Weird Veg BANNER ART CONTEST!

Just when you thought all the games and parades were over--Halloween, World Series, Dia de los Muertos, S.F. Giants homecoming cable car parade--I bring you the official Weird Vegetables BANNER ART CONTEST! Oh yeah. Okay, sit down, get ready. Calm your excitement by gazing into the waxy eyes of these animal vegetable paraffin creatures that my thoughtful friend John Kim sent me (and thanks to Dave Huang too, whose company imports these from China). For I lay before you a proposition as mysterious and absurd as the imposed relationship between vegetables and briefcases. Now, to explain.

Back while I was working frantically to meet my non-vegetable-related deadlines head on, an email arrived in the Weird Vegetables virtual letterbox from Eileen of the CSNPromo Team. She dangled free gifts before our curious noses, with tales of booty from Cookware.com in exchange for a WV product tie-in post. "Vegetable love cannot be bought so easily!" the cabbage dog and onion pig declared hotly, but the cauliflower sheep nuzzled my arm gently to say that $55 in cookware could actually be quite a nice thing. Determined not to sell out so transparently, I considered reviewing only products that could be relevant to the blog's raison d'être, such as the machine that transforms all vegetables into spirals, or tools that suggested a strange fear of dirt + compulsion towards gadgetry (potato peeler with extraneous toothbrush thing), or that merely sounded bizarre: the Ronco Veg-O-Matic.

But I decided in the end to leave my cluttered kitchen universe intact and instead to let one artistically inclined reader choose something they actually wanted--like a Le Creuset mustard jar with matching silicone spatula or that Global 2.5" sheeps foot peeler you've been drooling over--while also breaking my ennui at my own photo of vegetables that currently resides at the top of this blog. In this way, we might imagine that art will trump the convoluted strategems of commerce. The contest is as follows.

CONTEST GUIDELINES:
Design a banner to run across the top of this blog. The only requirement is that it say Weird Vegetables clearly (can be all lowercase letters or all caps too). In color or black & white. I will say I'm partial to some sort of illustration or graphic to contrast the photos on the blog. I'm not sure what the measurements up there are, but the jpg I uploaded was 35 x 7 inches or 2575 x 554 pixels, if that's any help. Email the jpg or other kind of image file (or a link to where it's posted) to weirdvegetables AT gmail.com.

The winner will receive $55 of credit to use on cookware.com, plus the ultimate tribute of having their art featured atop the illustrious blog-o-space that is Weird Vegetables. Let's say we'll decide in just over a month, so you have until December 15 to send in something eerie and wonderful. So spread the word, start roaming farmers' markets and the fields for inspiration, and get your sharpies and paint pots out, your scissors and knitting needles moving.