Style Conversational Week 1092: Hmm, a challenge to do stupid things ...; The Empress of The Style Invitational talks about this week's new contest and results 
Washington Post Blogs 
October 2, 2014 Thursday 7:02 PM EST 
Copyright 2014 The Washington Post All Rights Reserved 

Length: 1599 words Byline: Pat Myers 
Body 
Welcome, federales, to FY 2015; welcome, Jews, to 5775; and if you're reading this, then The Washington Post has finally welcomed me to the new Methode year -I found out right after midnight Wednesday/Thursday that as of Oct. 2, 2014, The Post's security certificate to remotely access its publishing system had expired, and I couldn't log on to the system no way no how. [It was finally fixed around 11 a.m., at which point some other thing went wrong.] 
I'm truly heartened that the ALS Association received such a huge windfall -or waterfall -from its Ice Bucket Challenge; a friend and neighbor of mine just died of this cruel disease, and a cure cannot come fast enough. $100 million surely will help in some way. Still, you just know that lots of equally worthy charities (along, no doubt, with numerous unworthies) are hatching plans of their own to get pledge money directed their way. Your challenge for Week 1092 may well be to figure out some crazy fundraising scheme that isn't  actually being used already. 
There aren't any concrete rules this week for how the entries should read (except for the standard fabulously-funny­and-clever). But please don't write on and on; humorous essays can be wonderful, but they just don't work in The Style Invitational, especially interspersed with one-liners. 
For those who don't get the print Invite, here's a link to what the page looks like in its latest location, the third page from the back of the Arts & Style section. (Elden Carnahan's Master Contest List has PDFs of most of the past 1090 print pages; just click on the cartoon icon on the right side of a certain week's contest listing.) Take a look at the link above and see those blocks of type in the narrow little columns. You see a couple that are especially long -Dan McMahon's third-place ink; John Kammer's honorable mention? Each of those runs about 55 words. And even at that length, they look forbidding to the weekend-morning eye, especially before that second cup of coffee. So try to be concise, and try to make your sentences as readable -fun to read -as you can. 
What counts as an organization? I'm not going to be rigid, but a joke will make more sense if it's a nonprofit entity of some sort. Apple's charity foundation, yes: Apple Inc., no. 
For years and years, the Invite always likened the Ask Backwards contest to "Jeopardy!," since you have to answer in the form of a question. But in recent years we've acknowledged our debt to Carnac the Magnificent -Johnny Carson in bejeweled, feathered turban "divining" the questions for the answers supplied by the genially obsequious Ed McMahon: A. Sis Boom Bah; Q. Describe the sound made when a sheep explodes. Here's a video clip of that joke and a few others. The "Tonight Show" audience is very supportive. 
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I offered 16 categories in Week 1088, up from the usual dozen, about half of them contributed by Losers on the Style Invitational Devotees Facebook page. I padded the list because I didn't have a feel for which phrases would be fruitful. And some weren't; "iPad Thai" drew a bunch of entries about using your noodle, noodling around, etc.; and com.org brought in only 24 entries, possibly an all-time low, and none of them guffawable. On the other hand, there were plenty of good jokes about a cross-country trip in a Miata, but just about all of them are, duh, about being cramped.  So I wasn't going to run a dozen of them; it's better to go on to the next topic. 
As I mention in the results, that category was inspired by the trip by Longtime Loser J.J. Gertler last month from Arlington, Va., to Monterey, Calif.- and back -to the 25th-anniversary Miata convention at Mazda's Laguna Seca racetrack, attended by 1,800 little bitty pretty cars, including JJ's 17-year-old ragtop. He kept a Facebook blog called "JJ's Almost C2C2C Sojourn" to document what seems to be a crisis-free 6,712 miles and 16 days, starting with a video of himself backing out of the driveway.   Presumably he got to put some luggage in the passenger seat. 
Once again, brand-new Loser Danny Gallagher fails to score a magnet. Just a few weeks ago, Danny got his first ink with a runner-up idea for a new phone app: "The Teh: An app that un-autocorrects your texts so it makes people think you're busier than you really are." Now the Dallas-based humor blogger gets to bobble the head of his own Lincoln Memorial statue courtesy of his tribute to the governor of his state. (I'm sure there's already a Rick Perry bobblehead, and even one that's a little statue with a spring in the neck.) 
Appropriately winning a package of tenacious little critters that you keep finding in your house no matter how you try to dislodge them, Frank Osen once again finds himself in Runner-Up Land. Well, last week he wasn't a runner-up; he won the whole contest.  
The three other runners-up this week are all Invite veterans -in fact, I'm sorry to say that there weren't any First Offenders this week. (As tempted as I am to encourage promising new people by giving them ink, I don't see names when I judge, and there were probably some very clever entries by newbies that just missed the cut. Just keep trying, new people -see the nice pretty new magnets?) 170-time Loser Lawrence McGuire and 170-zillion­time Loser Chris Doyle did the great-minds thing with "stir-crossed lovers," and Dave Prevar gets Ink No. 255 with one more go at Bob McDonnell, in this case, an allusion to the plea bargain that the ex-gov really, really stupidly turned down.  
  Not surprisingly, there were several good ideas that were sent by too many people to get individual ink. Tysons Coroner had the slogan "Shop Till You Drop";  a cross-country trip in a Miata was feasible only in Liechtenstein. 
A factoid I learned courtesy of one entry: Zoologists say that an octopus has "arms," rather than tentacles. They reserve the latter for appendages that have suckers only on the end, rather than all the way up, as an octopus does. I learn so much in my job -including various genres of porn, but fortunately that didn't have anything to do with the octopus entry.  (Unprintable entries from Week 1088 at the bottom of this column.)    
When I was off doing some volunteer work yesterday, I noticed an e-mail to my Post account from whoever takes "contact us" questions on washingtonpost.com: An Ira Moskowitz would like me to contact him immediately. 
I recognized the name; I had just credited Moskowitz last week for his super-clever winning entry from Week 105 (1995), which I used as an example and inspiration for Week 1091, an encore of the same "good idea/bad idea" challenge: 
Good idea: Showing pictures of your kids at a private party.Bad idea: Showing pictures of your privates at a kids' party. 
So I e-mailed Ira and complimented him on his long-ago ink, said I figured he'd seen it again, and asked what I could do for him. He instantly e-mailed me back. "Call me." 
So I called (n.b.: I hate calling strangers on the phone). Ira informed me that he was very upset to see his name "used fraudulently" next to this joke, that he had just heard about it because someone had mentioned it to him. 
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Furthermore, he did not find it funny to joke "about displaying genitals to children." And further-furthermore, he worked in a "very sensitive job." He demanded that I take the name off the joke immediately from the online version. 
I explained that I'd simply copied the joke from the archives of 1995; I didn't recently get anything with his name on it. He wanted to know if I could check the original entries from 1995. No, sorry, I said: It was the dawn of e-mail, and The Post's e-mail purged after 90 days. And anyway, most of the entries still arrived by fax and postal mail; they got trashed as soon as the prizes went out. (Heck, probably some were trashed before the prizes went out, to judge from the number of people who wrote me to complain they'd never gotten their bumper stickers from the Czarist regime.) 
So unless I'd just dreamed up the name by mistake, I told him, the joke must have been by another Ira Moskowitz, strange as that would seem. And I certainly wasn't going to deprive the Cleverer but Perhaps More Tasteless Mr. 
M. of credit because someone else was running around with his name. 
When I got home, I double-checked the Week 105 results, and indeed the winner was "(Ira Moskowitz, Lanham)." This Ira is not and never was from Lanham. I think, in fact, he recently moved to the Washington area. And so he seemed satisfied. 
If you Google the name, most of the hits are for an artist who lived from 1912 to 2001, residing in New York and Taos in his later years. There's also a doctor in California. The Ira I called had a D.C. area code. 
The original Ira, according to Elden's statistics, won the contest with his first ink, and never got another blot. Until the encore presentation last week. 
So I guess it's not likely that Ira Formerly of Lanham will be reading this, eager to set us straight and bask once again in the glory of a well-wrought chiasmus-type joke about children and genitals. 
(I do now, by the way, keep copies of all the entries except the few that straggle in through the fax machine.) 
Among the unanswerables:A. A cross-country trip in a Miata. Q. What is the best way to prepare for self-administered oral sex? (Harry Farkas)
 A.  Mary Had a Little Lemming.  Q. What is a cute euphemism for Mary's intimate foliage?  (Tom Witte) 
A. An octopus doing the Hokey Pokey. Q. Who's got fewer things going in and out than Your Mama? (Jon Gearhart)