Label appropriately:

1) Items found in iceboxes.
2) Items that are eaten.
3) Items that you are saving.

further categories of agents

0. fabulous ones
1. Those that are trained
2. Those that dissemble as if they were mad
3. Those that have just broken the law
4. Those that from a long way off look like publishers

1. Money flows towards the author.
2. Money flows towards the scammer.
3. No money flows.

1. Formal verse
2. Free verse
3. Verses about plums

1. People who write on paper
2. People who write on line.
3. People who write on stones.

1. Those that belong to the emperor
2. Those that belong to the emperor
3. Those that belong to the emperor

1. Written in large friendly letters
2. Written in the stars
3. Writ on water

1. Hula hoop champions

1. Stage magicians
2. Beer distributors
3. Topologists and knot theoreticians.

1. People who like Venn diagrams.
2. People who like drawing circles.
3. People who put their coffee cups down on their work.

You Can Draw the Heads of Talking Animal Characters!, "Lesson 7: A Parrot", Step 3.

12. Oh
1. my
2. God,
123. it's
23. full
13. of
3. stars

@9 http://www.circustakeaway.co.uk/magic_trick1.php

1) Maria Silaeva

2) That is all.

3) Oh all right, if you insist:Elena Lev

1) A circle.

2) Another circle.

3) Yet another circle.

1. Dogs
2. Cats
3. Elephants

1. mountains and rivers
2. not mountains and not rivers
3. mountains and rivers

123. !

1. Lions
2. Tigers
3. Bears
0. My!

1) Hoop snakes

2) Drop Bears

3) Bunyips

1. Yarn you have.
2. Patterns you have.
3. Yarn and patterns that work together.

1. Kahlua
2. Half & Half
3. Smirnoff Vanilla Vodka

1) Chatowsies

2) Ahagaree

3) Pourrian.

< FX: wanders off to wash his dog in the beer.>

1. Time travel
2. Spaceships
3. Killer robots

(Extra points to the first person who guesses the reference!)

Lee (23): I love that shirt!

1. Tornadoes.
2. Ice Storms.
3. Brush fires.

123. Where Janet lives.

1. Things you will do.
2. Things you won't do.
3. Things you might do.
123. Politics.

1. A ring
2. and another ring
3. and another ring.
And you've got three rings, Ballantine,
or for the Elven Kings under the Sky,
or a traffic circle in Camden NJ that looked very much like the Ballantine logo except with some stoplights at inconvenient places in the middle.

1. People who hate
2. People who love
3. People who are comfortable

The Olympics was much smaller than usual this year.

Bill Stewart:

XKCD

1. Restaurants you like to eat at.
2. Restaurants you can afford to eat it.
3. Restaurants within walking distance.

1. Structural social conflicts.
2. Externally-influenced dimensions of personal identity.
3. Pre-existent structures of loyalty, allegiance and belonging.

123: everyone.

A villanelle, and
a triolet, and also
a sonnet. TOM SWIFT!

--Dave, a-seasonally

A symphony of Petri dishes

Oh, and using Jim's original key, that would be Dave Langford in the middle, wouldn't it?

1.Red
2.Yellow
3.Blue
4.Orange
5.Green
6.Violet
7.White

... Making Light!

1, 2, 3, Dip!

1: John Bonham

1. Those who know the territory and have been around

2. Those who turn to dust and fall down

3. Those who sooner or later will be screwing around

Thank you.

Hit the point this morning where if one more person used "epublishing" and "self-publishing" as synonyms (and so leapt to the existence of both portending doom for anything outside the set that is self-publishing), eyes were going to meet sporks. Just hadn't decided whether they'd be mine or everyone else's yet.

(I do get that this doesn't only apply to the first example given. But even so.)

1. Eyeballs of Janni @41's interlocuters
2. Janni @41's eyeballs
3. SPORKS

LOL, abi!

(No sporks required for said LOLing, because the term is being used in its original context.)

1. People who know what LOL means
2. People who are actually LOLing when they say they are
3. People who responding with LOLs to things worthy of LOLing over

It occurs to me that we need this key to the diagram as well:
1. Spoons
2. Forks
3. Knives
4. Sporks
5. Chopsticks
6. Really Sharp Forks
7. Fingers

If we make it just:

1. spoons
2. forks
3. knives

Aren't the sporks implied among the intersections? :-)

(But not the chopsticks. The fingers simply lie in the space outside the diagram, though.)

(I have met fork/knife, in plasticware even. spoon/fork/knife is probably a certain sort of Swiss army knife, or other camping gear.)

If we make it just:

1. spoons
2. forks
3. knives

Aren't the sporks implied among the intersections? :-)

(But not the chopsticks. The fingers simply lie in the space outside the diagram, though.)

(I have met fork/knife, in plasticware even. spoon/fork/knife is probably a certain sort of Swiss army knife, or other camping gear.)

I was naming the intersections as well:

spoon + fork = spork
spoon + knife = no damn use, give me chopsticks
fork + knife = really sharp fork
spoon + fork + knife = ah, hang it, I'll just use my fingers

1: A man
2: A plan
3: A canal
1+2: A map
2+3: A panel
1+3: A camel
1+2+3: An alpaca almanac

abi: heh. Okay, I get it now.

Janni @50:

I should have used Avram's notation. And some of his cleverness, too, while I'm being acquisitive.

1: Ugly
2: Rock Star
3: Genius
1+2: Ted Nugent
2+3: Sting
1+3: Jean-Paul Sartre
1+2+3: Bob Dylan

There's another game possible here: name what's in the center, and have others guess what the three outside circles might be. Extra points for large circles, reasonably large secondary overlaps, and a tiny tertiary overlap. A ternary expansion of the two-word google search....

48
fork + knife = skewer, perhaps? Or maybe an oyster-fork, with two tines.

(Also, snail tongs are like spoon+knife.)

1: Those who read Saul Bellow
2: Those who do not conceal their farts
3: While riding the train
1+2: Genius
2+3: Ugly
1+3: Rock Star
1+2+3: Bob Dylan

Theophylact @ 36: You seem to have your RGBs and your CMYKs badly mixed up.

Poem, in theme, but too complex to fit into a comment:

http://eblong.com/zarf/thod/42/index.html

(Requires a graphical web browser with javascript on. Unusably slow on the iPad/iPhone browser, for some reason; I may fix this tomorrow, or not.)

1) Guitars
2) Cadillacs
3) Hillbilly music

So combining Abi & P J Evans, plus introducing a more suitable notation for this stuff:

01/1.

Spoons

02/2.

Fork

03/1+2.

Spork

04/3.

Knife

05/1+3.

Snail Tongs

06/2+3.

Oyster Tongs

07/1+2+3.

Multitool

Janni @ #44:

People who say "LOL" instead of saying "That's funny" (or, for that matter, laughing).

1. A bunch of inflatable sex dolls.
2. A tank of helium.
3. Rapture!

?

Oh, and I have some metal sporks here with (ineffective) serrations on one side to vaguely indicate that it's a knife on that edge.

The local system as I understand it:

4 prongs = fork
3 prongs = threek
2 prongs = toque
1 prong = whunk

@63 Credit for this system to myself, BDan Fairchild and possibly the Swarthmore collective at large.

1. A snowball down a mountain.
2. A carnival balloon.
3. A carousel that's turning, running rings around the moon.

1. An Australian pawnbroker that needs to move to a larger location.

Theophylact:

0.Black
1.Brown
2.Red
3.Orange
4.Yellow
5.Green
6.Blue
7.Violet
8.Grey
9.White

1. The fields we know.
2. The edges of the fields we know.
3. Beyond the fields we know.

1. John
2. Paul
3. George
123. Ringo

1. Chemistry
2. Physics
3. Biology

0. Mathematics

1. Long Range Plans
2. Short Term Plans
3. Winging It

1+2= Midpoint course correction or attitude adjustments.
2+3= Somewhat clued in to things.
3+1= WTF-ness.

1+2+3= success

Somehow I read this thread without immediately being inspired to post a reference to Jessica Hagy's blog thisisindexed.com (Let me fix that herewith.) She posts a variety of graphs, Venn diagrams, etc. that are creative and usually funny.