I love you all.  I appreciate every submission (and want more! MORE!).  But sometimes I get submissions I choose not to use, because I don’t like them.  It’s my blog.

Sometimes I feel like the mistake was so obviously made by someone struggling with English that I don’t find it amusing… I’ve made hideous errors myself in foreign languages.  More than once!

Sometimes I don’t think the “mistake” was a mistake.  Sometimes I’m just in a bad mood and I don’t want to, jeez.

And then sometimes I find myself genuinely puzzled about the error.  I stare at it.  I try to think about what the submitter could have seen that I’m not seeing.  I try to be ONE with the error.

This picture wasn’t quite one of those.  Veronica wrote only “Gag” in her email, so I wasn’t sure what I was looking for.

It’s clearly a tagline, and I know copywriters have a bit of creative latitude in things like capitalization and punctuation.  So I looked at this one, and contemplated whether it was really a mistake.

Then I realized something.  I was HUGELY UNCOMFORTABLE.  What is it about this picture, y’all?  It’s totally unnerving!  There’s a figure in the corner that might be a baby-doll in a carseat, or it might be a crash test dummy, or it might be a dead body, it’s just sitting there floppily… there’s a poster with hivemind buzzwords… and then there’s

and I just can’t handle it any more.  What is this, Volvo?  What are you trying to do to us?  I’m so confused.