Subjects, subjects, subjects.
Contest Queen is nowhere near tears.

After laboring through the hundreds of entries for this week's contest that have flooded her (corner) office at Word, her eyes are dry; her heart is cold.

A lone contestant has caused a thin smile to play about Contest Queen's lips, in appreciation of the pathos of his/her entry. And here it is:

Black as the night, cold as the winter. Rummaging through street trash and looking upward to the warm home above. His dead mother lying nearby, black as the night, cold as the winter. And he snuggles up regardless, because he doesn't know what else to do.
         --tgorham@baste.magibox.net
Pathos be damned! Bathos! Bravo!

Also!

We do have an interesting story to share from our own jbowe:

A few years back a friend and I were hitchhiking. Christmas Eve found us getting dropped off in Las Vegas-- drunk as shit and tripping on 2-3 hits of acid. As we got progressively more looped, we stumbled into Caesar's Palace. I was mesmerized by a six-foot tall cocktail waitress in a pseudo-Roman get-up complete with aggressive plastic bustiers. I think I actually said the line "So what do you guys do here when you're not working?" She smiled and ignored me. She was about ten years older than me. I threw up all over the table and we got the hell outta there.

Later we spent the night outside of town in a drainage ditch, and in the morning walked back in for the $2.99 all-you-can-eat Christmas dinner at Circus Circus. The worst part was when I called home and talked with my brother. He asked me if I was having a good time. From the pay phone, I looked up and down the main drag at the whole gaudy, cheap, exploitative scene that is Vegas. People stumbled by-- fake, unself-examined whitey-ass cowboys who don't know shit and act tough, cheap-ass dyed blonde women who pretended to love the whitey-ass cowboys....They were all pretending to like this shit. The whole thing sucked. "Yeah," I told my brother. "Tell everyone 'Merry Christmas!'" 

             --jbowe@iconnet.com
Thank you, jbowe. And now, having experienced her own holiday horrors, Contest Queen is going on hiatus and taking her tiara, her ermine, and her contests with her. Look for new staff home pages in this space, beginning on January 9.