The challenge was to take the top 3 most emailed photos on yahoo and create a hopefully amusing story about the sequence. I reserve the right to refuse a disturbing picture, this includes any pictures of celine dion.

Please feel free to add alternative captions if you can or comments if you can't.

All rights to the photos belong to the companies in brackets beneath them. All text, concepts and layout is copyright Mort 2003-2007.

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I hate Mondays, I suck on Mondays.

We go to the laundromat so infrequently. We prefer to save up our vast deposits of dirty clothes for a rainy day. I get bored there, I can never find an internet hook-up, no matter how long I stare at the vibrating, spinning turbulence of the tumble driers.

The one thing I do enjoy is watching the varied vagrants that frequent the mecca of quarters and detergent:

The huge bulk of the Samoan man and his tiny wife. He moved aside unapologetically, yet serenely after blocking the whole aisle.

The many Latino women spending hours each week doing the same thing, going alone to the laundromat, washing clothes for the whole extending family.

"Is that a girl or a boy?" We ask each other.
Camouflage pants -- boy. Shapeless green shirt with slight bulges -- girl. Long, dark, full hair -- girl. Silly looking hat perched haphazardly -- boy. The face? Either very pretty boy, or strong jawed girl -- no help there. The hands always tell the truth, and the hands said boy... finally!

The one person that drew most of my attention (except for the girl who seemed to be washing only tiny lace bras and thongs, I wondered about her occupation), was the man. He was ordinary, he was normal, he was average in every way except for weight, in that respect he was above average for California. Although about average for the Mid West, where I suspected he orginated from. It was an easy assumption if you looked at what he wore: turtle neck shirt under a blue button-up shirt, a black plastic jacket which I just knew he wished was leather, faded light jeans and dirty white basketball shoes. This man needed help!

He looked to be in his 50s, a single white, middle-aged man alone in a laundromat. I couldn't think of anything more lonely than that. He wore no wedding ring, the car he drove looked like the same Buick he first came to California in, maybe twenty five years before.

I began to pity him, I began to make up stories about his sad long life. He used his cell phone, I guessed to check on messages that never came. I began to wonder if things had gone differently for me, that I might have become that man. My pity for him was being fueled by the fear I have, that I might at heart be normal.

Later on my impression of him changed, I saw his laundry, all of it hospital scrubs. I altered the image of him in my mind into a brave hero, sacrificing his life and happiness to save the lives of hundreds of sick children.

My mind is a fickle thing.

If you've never read any of P.L. Travers' Mary Poppins books, I highly recommend them. I have no complaint about the film at all, but the books have a special charm of their own.

Oh god! It feels so good to have that off my chest!

...www.phoenixnewtimes.com...

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