AND THE WINNER IS . . .

For this year's Cartoon Caption Contest, Alex Gregory drew a man and a chef in a sushi restaurant--a fairly ordinary setup, except for the giant squid standing next to the chef. Evidently, people like to make squid jokes, because we received more than thirteen thousand entries, most of which followed four or five lines of comic thought. Hundreds of readers imagined the chef bragging about the sushi's freshness. Hundreds more wondered if the squid was yet another example of supersizing. Others wondered whether the squid was the boss's son (or son-in-law), whether he was hired as a result of corporate outsourcing (or promoted from within), or whether it might be a good idea to discourage the diner from ordering squid ("Ixnay on the idsquay"). And then there were the puns, which, like most puns, ranged from the execrable to the slightly less execrable: we got "squiddish" and "Call me fishmeal" and "squid ...