The Creative Mind Exploits of News Titles and Cartoons – Sea Quest Ration, Sequestration Case Study
The other day I was talking to a member of our think tank, she's an amazing creative gal, super bright, and has a very sharp mind when it comes to language. She spots patterns of word formations, and come up with a double entendre faster than anyone I've ever met, she's totally funny to listen to in conversation, she seems to pull new jokes out of the air in fact. In any case she got stuck on a cartoon her small close-knit team was having in creating a cartoon for the end of the world; Government Sequestration.
She ask me for a cool cartoon because I so often write about politics, economics, and government affairs. She wanted to make a mockery of the fact that "nothing had happened" after all the doom and gloom talk over sequestration, and she was looking for a way to portray that in a cartoon. Well, I said "You mean Sea Quest Rations?"
Okay so, picture a sea captain of an old British Merchant vessel round the Cape of Good Hope sitting up top the deck with his telescoped monocular stating; "Don't bother me now we are on a Sea Quest!" and his second officer says; "But captain what about the rations?" A parrot a top the captains shoulder says; "OK now I get it, Sea Quest Ration" and "this whole time I've been told they were "crackers".
Now then, let's look at how I had used the language to make fun of a word which has hardly been used in the American Media prior to this Sequestration Issue. Then to make a pun on words I simply broke down the word phonetically and slowed down the pronunciation, then listened to the words, rather than what they wrote out, and it sounded like "Sea Quest Ray Shuns" and so, I looked at that and visualized what that could be. We all know what a Sea Quest is, and a ray and shunning of others.
Well, all that surely fits the focused political rhetoric - a ray of light - laser beam focus. Plus, when one side wants to cut one thing other than another or one side wants to raise takes without cutting they are shunning the other side. So, we have lots of other opportunities for this Sea Questration as you can SEE. By playing around with the language and the word it only took a moment to come up with the other cartoon concept. And this is how those who have a superior use of the language can use their creative mind to overcome the creative fog, that's how it's done.
Gloss