Sunday Osbcure Science Photo Caption Contest – or – The New Yorker Does It, Why Shouldn’t Terry*? – or – “Sos-pic-cuh”

By Dave Semeniuk On February 10, 2008 · 8 Comments · In >archive, >creative, >humour

The New Yorker has a weekly cartoon caption contest where readers send in their own cartoon captions to a provided cartoon. The editors then choose three to be voted on by their readership. Given the often intriguing, historically significant, or just plain hilarious/bizarre nature of many old photographs with scientific content, I thought to myself, “Why the hell not do the same on Terry*?”

So, here I present to all of you the first “Obscure Science Photo Caption Contest”. There aren’t any prizes available for the contest participants – that is, beyond receiving acknowledgment of your formidable wit from your peers.

But where/how do you start? Let’s take the following as an example:

[source - NASA]

This above is an image of a technician preparing a scale airplane model for the AMES wind tunnel in 1942 – but, what might he be thinking? Perhaps something like…

“Now…how do I shrink the bloody wind tunnel?”

or maybe…

“Hey baby…it’s me…shh-shh-shh, don’t worry, we’ll take good care of you.”

or more likely…

“I hope the modification we made to the horizontal stabilizer improves the Reynold’s number”

Of course, it’s up to you to have a go at it – what better way to break up a dreary Sunday of studying? So, keeping in tune with an aerospace theme, here is an image of Yuri Gargarin – the first human to fly in space:

Geek on!

8 Responses to Sunday Osbcure Science Photo Caption Contest – or – The New Yorker Does It, Why Shouldn’t Terry? – or – “Sos-pic-cuh”*

Kerrie says:

February 11, 2008 at 8:52 am

“And they thought economy class was crowded before!”
Dave Semeniuk says:

February 11, 2008 at 10:00 am

I thought of another for the wind tunnel image that would almost certainly happen if it were me in that photo:

Ahah! There are my keys!
Kerrie says:

February 11, 2008 at 11:37 pm

For the Yuri photo:

“Geez, these post-911 airline rules are getting out of hand.”
David Ng says:

February 12, 2008 at 9:16 pm

“This field trip sucks.”
Dave Semeniuk says:

February 12, 2008 at 9:47 pm

The rather somber looking man sitting behind Yuri:

“You should stop drinking coffee before you go into space” they say, “caffeine’s a laxative” they say.
Asteroristian says:

February 13, 2008 at 7:27 pm

Yuri:

“…must….look….sober….”
Terry » Archive » Another Installment of Sos-Pic-Cuh - or - Sunday Obscure Science Picture Caption Contest says:

February 17, 2008 at 9:00 am

[...] Asteroristian: Sunday Osbcure Science Photo Caption Contest – or – The New Yorker Does It, Why Shouldn’t Terry*? – or – “Sos-pic-cuh” [...]
Terry » Archive » Let’s do this: SOSPICUH!! - Sunday Obscure Science Picture Caption Contest says:

September 21, 2008 at 2:59 pm

[...] USSR. If you’re unfamiliar with SOSPICUH, you can brief yourself at the original post here, and check out follow up posts here, here, and [...]