can enter or vote.

And I wonder: Why can't people in France vote?

Or people in Japan?

But this time it appears that everything is set except for my caption, so let's caption the bejeezus out of this cartoon.

So what I thought was a mountain in the background is a city, right? It's a bridge and some buildings.  Is this New York?  San Francisco?  Some other city with a bridge?  No other cities have bridges of note, so far as I know, beyond New York and San Francisco, and I say that as someone who has been in several cities.

Does the location matter?  Probably.  It's The New Yorker, after all, not The San Franciscoer.  Maybe I should go SF, though, only...

HOLD ON, FLASH OF INSPIRATION.

"Next time, I get to wear the outfit!" 

That seems almost too obvious.  If it came to me as I was actively thinking about something else -- I was pondering a Super Bowl-related joke -- then it would probably come to every Brooklyn hipster reading this issue at their locavore dentist's office (the hipsters are there to get their teeth crookedized.  I think the next big thing is going to be not-perfect teeth, because they will seem genuine.)

Probably too obvious.

Are the two out on a ride together? Probably not.  He's on a chopper, she's on a Vespa thing, and he's, of course, naked.  What if they are related, though?  What if

FLASH OF INSPIRATION:

"I think you took my clothes when you left this morning."

That's okay.  That's on the right track.

"You've got my housekeys in your pocket."

That's even BETTER, I think.  Suggests that they spent the night together but they don't live together.  So the woman left him at her house, maybe? WOMEN'S LIB, amIright?  She is a sexy, confident, woman of the 21st century,  not afraid to pick up a biker and then head off to her job at a ... what kind of company would she work at? I want to say graphic design, but that's probably because we saw Side Effects yesterday and that was what Rooney Mara's character did for a living after Channing Tatum's character got thrown in prison for insider trading.

That's not a SPOILER.  It's the plot of the movie, in part, and you're told all that in the first two minutes of the movie.

You know what's weird? I cannot recall a single character's name from that movie except for Catherine Zeta Jones' character

who was called "Dr. Siebert."

So it probably doesn't matter what Vespa woman does.  Think think think.  Maybe a traffic-incident joke, something that the Vespa did that made the man lose his clothes?

All I've got is

"You cut me off back there," 

but that doesn't imply that he lost his clothes in the process, does it?

The man is definitely mad.  The woman appears to be ignoring him.

What's the story, here.  What has happened to make this man mad and this woman indifferent?

"I thought you said you had to be at work early today?"

Still on the "we slept together last night" theme, but a little better, maybe.

I really can't stare at that guy's body any longer.

But I can't not stare at it, either.

His eyebrows, for one thing, are really bushy.

*******

Ordinarily, I do these things really quickly, but Mr F wanted to go for a ride, so we took him for a ride that lasted about a half-hour.  While we were doing that, I went over the ideas I had with Sweetie, and she liked the ones I had so far, so I am going to go with one of those.

Sweetie also clarified for me that in the movie Side Effects, Rooney Mara's character was called "Emily," and Jude Law's character was "Dr. Banks," only she knew his first name too and told it to me but I already forgot it.  She also knew that Channing Tatum's character was "Martin" and that Jude Law's wife's name was "Dierdre."

I was fine with just thinking of them as "Rooney" and "Channing" etc.

So I'm going with "You've got my housekeys in your pocket," because I like that one.

Let's go back and try to enter it.

DONE.

So it took me only three tries to submit my entry, but I had to fill out the entire form anyway, and besides that, I've already forgotten the password that I used this time, which means when I enter next week, I am going to have to come back to this post to remember what I did to enter the contest.

Because, again, GOD FORBID someone enter a contest under false pretenses.  I can just see it now: some week, I will be watching Access Hollywood or the Academy Awards or the Nobel Prize ceremony and there will be a bunch of paparazzi surrounding some guy who will be walking around with January Jones on his arm and the people covering the event will say

"There's Briane Pagel, you know he won The New Yorker caption contest this week, and January Jones fell in love with him..."

And I'll be all yelling at the TV "Hey, that's not me, I'm me," but nobody will pay attention, and that guy will be living my life, and I'll have to shut up when Sweetie comes back into the room, but THAT GUY will be getting all the fame and fortune that comes with submitting the caption voted to be the funniest for a drawing of a couple of bears at a cocktail party talking about the stock market

OR, conversely, one day I'll come home from work all innocently,  hoping that Sweetie has made pizza for dinner that night (YES!) and I'll walk in and she'll hit me with a frying pan and when I say

"What was that for, and also did you, in fact, make pizza tonight?" she'll say

"I heard on the news that some guy named Briane Pagel won The New Yorker's caption contest and went on a date with January Jones! I'm leaving you!" and then she'll hit me again with the frying pan because we are in a Blondie comic strip.

So it's probably for the best that security is so tight around The New Yorker, but that is January Jones' loss.

My entry in this week's New Yorker cartoon caption contest.

I began with

I think the occupy movement has gotten sidetracked.

but changed it to

"I agree.  The occupy movement HAS gotten sidetracked."

But then briefly thought about

"Speak for yourself.  I'm STILL occupying."

And tried it a few different ways:

"Speak for yourself.  I'M still occupying."

And then went on to

"Well, once I get enough money to move out of my parent's house, I'm straight back to occupying."


Before going back to

"Speak for yourself.  I'M still occupying."

As the one I liked best.

But then I went on to other stuff like:

"Still beats law school."

And

"No, I'm on salary.  Why?"

So I ran them by Sweetie, who made the pick for me:

"Speak for yourself.  I'M still occupying."

(She didn't think those latter two were funny, and voted for "the occupy thing" as being timelier.)

The Thought Process Behind My Attempt To Caption A "New Yorker" Cartoon.

It is a little-known fact about me that I am desperate to get into The New Yorker, and lately my best shot seems to be to caption a cartoon of theirs, which I try to do each week, giving myself 10 minutes to come up with a caption because nobody's funny after 10 minutes.  Here is my latest attempt, beginning with when I first look at the cartoon... 10 minutes on the clock. 

Go to the cartoon.

Go to my iTunes and put on the upbeat playlist.  First song: A Child's Introduction To The Drums.

What is this... Roman Centurion.  Horses.  Woman.  Parking.

Go get coffee.

9:11 on the clock.

Something about hybrids.  Hybrids are big with people who read The New Yorker.  That's not exactly true, because I read it and I don't have a hybrid.  Hmmm... "They were out of Priuses at the dealer?"  No.

Definitely not.

I said no, brain.

8:26 on the clock.

He's maybe asking her on a date.  "How about we take mine?"  Maybe.  Run with that.  "Mine gets better mileage?"  No, the first one was better.

He's pointing her towards the horses.  She looks awkward.  How about "Excuse me, I think that one's yours?"

I like that.

Really mixes it up.

6:59 on the clock.

"Excuse me, I think that one's yours."  Should I go with that? Will people get it?  Keep it in mind.  Let's go look at it again.  Check out the background.  Think about who these people are, really get into the heads of a Roman Centurion out on a date in New York-- -it's got to be New York, right? -- on a Friday night in 2012.

How about "No, that one's mine, over there?"

Even better -- the lady didn't realize that the Centurion she's on a date with would use the chariot, and thought he'd use the sports car!

5:38 on the clock.  Let's go with that.

Oh, man, I went to enter it and thought "That's exactly what everyone else will enter.  It's so OBVIOUS."

It is kind of obvious, isn't it?

4:09 on the clock.

Common People comes on the playlist.  What would William Shatner do?

"Excuse me, can you watch my horses?"

NO. That's not funny! That's nothing.  Oh, man.  3:26 left.

"Well, you said interesting swaps?"  Too much of a rip-off of Seinfeld.

2:35 left.

"I thought it was a formal event"?

Hmmm.

I kind of like that one.

Because it doesn't make any sense.

"I thought you said this was a formal event?"

Yes.

YES.

Entering it now.

1:12 on the clock, Convoy on the playlist.