In this week's contest: Choose any sentence (or the major part of a sentence) from any publication dated Jan. 26-Feb, 3 and follow it with a question it could answer (usually out of context), as in the examples above from last year’s Questionable Journalism contest appearing in Gene Weingarten's Jan. 26 Substack column, The Gene Pool, at GeneWeingarten.substack.com.
The sentence can be in an article or ad. Tell us the name of the publication and the date and (if in print) the page number; for online publications, please include a link to the webpage. As always, you can submit up to 25 different entries, either all at once or as you think of them.
Type as many as 25 entries in the area below where it says "Your answer." It's best to copy them in from another document so you'll have them if your computer suddenly dies or something, or if you click to submit the form and something goes wonky.
HOW TO FORMAT YOUR ENTRIES: Because your entries this week are most readable if they're in multiple lines (sentence, question, link), go ahead and write them that way. This means that the Empress won't be shuffling up all the entries, but she and the Czar still won't see your name until after making their picks.
But please put space between entries. Note: Your auto-reply confirmation might be missing formatting, with everything squished into one big blob of text, but it seems that it's nothing to worry about; the entries have been coming out fine on this end..
Entry deadline is one moment before midnight on Friday, Feb. 3. Results will be posted in Gene's chat on Thursday, Feb. 9. Entries will sometimes be edited by the Empress and/or Czar for space, taste and just better wording of the joke. Unfortunately, time doesn’t permit full consultations about every editing tweak.
Every entry will be personally read and ruminated on (ewwww!) every week by either the Czar or the Empress or, when there's time, by both of us.
