The Caption Competition for the Web version of issue 16 of Ariadne...
For issue 15, Ariadne asked that readers suggest captions for the image below, by June 19th, 1998. A surprising number of entries arrived after the entry date, which is slightly perplexing. The following are the best of the whole lot.
The best entries were:
"Rumours concerning the unconventional appearance of some of the
speakers at the Hybrid libraries concertation day proved to be not such an
exaggeration after all..." (Anon, 25th May)
Another, ploughing the same furrow was:
"The social events at the eLib project managers workshop were
starting to pale somewhat" (Anon, 25th May)
Getting surprisingly close to the real context in which the picture was
taken (see below) was this one:
"Mrs Smith suddenly realised that her husband's obsession with
gorilla documentaries on TV was having strange and disturbing
consequences..." (Annette Hartley, 22nd May)
"'ere, don't fancy yours much" was the brainchild of Karla
Youngs (22nd May)
"Mao Tse-Tung and Margaret Thatcher - The Unknown Years" (Henry
Girling, 21st of May). Another front runner.
"I wouldn't say we were your _average_ Ariadne readers ... but we
love it, don't we Billy? *nudge* BILLY?" "Duh, yea, we love it
... duh ... love what?" was by William Hann (26th May), at william@freepint.co.uk
"Somewhere in a secret hideaway Gazza and Geri Spice, no longer the
People's Heroes, plot an evil revenge involving a laser pointer, some
amusing shaped crisps and a set of combat-trained Carmen Rollers" -
Clearly a hot favourite from Jo Lomax, on the 3rd of June.
Down to earth a bit with one which requires (I think) a Hollywood Southern
Drawl for comprehensibility:
Man(??): "I still can't understand WebTV" Woman: "Oh,
thats old fashioned now - you should try interfacing with the latest
hairnetechnology!" - From Phil Bradley (UK), on the 4th of June.
Inevitably there are some infra-digs, such as:
"Backstage preparations for the first performance of the UKOLN
line-dancing team had a somewhat relaxed feel about them".
sent in anonymously on the 7th of June.
This was not the only one from this author: "In the year 2039,
library demolition men stumbled across the long forgotten and sealed "UKOLN
metadata office"; upon forcing open the rusting door, they were
surprised to find the occupants still engaged in debate regarding the
merits of the now-antiquated "Dublin Core"..."
Later we received an entry from John Kirriemuir which is a miracle
of compression:
"Nicole?" "Bob!!!"
If we had an Ariadne Ionescu award, it would have to go to:
"Ah, dear. Life is so exciting" from Pedro Serrano
(pedros@tsai.es).
"And to think I was eighteen when you started this 'Hairdressing
over the Internet' course, and we haven't reached lesson 2 yet!", was
the entry from Mathew Dovey, who in this entry clearly anticipates
difficulties with the future implementation of RDF :). Submitted sadly way
after the deadline on the 7th of July.
The picture was taken in Edinburgh, April 1998, at an exhibition
called "Missing Links!". The exhibition featured multimedia and
animatronic exhibits, illustrating the evolution of hominids over the last
four million years. It also took a peek into the future with an
animatronic sofa-bound couple - as pictured - endlessly surfing through TV
channels
.
will be announced shortly
Another one of Ariadne's cultural forays, but this time to more salubrious surroundings. Nice to recall the time when the quill pen was the cutting edge of information technology, and the eye test was the result of too much scribbling by candlelight. The band however, appears to have decamped from the gallery: possibly because they heard that the kitchen staff were keeping up with the football score with an out-of-period device. Entries by 31st of August please. Send your entries in to...