The Stretcher
Created | Updated Mar 19, 2009
Where Skanky's Notes would have been, only they're Pinniped's...
We've all been there, haven't we? There you are, thinking everything's going swimmingly well, and somebody else is putting in all the effort, which is a big relief if you're honest, because you haven't actually got a clue how it all works anyway. Then all of a sudden, the guy you're relying on to make it look like you're doing something announces he's got to go off somewhere highly improbable, but it's OK, because you're supposed to know how to do all this, right? And it's only for a couple of weeks, he says sweetly with just a hint of power-crazed vengeance in his voice, and then he'll be back to sort out the mess that your inimitable combination of incompetence and laziness has created.
You reckon it's just me that this stuff happens to, do you? OK, I guess I'll have to take your word for it, but I really am deeply suspicious about this whole thing. And it isn't because I have to get my flukes off the desk for once. Well, not mainly about that anyhow. It's because we're doing evictions, isn't it? The dirty work. Let's leave it to the Seal; everybody hates him anyway. I mean, why isn't GB writing this? She seems to write everything else, damn it. And it's not as if there's going to be much going on in expletive-deleted Cleethorpes, is it?
Gambia. As if. I think it's just a tad more likely that the Skanky One made himself scarce because the Devonian Dosshouse Inspectorate is on his tail. They've got an arrest warrant, more than likely. Good riddance, I say.
Anyway, now that I'm in the mood, it's Eviction Week.
On a slightly more serious note, this is...serious. The lines are now closed, the votes have been counted and verified, and I can now reveal that the first two people to be evicted from Strictly Come Skanking are...
Hang on. There's a couple of things I need to say first. For one, everybody here, still in or not, deserves the praise and gratitude of all of h2g2. There's no disgrace in leaving the Stretcher. Every contestant is amazing. The best of this site, in fact, and the Best of Hootoo is pretty damn good.
Second up. This really has been incredibly close. So close, in fact, that the bottom two positions are both different after the public voting from where the judges had it1. In no particular order, then, the first two evictees are LLWaz and David B.
We're sorry to see you guys go, of course, but the thanks are heartfelt, and do please follow the Stretcher and contribute whenever the temptation takes you. We hope it's often. Same goes for everyone else who started but has since withdrawn, and indeed for every Researcher everywhere. Make the Stretch. Writing is good for you, and great for your readers. Writers are special people, the immortals in a world otherwise short on superheroes.
The Scores
After all the voting in the first four rounds of the Stretcher (public and judge votes combined), the positions of the remaining nine contestants finished up like this:
| Position | Researcher |
|---|---|
| 1 | Beatrice |
| 2 | Danny B |
| 3 | Tibley Bobley |
| 4 | dmitrigheorgheni |
| 5 | Trout Montague |
| 6 | Psycorp603 |
| 7 | MinorVogonPoet |
| 8 | Frenchbean |
| 9 | Alex Ashman |
So a particular mention for Frenchbean, who's hung on in spite of missing a round. Unless I'm very much mistaken (though I am often very much mistaken, so prepare for Livingstone to tell us all that I got this wrong when he gets back from Darkest Africa), the scores to date will have no further significance, so that everyone starts afresh from here.
One more thing then. There's still the small matter of:
The Next Challenge
As usual your Entries have to be made one week after Post publication, ie by midnight UK time on Thursday 26th March. There'll be a Submissions Thread set up below this Post piece, and we ask you once again to declare the A-number of your finished Entry there.
When we write a description of an event, we instinctively exploit the freedom of our medium. In particular, we use past tenses to explain what led up to the event, and we use future tenses to anticipate what might follow from it. The event itself becomes a point in a continuum of time, and we draw upon the whole of that continuum for our context. There's a whole genre of writing that describes events progressively in this way, so that everyone affected can be informed about what has already happened and what might result. We call it journalism. It's the raison d'être of our hosts, the BBC.
But we all know another kind of journalism, a visual one. Photographers are journalists too, and before them painters did the same job under the same constraints. Imagine the famous photographs and paintings of events in history, and contrast them with the written medium. The difference is, the images have no continuum of time to convey their message. They consist of a single frozen frame, obliged to capture the essence of the event they depict in an isolated moment. Such journalism has no past and no future.
For this challenge, you have to write like a photojournalist. No time must pass in your piece. It must describe a famous event, in either EG or AWW style, in a single scene, viewed in an instant. You must not allude to anything that went before, nor to anything that might come afterwards. Not even a second in time before or after your chosen scene is admissible. This week, you are a camera.
Galaxy Babe and Pinniped
