“Likely names of organisms had Linnaeus been a science fiction fanboy.”
Although I still have difficulty considering myself a writer type, what little experience I do have in this world is mostly limited to publishing humour pieces. I guess my niche is to do this and still stick to science and technology subjects. So far, I’ve been lucky enough to have gotten quite a few pieces published in various places (you can see a partial clip list here), although often I think my geneticist title was key in throwing editors off. In fact, one of the reasons the Science Creative Quarterly (which I edit) exists is that I thought it would be cool to have a portal for “literary science humour.”
Anyway, when I write a humour piece, I usually start with a quirky title (the two of mine above being prime examples), and then kind of let the ideas flow from there. As well, if you just peruse the SCQ’s humour archive, you can readily feel the potential of each humour piece just from the title. Consequently, I’ve always wondered if crowd sourcing the comments on a blog post might be a good way to produce a decent humour piece. This might fail epically, but I always thought it would be worth a try – especially if I ever had a chance to give it a go on a website with clever commentary and excellent traffic.
So, just for fun, let’s see if we can first start with an interesting title. I’ve got a few that have been sitting in my head for a while as backups (at the top of this post), but hopefully, we can come up with better ones in comments below. In other words, here is the first task:
Can you come up with a humour piece title that lends itself to potentially funny answers?
(PS: We’ll also stick to things that are science- or technology-related, since those I have a bit of experience in as an editor.)