No, I didn’t enter one of those spam e-mail contests that make you sign up to get inundated by advertising so that you can get a free iPod. (Actually, I don’t even own an iPod. But that’s another story.) I did enter an online competition, but there were no prizes other than having your wit publicly credited. And I won!
Last month, I happened upon an interesting little article at OverthinkingIt.com (motto: “Movies, TV, Music, Video, Humor and Pop Culture … taken way too seriously”). In honor of the upcoming summer blockbuster movie season, and all the hackneyed stories and phrases on display during same, they did a contest called “CLICHEMAGEDDON.” The premise was simple: they took ten standard action-movie phrases, inserted blanks at key points and invited people to fill in the blanks with the funniest/silliest/wittiest/nerdiest things they could think of and post the results as responses. Here are the ten offerings:
- “You forgot one thing.” “What’s that, hotshot?” “______.”
- “Leave the ______ out of it. This is between ______ and ______.”
- “In case ______, there’s something I want you to know. I’ve always ______.”
- “You’ve never given up on anything in your life! Now stand up and ______!”
- “We have to go back for him!” “Forget him! He’s ______!”
- “If I ______, they ______. And I won’t let that happen.”
- “Only ______ can save us now.”
- “So it’s true what they say. You are ______.”
- “In every man’s life, there’s a time to ______ and a time to ______. I feel like ______. Who’s with me?”
- “What do we do now?” [dramatic zoom] “We ______.”
If you’ve watched more than a few shoot-’em-up films, you’ve no doubt heard all of these repeatedly — they’re stock phrases in the hack scriptwriter’s tool kit. One could have a lot of fun mocking them if one wished. And I did. If you look at the original thread (click here), I posted two sets of entries, one about halfway down the page and another near the two-thirds mark.
It took awhile, but the contest’s progenitor finally got around to reviewing the submissions and posted his list of favorites. And … YES!!! I made the final ten (12, actually — he included honorable mentions for numbers 4 and 7) with my Scrabble-themed entry for Cliche #6:
6. “If I play the word DIVERSE with the D on that double-letter score, they will have an easy shot at those two triple-word squares. And I won’t let that happen.” – Ray the Recovering Cynic
(Some of you may note that I used the same nom de plume as I do for my posts at David Hayward’s blog. Also, for any other Scrabble fanatics out there, my mental picture was of playing DIVERSE running down from the DLS between the top-center and top-right TWSes on the board. I know, too much info …)
So I’m pretty stoked about it. It’s not apropos of anything, there’s no deep spiritual meaning connected with the win (that I can think of), and it’s certainly an indication that I had too much time on my hands that day and was wasting it besides. But it was fun to do, even more fun to get a mention in the wrap-up … and I just wanted to share the moment.
(I’ll write about something more serious next time, I promise.)
Ray Anselmo, Professional Outsider 