Is it random or link-dumpy? Not a bit! The theme is varieties of appreciation. Here's what I mean:

In The Baltimore Sun, the whole story of the cartoon caption contest, by Rob Hiaasen; I know you're eager to snack on that one. More about that later. Meanwhile, breaking news! Was last week's contest winner channeling The Far Side, and if so, was that bad? The Times finally acknowledges the caption-contest beat and even provides a graphic comparing the two cartoons. "The winning entry, for an illustration showing two monster-movie dinosaurs speaking while devouring a city, was 'Remember that time you made me laugh and people came out of my nose?' The punch line bore a marked similarity to a 'Far Side' quip from 1985, although in the original, it was lions with antlers coming out of their noses." Read all about it: Mankoff reacts! Larsen legions rumble!

Although the Times still hasn't made the switch to the more modern "punchline," the piece is a fine demonstration of the paper's groovitude on the popular culture: "The incident does bear strong resemblance to a 1998 episode of 'Seinfeld' in which Elaine submits a caption to The New Yorker only to learn to her great horror that she had cribbed it from 'Ziggy.' The episode was written by Bruce Eric Kaplan, a New Yorker cartoonist and executive producer of the HBO drama 'Six Feet Under.'"

Prince Charles Simic reviews the magnificent coffee-table book Steinberg at the New Yorker. Plus a slide show of Steinberg drawings with the ad-bizzy announcement "Interactive will begin shortly." Get me rewrite, please.

I just happened on this engaging "brief autobiography in the third person" by Harrison Kinney, who wrote James Thurber: His Life & Times, the massive and definitive 1992 biography that I covered for The Nation in my book-review debut. I was positive but, I fear, sort of presumptuous; the big finish was a clever-ish, super-stretched metaphor. Ah, the follies of youth. Anyway, to make up for all that, here's Kinney's first chapter, "Those Clocks of Columbus." Kinney also edited, with Rosemary Thurber, the fabulous collection The Thurber Letters: The Wit, Wisdom and Surprising Life of James Thurber, which everybody ought to own. Surprising is absolutely right.

Finally (last bite for now), U.S. News interviews Todd Pruzan, deft author of The Clumsiest People in Europe. The Globe and Mail reviews it. Critic Martin Levin—who had me at "I have always scorned the manufactured distinction between summer reading and reading per se, a division that allows you to read Dan Brown in July, but Norman O. Brown in January"—calls Clumsiest People "my favourite summer read this year." Pruzan's reading and signing in NYC this Wednesday the 15th, at 7 p.m. at the Chelsea Barnes & Noble.

Back to our regularly scheduled considerations, not necessarily about iPods.

Categories: NYer, Cartoons, Contest, BEK, Steinberg, Simic, Thurber, Pruzan