Friday 6 May 2011

ALICE IN CAPTIONLAND

It's
COMPETITION TIME
again!


One of my favourite blogs is that of former long-time Disney designer and on-going, all-round renaissance guy, Kevin Kidney.

Last month, under the heading Storybook Fashions, Kevin reproduced a series of a dozen fashion photos outlandishly modelled against the fantasy backdrop of Disneyland, California. Unearthed by Tim Haack, the photos were taken for the April 9, 1961 issue of Midwest Magazine, a supplement to the Chicago Sun-Times.

One of these curious photos is the subject for this CAPTION COMPETITION...


The original caption read:

Why is a raven like a writing desk?
Who cares when you look like this!

However, going on past experience, I reckon readers of this blog can come up with one or two better offerings than that!

What is the Hatter, the woman or both of them (or even the guy in the background) thinking or saying?

Answers via comments below (or e-mail) by Friday 13 May.

3 comments:

Suzanne said...

Yay! Thank you Brian! I shall put my thinking cap on and try to come up with a gem!

Steven Hartley said...

Carroll originally wrote the riddle "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" as nonsense and a lot of people have been wanting to know the answer. There is the possible answer:

Poe wrote on both.

Brian Sibley said...

Or the solution offered by Lewis Carroll himself in his prreface to the 1896 edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:

"Enquiries have been so often addressed to me, as to whether any answer to the Hatter's Riddle can be imagined, that I may as well put on record here what seems to me to be a fairly appropriate answer, viz: 'Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front!' This, however, is merely an afterthought; the Riddle, as originally invented, had no answer at all."

This was generally derided by commentators over the years as a pretty lame answer – which, to be honest, it is!

However, it was not quite as feeble as it at first appears, as my good friend and fellow Carrollian, Denis Crutch, explained when he pointed out that when the preface first appeared the word 'never' was spelled 'nevar': 'raven' in reverse or, "put the wrong end in front". Still not a corker of a gag, but it would have made more sense if assiduous editors hadn't subsequently 'corrected' the 'misprint' of "nevar" to "never"!