The Dunedin School is pleased to announce our very first Caption Contest. Over in that wannabe-mini-America they call Australia, last Easter Saturday, members of the Heaven on Earth Church upset hoardes of little children with a graphically violent crucifixion scene, staged outside a local shopping centre. After the children started bawling and causing an unholy ruckus, and most importantly, interrupting sales, the cops were called in. The authorities quickly removed the bloody Jesus from his cross and detained him for questioning (“Who do you think you are, all covered in blood, like this? You oughta be ashamed. The Son of God, huh? So ya think you’re funny, do ya? How about you accompany us to the station looking like a half-naked Abo, and we’ll see if you’re still making jokes after an hour or two…”).
Anyway, issues of religious freedom aside, this pic is just begging for some witty captions. Go on, have a go (you know you want to):
A free copy of John Shelby Spong’s latest book, Eternal Life, to the lucky winner.
The Dunedin School 
Onlooker: “Wow, Abercrombie and Fitch is really going all out this time…”
Honourable runner up. No idea what you were alluding to, really, but we are sure that within some internet forum or another the quip would be like totally LOL ROTFLMAO.
Can editors join in?
‘Australian police, in an attempt to join in the worldwide move towards multicultural unity, proudly display a white Australian citizen beaten to a bloody pulp in police custody (for no good reason, of course). One unimpressed onlooker told this reporter, “I’m not going to be convinced they really mean it about equality until I see a whole pile of bloody white corpses on the street”‘.
No.
Since this happened in Geelong, it would have to be something like:
“Rough day at the cement works, mate?”
Or
“We’ll never get that bloody Guggenheim built with blokes like you wandering the fucken streets looking like that.”
(And while Australia may be a “wannabe-mini-America”, may I respectfully submit, Sir, that New Zealand is but an over-fed Niue.)
Ibs,
As both an American and a kiwi of sorts, I feel honour-bound (and check the spelling on that one as evidence of my commitment) to point out that New Zealand may be an ‘over-fed Niue’, but it is also a ‘wannabe-(very)mini-America’ as well, if the evidence of how people dress and what they watch and/or listen to is an indicator of broad cultural trends.
Most of the anti-American rhetoric you hear down here – not unlike all the ‘100% Pure’ rhetoric – is all fairly hollow given how beholden New Zealand is to the rest of the world, and to the US in particular. The only reason that kiwis aren’t lined up outside of electronic retailers to buy their new iPads like all those monkeys in the US is that they haven’t shipped any down here just yet.
E
Diabetes and iPads – the fruits of civilization!
pugh!!! ‘how people dress and what they watch and/or listen to’? maybe in your social sub group. And I’ll never be shackled to any TV or dinky little phone, never owned one, never will!
;-)
DQ for arguing with those in power. That’ll teach you, you upstart!
“Chill dude! I’m just on the way home from my pilates class.”
Honourable runner-up. A superbly arcane, nay occult, allusion to the Resurrection of Jesus via that seminal work of Joseph Pilates (his name echoing both the legal father of Our Lord and the one who legally condemned Him – the Jews being behind it all, of course), Return to Life through Contrology. Subtle indeed!
… and I have to add the obligatory joke “Is second price two copies of John Shelby Spong’s latest book…”
Roland Boer, working as a cop part time, finds Jesus
Winner.
I’ll second that note. Nice one, Jim.
Jim – would you like the copy of Spong delivered to you, or to somebody you particularly despise? In either case, please email me an address.
“Look mate, fair suck of the sav, I don’t have any nails on me, and if even I did it would cost me my job to bung them in to your extremities. There’s a dominatrix down the road who may be willing to help you out though.”
Honourable runner up. While your opening reference to oral sex was somewhat gratuitous, your closing reference to “dominatrix” has been the saviour of many a bad Britcom sketch. Could’ve added a “bum” or “tit” to really get the Brits rolling in the aisles, or at least off their couches.
Reference to oral sex? Egad, that’s not what it sez in my copy of “A Dictionary of Modern New Zealand Slang”! Do you think Harry Orsman was simply trying to spare us the horror of it all?
he does look like roland. the cop i mean. though the seated chap may look like roland after one of his trips to the outback.
Constable Jake Phillips responds to a complaint that the fountain beside him now produces wine instead of water.
Third place. What let you down is the unrealistic assumption that any Aussie would complain about free piss.
‘n’ when the Pig,
who stood over against him,
saw that he so cried out,
‘n’ gave up the ghost,
he said,
truly this bloke was the son of god.
An honourable runner-up. Reminiscent of Octavio Paz. Remarkable concision and bathos.
Am just back from the wilderness …
Runner up. Rather confuses the chronology of the Life of Our Lord, in which the temptations in the wilderness are at the opposite end from His crucifixion. Yet, this places you in fine company, indeed with the Fourth Evangelist, who also manifested such apparent confusions (no doubt in order to display the higher, spiritual meaning of Our Lord’s actions, rather than as a result of any confusion of mind), and replaced His time in the desert with a long drinking bout at a wedding.
That too is a wilderness of sorts, having been to one too many weddings …
“I know it worked for Jesus, but as a way of starting a new religion today, your approach lacks originality.”
Second place! The incongruity of school report stylistics and religious subject matter, and the ‘originality’ of making what is apparently a Jesus-figure into a simulacrum in which the ‘original’ disappears, substituted for the pure play of appearance in which the facsimile is “more true than truth” lends your answer a certain Baudrillardian irony.
Have you ever thought of submitting an article to Social Text?
;-)
“Even after going to this extreme, James couldn’t persuade The Dunedin School to add him to their blogroll”
I don’t get it. That’s clearly Jesus, not his younger brother.