Second WEIRD UNIVERSE Contest:  Official Results!!!

Well, the voting is over, and it was a neck-and-neck gallop for the finish line. I was monitoring the poll at regular intervals for the last hour, and what seemed a sure victory turned into a narrow upset. But there's a clear winner, with no need for another tie-breaker vote.

There were 296 votes overall. Here are the stats for all the captions that earned double-digit totals, in reverse order, leading to the winner:

Coming in at fifth place, Caption 16 earned 11 votes.
Charles brooded. After all, Anna was supposed to be HIS mistress, not his wife's.
Emmitt Dove in CT

Coming in at fourth place, Caption 2 earned 32 votes.
Woman: "What are you writing dear?"
Man: "A suicide note... sign here!"
Dumbfounded

Coming in at third place, Caption 35 earned 33 votes.
Realizing he had spent the best years of his life in the simultaneous pursuit of deep intellectual thought and loose women, the now middle aged Henry Willingsworth decided then and there to dedicate his life to chasing the dragon. Yes, an opium habit would make the insufferable voices go away...well that and murder....
Chelonian

Coming in at second place, Caption 62 earned 36 votes.
Theodore turned in his chair, giving Betty and Lynn a lingering, side-long glance. "What could they be up to...?" he thought to himself, fingering his fountain pen precariously over the manuscript of his latest novel, the sprawling epic, 'Foamy Waves of Passion's Ungoverned Despair'. "I'm sure that they couldn't know--how could they know? I've hidden the trapdoor well; and even if she did suspect, two layers of sea-lion-skin rugs are far too heavy to lift for a woman of such dainty pulchritude as Lynn--But Betty... Betty, Betty, Betty, I'm not so sure about that one. She's a dyke. She has dyke-strength, that one. And ho! Perhaps when Lynn herself was trying to persuade me 'oh Theodore, stop calling my sister a dyke, for heaven's sake she has three children' that lesbian-queen herself was hurling those rugs away like a behemoth vixen, clawing through my trap door, bounding across the rancid-custard booby-traps (nay, she must've slurped up the foul concoctions herself, that nefarious demon-puss!), and into the secret chamber! God help me, if she laid her dirty dyke-tongue on a single one of my Boy Meets World action figures, in the name of Topanga, I will f--"
Sam in Colorado

Coming in first, Caption 4 earned 38 votes.
Thanks to his mother, Simon wasn't turning out to be the quite the son Gordon had hoped for.
Dumbfounded

So that makes Dumbfounded the winner! He passed Sam in Colorado only during the last few minutes of the contest.

Dumbfounded's win is especially notable, since another entry of his placed fourth.

Let's all hear it for Dumbfounded! Yay! Huzzah!

And Messr. Dumbfounded must now send me his snail-mail particulars: [email protected].

Let me address a few issues raised in various comments.

First, Sam's two entries--Caption 62 and Caption 63--were really intended as one by him. I split them because there was a huge spatial gap between them, and no apparent segue. Caption 63 picked up one vote, which, added to the total for Caption 62, still did not top Dumbfounded. Now, it might be argued that I screwed Sam's chances by this accidental editorial revision. But it could equally be argued that I made Caption 62 more attractive by splitting it. In any case, I regret not consulting Sam first, and so I am going to award him a consolation prize!

Sam in Colorado: please send me your snail-mail particulars! [email protected]

That's how we roll here at WEIRD UNIVERSE. Just like Obama, we admit mistakes and seek to remedy them!

Next, some readers suggested that I should have trimmed the list of contestants down to a handful of "best" entries. That was precisely what I was trying to avoid: imposing my judgment on the WU democracy. So I'm grateful everyone was willing to deal with the huge slate of choices.

I just want to thank all the contestants and all the voters and all the silent readers who just sat back and enjoyed the contest. You're a super bunch!