The judgment of MinnPost readers has been rendered, along with quite a bit of chicken fat. Michael Friedman is the winner of the heartbreakingly elegant MinnPost T-shirt for this headline about the poultry-produced pileups on a Virginia highway: Why is the chicken across the road?

This announcement is being made on Dec. 21 instead of Dec. 24, to give the vast MinnPost staff a chance to deal with last-minute holiday errands. (Didn't anybody buy the foil pan for the Christmas turkey? Again?)

For reasons of symmetry, we're also posting the next competition a few days early. To give the vast staff time for New Year's madness as well, the deadline for entries is delayed a week on top of that to 5 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 3. Although this might throw some potential contestants off their rhythm, the more mathematical among us might note that this amounts to 10 extra days before the deadline, a 333-percent bonus in the amount of time you can waste in an effort to win a T-shirt. All this at no additional charge.

And here's your challenge:

When a bingo bus got stuck in a Minneapolis snowdrift, one of the passengers went looking for a shovel. She spotted one outside a nearby police station and asked to borrow it. "Is it a city bus?" a cop asked. When told it was the midnight bus from Mystic Lake casino, he told her to call the casino. She told him she was taking the shovel and would bring it back. A few minutes later, after a combination of rocking and shoveling began to free the bus, the cop showed up — and wrote her a ticket for "failure to obey." The police later apologized.

Your job: Compose a limerick about this situation.

As always, the judge's selection of the best five entries will be arbitrary, capricious and based largely on how amusing he found them.

And, as always, here's a not-especially-memorable example:

Stuck in snow near a city police station
Her bus needed shovel's salvation
They refused her that aid
So she borrowed their blade —
And they wrote her a bleeping citation.

Email your entry to asicherman [at] minnpost [dot] com. At 5:01 p.m. on Jan. 3, I will enter MinnPost's massive hyperbaric chamber and stick my head into the barrel of entries, emerging only on Monday, Jan. 7, to post what I judge to be the top five. You'll then have until Thursday, Jan. 10, to vote for the best one, which will win the amazingly presentable MinnPost T-shirt. The winning name will be posted on Monday, Jan. 14, along with a new challenge.

OK, start rhyming — but don't borrow a thesaurus from a police station.