MotherReader

It is time to make good on my promise to give away a copy of Don’t Let the Pigeon Run This App! Last night I took all of the entries, created one list, and read them to my family. TeenReader was the prime audience, with both her fine-tuned sense of humor and her tendency to literally roll on the floor laughing. A tendency that could only be more pronounced given her lack of sleep during her play performance week.

As I pulled the list together, I found patterns among the titles. There was inadvertent poetry:

Don’t Let the Pigeon Dance with the Stars!
Don’t Let the Pigeon Fly to Mars!
Don’t Let the Pigeon Fly Over Your Head!
Don’t Let the Pigeon Become One of the Undead!

Which we will consider my contribution to Poetry Friday, hosted today at The Opposite of Indifference. There were the cautionary tales:

Don’t Let the Pigeon Write My Tax Refund!
Don’t Let the Pigeon Give Root Canals!
Don’t Let the Pigeon Plan your Wedding!
Don’t Let the Pigeon Anywhere Near the Oval Office!

All very practical advice. There was a layered, meta response:

Don’t Let the Pigeon Write a Children’s Book!

It invokes BACA, Bloggers Against Celebrity Authors, with the notion that now that the Pigeon is a celebrity, we would be against him writing a children’s book. But he’s in a children’s book, so how does that work? I know. We just blew your mind.

A holiday entry caught our eye for its creepy cleverness:

Don’t Eat the Pigeon for Thanksgiving!

But in the end it was less wordplay than imagery that tickled our funny bones. The winner of the app is Joanna Freeman for:

Don’t Let the Pigeon Learn the Bagpipes!

While the visual sold this, word choice is important in its humor. “Learn” here is funnier than “play,” because we assume an ineptitude on the part of our feathered friend, which is funny. Bagpipes is (are?) a great choice, being a silly-looking instrument that gives an instant visual. It also could be a rather annoying instrument, which plays nicely against our Pigeon — who considers annoyance a personality trait. It also would be a brilliant title to include in the actual app or a new book. I can picture it. Can’t you?

Thanks to everyone for playing, tweeting, and promoting the contest. And thanks to Mo Willems for giving me my first app. I’ll never forget it.