Style Conversational Week 1095: The man who made Style ripe for the Invitational; Without Ben Bradlee's creation, you wouldn't be reading these jokes here 
Washington Post Blogs October 23, 2014 Thursday 7:04 PM EST 
Copyright 2014 The Washington Post All Rights Reserved 

Length: 1507 words Byline: Pat Myers 
Body 
Ben Bradlee had nothing to do with The Style Invitational. Not personally, anyway -he retired in 1991, two years before the contest debuted. It was his successor, Len Downie, who approved the idea (a bit surprisingly, to me) and let the Czar run with it. 
But in another respect, Bradlee had everything to do with it: It was he who created the Style section in 1969, tossing aside the fusty and demeaning "For and About Women" section and replacing with a lively and irreverent digest -essentially a daily magazine -featuring some of the day's best writers. As he wrote in his memoir, "A Good Life":  "We wanted to look at the culture of America as it was changing in front of our eyes. The sexual revolution, the drug culture, the women's movement. And we wanted it to be interesting, exciting, different." 
And it was Ben Bradlee who, in 1990, hired one Gene Weingarten away from the Miami Herald, where Gene had similarly transformed its Sunday magazine, Tropic, running cover stories like this one on the budget deficit, and recruiting Dave Barry as a humor columnist. Before long, Gene was given his own domain at The Post, the Sunday Style section, which until then was the final vestige of For and About Women, featuring a fashion column, society news, and features such as Ann Landers and the horoscope that on weekdays ran in the comics pages. Gene promptly made Sunday Style appointment reading for a major feature story every week (often of the true-crime genre), on which -he's a terrific editor -he would work closely with one of a roster of writers he particularly respected; occasionally he wrote his own. 
And he also, on Page 2, started up a contest based on the one in New York Magazine (in which his sole entry failed to get ink), and made it edgier than any of the contests run by  that famously brash publication. 
Though from its earliest days it drew contestants from around the country, even before we had the Internet, The Style Invitational was never syndicated -it just wouldn't have been suitable for other newspapers' feature sections. But it was perfect for the one that Ben Bradlee created. 
Bradlee also hired me, by the way. After a few years working part time, I was hired as a copy editor in 1986; the job interview was brief. (He asked me what my father did; I looked young.) However, after I became Style's copy desk chief, a particularly honest job evaluation I did crossed his desk. "This Myers, she's tough as nails," he remarked to my editor, Mary Hadar. It wasn't true, but I treasured the Bradleean appraisal anyway. 
creation, you wouldn't be reading these jokes here 
There have been some marvelous Ben Bradlee appreciations published over the past two days. In addition to the excellent obit by The Post's former managing editor Bob Kaiser, I especially enjoyed these personal reminiscences by some of the paper's most talented writers from over the years: 
Bradlee and the Style section,  by my former Style colleague Martha Sherrill. 
Bradlee backs up his young reporter against lawyers, anecdotes by The Post's Marc Fisher. (Note: "Flysh--on paper" is to be read as "fly sh--") 
From my former Style colleague David Remnick, now editor of The New Yorker, in his magazine. (In the understatement of the century: "His letters in no way resembled those of Emily Dickinson.") 
And one in Time Magazine by my former boss David Von Drehle. 
Given that in the 1960s, Ben Bradlee told Katharine Graham, in the middle of a fancy restaurant, that "I'd give my left one" to be editor of The Washington Post, it seems to me that the Invite is carrying on his legacy proudly. With both. 
Given the poetry chops of the Greater Loser Community -witness the "rude word" poems in last week's results -I'm always eager to set them upon a different genre of verse to bumfiddle, to use one of said words. Last week I saw a tanka posted on Facebook by Loser Madeleine Begun Kane, whose main gig is a limerick blog. I can't seem to find it now, but the form seemed just right for the Invitational -short enough for lots of them to fit on the page, long enough to get some cleverness in.  
And because real tanka -in English, anyway -doesn't actually hew to a strict syllable count (here's some beautiful poetry, labeled as tanka, by Gerard John Conforti, and the lines greatly vary), and it doesn't rhyme, I figured that rather than getting the poetry people up in arms with our insistence on 5-7-5-7-7, and rhyme, and humor, we could let them keep their arms down and we'll just call it something else. Hence TankaWanka. 
My hunch is that the rhyme will usually be set in the last two lines, in sort of a mini-mini-sonnet ending. But it can be anywhere, and in more than one place. The syllable count, though, and the rhyme requirement, will be fast rules. The subject matter is really flexible, but it can't just be a little personal/domestic musing, about your dog, say. It has to concern some topic that's mentioned in the news of late - i.e.,  not already out of the discussion.  
Lord knows, just because I have reading glasses dangling from a little chain around my wattly neck doesn't mean I'm mature. And I admit that both the Royal Consort and I kept breaking into almost weepy guffaws at the succession of poopy jokes, sex jokes and sicko jokes that I was reading aloud to him from my (un)short-list of "good idea/bad idea" entries for Week 1091. A lot of them were similar, and so it didn't make sense to run them all, but I hope the inking ones today will give you a giggle, even if it's a guilty giggle.  
I had no idea at all whose entries were whose until I put them on the page on Tuesday; because the format was predetermined, it was even hard to tell when one set of entries finished and the next began. And it was fun to see that three out of the four top finishers were either brand-new or occasional visitors to the Invite. 
But first prize -and not just my own choice, but that of both people I asked to read the short-list -goes to Him Again Frank Osen, who's having the kind of year that reminded me of when, one year about a decade ago, Brendan Beary got 179 blots of ink before returning to semi-sanity. 
But Jan Forman will have to be moved off the Loser Stats' One-Hit Wonders list, now that we'll supplement her Week 1060 FirStink with a genuine vintage Loser T-Shirt for her thing we used to call a chiasmus and then got corrected because technically it's "antimetabole" or "epanados" -having fun switching the order of words, whatever you call it. 
It's just the ninth blot of ink for Larry Carnahan (no relation to Keeper of the Stats Elden Carnahan), who's been stopping by in Loserland very occasionally since Week 551 -but did come to this past weekend's Loser Brunch in 
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Arlington, Va., along with what turned out to be about 20 other people; that's where Cheryl Davis gave me this week's cool prize. Larry might have lucked out a bit with "Use power tools to keep your ear functioning properly," since I recently had to go to the doctor to get one of my ears cleaned out, and I was struck by the mental image of a Dremel rotary reamer in my left auditory canal. 
And Eric Yttri's nifty wordplay earns him his choice of Loser Mug or Whole Fools Grossery Bag along with the FirStink for his first ink. Eric, let me know which one you'd rather have.  
Some funny entries didn't quite fit the contest because they were good-news/bad-news rather than good/bad ideas; they weren't things that people might think to do. In fact, I hadn't noticed that myself until copy editor extraordinaire Doug Norwood pointed two cases out to me: Good idea: Thanks to the lottery, winning a million dollars. Bad idea: Thanks to the lottery, winning a million "relatives." (Lawrence McGuire) 
Good idea: The Post article describes you as an interesting person.Bad idea: The Post article describes you as a person of interest. (Howard Walderman) 
.So good news/bad news for Lawrence and Howard, good news/good news for the two entries that replaced them. (Not yours; yours got ink from the start.) 
Good idea: Surprising a co-worker by putting a cupcake in their office. Bad idea: Surprising a co-worker by putting a cupcake in their orifice. (Jeff Shirley) 
Good idea: Pulling your bowling balls out to clean them before going to the alley.Bad idea: Pulling your balls out to clean them at the bowling alley. (Brad Alexander) 
Good idea: Sneaking a piece of Good N' Plenty candy. Bad idea: Sneaking a piece of Good-and-Plenty Candy.  (Jim Stiles) 
Good idea: Blowing one's own horn to advance in the company.Bad idea: Blowing your boss's horn to advance in the company. (Also Jim Stiles) 
Good idea: Stimulating children's minds.Bad idea: Stimulating children's hinds. (Tom Witte, who I bet will protest, "But I said it was a bad  idea!") 
G: Write in your diary.B: Write in your diarrhea. (Kevin Dopart; sorry, too gross even for me) 
And the Scarlet Letter goes to: Good idea: Dishwashing liquid that is really hard on grease.Bad idea: Dishwashing liquid that is really hard-on grease. (Elden Carnahan)