Their Oops? We'll Hear It Again and Again.

"When people repeat these, you're essentially repeating a joke," he says. "Largely, these are not new meanings of old terms. You're referring to a well-known event and getting humor from using it in a new situation."

Nobody knows which ones will last, he points out, because it's often passing time and subsequent events that lend the remark the appropriate level of irony, tragedy or humor to endure.

First, let's look at a couple of nominees that didn't quite make the finals.

The winner in the category of "Things That Only a Lawyer Could Say," for example, was: "What we have here is a desperate woman who wants to have a conversation with another woman."

This was Donald Lykkebak, astronaut Lisa Nowak's attorney, describing her 950-mile, diaper-clad expedition to confront her boyfriend's girlfriend with a steel mallet, a knife and pepper spray in an airport parking lot at 3 in the morning.

This gets points for being (a) ridiculous, (b) part of a national news story and (c) a reference to the iconic line from "Cool Hand Luke": "What we have here is a failure to communicate."

But it's just not zippy.

Coming closer, the Hunter S. Thompson Memorial Fear and Loathing Award goes to the Rolling Stones' Keith Richards. Speaking of his late father, the cremated Bert, Richards told a British magazine he mixed Dad's ashes with some cocaine, then snorted the concoction up his nose.

"I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. . . . It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive."

Well, okay, this was one occasion in which someone did inhale, but Richards is so weird -- the man fell out of a coconut tree -- that it doesn't get quite enough separation from your standard rock-star debauchery.

But thanks for playing, Keith, and hope your head feels better!

So enough preliminaries! Let's get to the countdown!