Verse or Worse readers who love (or hate) Tom Swifties lined up to vote Cathleen Cotter’s entry the best of the five presented — not that there was anything wrong with the others, your genial host announced forthrightly.
Here is Cotter’s winning entry, which earns her a stunningly adequate MinnPost T-shirt:
“Green Bay’s quarterback has retired!” Tom announced brettlessly.
For your next challenge, we turn to a development that absolutely stupefied your genial host when he stumbled across it recently in a newspaper advertising supplement. It turns out he is way behind the curve in discovering this phenomenon, but so was everyone to whom he mentioned it.
What, at long last, is your genial host talking about? Fragrances from … Adidas. That’s right, the sneaker maker.
The ad was for “Deep Energy,” the newest Adidas fragrance for men, but there are other Adidas scents, including “Dynamic Pulse,” “Sport Fever” and “Team Force” for men, as well as a number of Adidas fragrances for women, including “Fruity Rhythm,” “Pure Lightness” and “Moves.”
Do the scents from the sneaker maker evoke those of the sweat sock? Your genial host assumes not, but he would nonetheless have turned down a chance to invest in perfumes named for gym shoes.
And that leads to the new Verse or Worse challenge, for which we return to the limerick form so admired by Verse or Worsifiers in previous competitions. In short, have some fun with the notion of unlikely-brand fragrances: Explore the Adidas-cologne link, suggest a name for a new Adidas scent, name a fragrance of some other unlikely sort, suggest an odd-perfume marketing scheme — or produce anything at all even remotely related to this peculiar development — in limerick form.
Here, as always, is a not particularly inspired example.
A lovely young girl from Berlin
Grew tired of wearing “My Sin.”
She set out to invent
A more savory scent:
A perfume like pork rinds — “My Skin”
E-mail no more than three (but more than zero) to asicherman [at] minnpost [dot] com by 5 p.m. on Thursday, May 15.
At 5:01, your genial host will enter the giant MinnPost outdoor exercise track, and while he attempts to improve his time for the half-mile (now about 10 minutes, as his dog, Gus, stops frequently in mid-stroll to sniff — possibly hoping to score a whiff of Adidas), he (your genial host, not Gus) will begin to judge the entries.
He will post what he deems to be the five best on Monday, May 19. You will have until Thursday afternoon, May 22, to vote for your favorite, which will win a distinctly unscented MinnPost T-shirt.
Because of the Memorial Day holiday, the name of the limerick winner will be posted on Tuesday, May 27, along with a new challenge.
OK — start coming up with rhymes for “sneaker.”
