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AL SICHERMAN

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    Digiti populi

    The people have e-mailed: The unspeakably wonderful MinnPost T-shirt, for the best limerick about the Finnish musicians' trouble at the airport, goes to Jill Field.

    Here's the winning entry again, in all its immigration-related splendor:

    Three acoustical, musical Lapps
    Fell into our MSP traps.
    The judge's conclusion?
    Most likely, confusion:
    INS thought their visas said "lapse."

    For your next opportunity to waste time and effort on the off chance of winning a stupefyingly wonderful MinnPost T-shirt (entries due by 5 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 29), your genial host sets before you a challenge that requires nothing in the way of rhyme or meter, to wit: Following the recent departure of Karl Rove from his position as senior political advisor to President George Bush, he was signed to do an occasional column for Newsweek. The first Karl Rove column, a memo to the future GOP presidential nominee on how to beat Hillary Rodham Clinton, appeared in the Nov. 26 issue.

     

     

    Its most remarkable moment came when Rove referred to "the low approval rates of the Republican president," not even mentioning Bush by name.

    Your job is to balance that missing-name situation by suggesting a name for the column. (For clarity: You are to come up with the title that would top the Rove column every time it appears, not a characterization of the first column. We're too late for that.)

    As always, we hope that the entries tend more to amusement than to naked partisanship, bitterness or evidence of psychosis.

    And as always, I provide a not-particularly-great possibility, just to get you started:

    Karl Rove: Right Behind

    E-mail your entry to asicherman [at] minnpost [dot] com. At 5:01 p.m. on Nov. 29 I will enter a sealed chamber in the MinnPost basement and begin the exhausting process of judging the entries. I hope to emerge, pale but confident, on Monday, Dec. 3, to post the top five. You'll then have until that Thursday (Dec. 6) to vote for the best one, which will win the achingly beautiful MinnPost T-shirt. The winning name will be posted on Monday, Dec. 10, along with a new challenge.

    So. Pencils in place? You may begin.

    Like what you just read? Support high-quality journalism in Minnesota by becoming a member of MinnPost.

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    Al Sicherman
    Illustration by Hugh Bennewitz


    minnpost.com/alsicherman



    Al Sicherman worked at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis from 1968 to 2007, initially as a copy editor and eventually as a food writer and humor columnist. He has a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Illinois Institute of Technology and much work toward an MA in journalism from the University of Minnesota. (He didn't finish his thesis. You wouldn't have either.) He can be reached at asicherman [at] minnpost [dot] com.

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