CAPTION CONTEST, WITH A MATERIAL PRIZE.

A winner has been chosen. Many thanks for all the entries, which kept Dr. Boli and his readers amused for days.

Why aren’t you doing a picture-caption contest?” one of Dr. Boli’s most insistent fans keeps asking. “That other magazine is always doing caption contests. Why can’t you be more like that other magazine?”

Leaving aside the fact that that other magazine never did caption contests while Mr. Harold Ross was running it, Dr. Boli could think of no good reason to deny a constant reader what is obviously her dearest wish. Here is a picture from an old magazine, and it is up to you to imagine what the caption should be. Leave your caption as a comment on this article.

Caption-Contest-Beach

And what is the prize? Nothing less than an inscribed copy of this season’s most coveted Christmas gift, Dr. Boli’s Gift Horse. You can have it sent directly to you, or you may choose to have it sent to an unsuspecting victim of your choice.

This is how it works: You leave your captions as comments. Dr. Boli reads them. By some method (he has not decided what the method is yet), he picks the one he like best. If he likes them all best, he uses some algorithm to pick one at random. He emails the winner, who gives him a shipping address, and off goes the book.

The contest will be open through Friday afternoon. Friday evening, a winner will be announced.

You will notice that there is no mechanism for eliminating bias, no anonymization of entries, nothing to make the contest fair or to guarantee that only the meritorious will win. All those things would amount to work, and Dr. Boli chooses not to add to the labor he already expends on running a great publishing empire. He makes this admission here at the beginning, so that there will be no unpleasant accusations at the end.