A Portion of First Place Poppy’s Rainbow by Mark Sherman of Coral Springs, FL

Last weekend was wet, cold and dreary. We circumvented some of this blah weather by leaving town on Saturday. Monday morning it was apparent that most of my co-workers had stayed inside and spent the entire weekend playing video games and watching action movies. This morning’s conversation was a total nerd-fest. It was a long and wide ranging conversation that covered Halo, Game of Thrones and the Marvel universe. The boss was out of the office. The comic book inspired movies Iron Man II, Captain America and The Avengers were all discussed in detail. At one point a young engineer quipped, “It sounds like a comic book store in here.” Not all nerds are equally nerdy though. One of the other engineers had confused last year’s blockbuster, The Avengers, with the 1960s British TV show, The Avengers. In particular, he had confused Emma Peel (Diana Rigg) from the TV show with Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) from the movie. I don’t think that this engineer was even old enough to have watched the TV show, except maybe in syndication.

We weren’t the only nerds that have been out and about though. Last Saturday night Washington DC held its annual nerd-fest, also known as the Whitehouse Correspondents Dinner (#WHCD). This dinner supposedly held for charity is really all about DC Politicos and their self-congratulations. The highpoint of this dinner is when the President speaks and tells jokes. Some Presidents are better at this humor game than others. As it turns out, Obama is really good at it and killed on Saturday night. He didn’t even have to use any drones. Here are three of my favorite jokes:

• “Maureen Dowd said I could solve all my problems if I were just more like Michael Douglas in The American President. And I know Michael is here tonight. Michael, what’s your secret, man? Could it be that you were an actor in an Aaron Sorkin liberal fantasy?”
• “Did you know that Sheldon Adelson spent $100 million of his own money last year on negative ads? You’ve got to really dislike me to spend that kind of money … Sheldon would have been better off offering me $100 million to drop out of the race. I probably wouldn’t have taken it, but I’d have thought about it. Michelle would have taken it.”
• “Some folks still don’t think I spend enough time with Congress. ‘Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?’ they ask. Really? Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?”