Style Conversational Week 1096: We just keep tooning along; The Empress of The Style Invitational ruminates (ew!) on the new and old contests Washington Post Blogs October 30, 2014 Thursday 8:26 PM EST Copyright 2014 The Washington Post All Rights Reserved Length: 1097 words Byline: Pat Myers Body Did you know that when Bob Staake does his cartoon each week for The Style Invitational, he often makes two versions for us -one in full color, to be posted online, and one that will look better when it's printed in black-and­white? (Which is what's done each week now that the Invite is no longer on a color page of the print paper.) But this week, Bob also did two separate versions of his cartoons when they're both in black-and-white -just to add a splash of color with the numbers. Once I realized that we weren't suddenly going to be moved to a color page this week (and also four weeks from now, when the results are published), I knew that the contest wouldn't work if the cartoons in print were in B&W and the online ones were in color, because inking entries often refer or allude to the colors in the pictures, and then the print readers would be all confused and would fill up their fountain pens and start writing letters to the editor about how journalism has gone down the toilet. Maybe next time, Bob could just write RED -->, <---ORANGE, etc., right on the cartoons, and people could color them in. (Hey, we did a word-find puzzle, you know.) Actually, the large majority of our cartoon contests have been in black-and-white: The Post didn't publish much in color at all until 1999, when it built a gigantic high-tech plant in College Park, Md. (it was later closed in a consolidation after circulation shrank drastically). But even after that, the page that the Invite was on -Page 2 of the Sunday Style section -didn't get to be in color (with a few rare exceptions) until February 2004. And even then, we had to take turns with Page 2 of Sports: Sports got the color page for the whole football season, for the Super Bowl and, on alternate years, for several weeks around the Olympics. (And probably a few other events I'm forgetting.) So I scheduled the cartoon contests around those times, traded my firstborn child for a week with color during the football season, etc. One reason I wasn't too upset that the Invitational moved to the Saturday paper in 2007 -even though Saturday had the week's smallest circulation, barely half of Sunday's -was that I was promised a color page every week. And on many weeks it was really splashy, with all kinds of art and graphics (here's a good example, from Week 727, featuring the zany face of Loser Kyle Hendrickson). So I got pretty spoiled on that. But as the newspaper business and The Post itself got spun around every which way as it looked for some way to bring back circulation and especially ad revenue, there was a move to bolster Sunday coverage, and so in 2011 began the separate Sunday Style tabloid section -to which its editor, Invite fan Lynn Medford, brought us when she moved over from the daily section. And she gave us part of and later the whole back page. And that page was always in color, because the other half of the sheet of paper it was printed on -think of splaying out a magazine upside down - was the cover of the section. (ew!) on the new and old contests And that all lasted several years, while The Post patiently waited in vain for ads to show up on all these new arts pages, while a pared-down staff of editors and writers worked incessantly to fill two Sunday sections as well as the six daily Style sections (and Weekend, and of course all the blogs and other online sites). And now we're back to the reunited Arts & Style section, which is still very spaciously laid out, with tons of lovely big pictures and artsy white space (and many thoughtful, well-written stories). But the color goes to the arts stories -believe me, a black­and-white page featuring an abstract expressionist painter is not a great idea -while the Invite is on the same page as a crossword puzzle. But! You know how when you move to a new house, there's always some stuff that's not going to get packed up one more time? Well, we've made it into that van four times in our 211 / 2 years (while numerous others weren't so lucky), and if this time we didn't get to move into the corner room with the bay window and the skylight, our friends still know where to find us. *An entry from Jeff Contompasis As I do most every week, I read through all the entries for Week 1092 from a list that included no entrants' names or addresses; made a short-list of my favorite few dozen entries; cut that list by half or more; and then picked the top four, and copied them into the template that makes up the Invitational's layout. After each, I typed "(XXXXX, XXXXXXX)." Then I copied another block of entries into the honorable-mentions area. Then I looked up my list of "Week 1092 with names," and searched for each entry. The person whom last week I called "Him Again Frank Osen" is now Him AGAIN Frank Osen. Frank's current string of highest-placing ink -and sometimes he'd have as many as five blots: Week 1092: Win. Week 1091: Win. Week 1090: Third place. Week 1089: Second place. Week 1088: Second place. Week 1087: Win. You have to go back to Sept. 21, seven weeks earlier, to find a Style Invitational contest in which Frank did not place "above the fold." I don't have time to find out how far back it was when he didn't get any ink at all. Has there ever been a run like this? Even in the year when Brendan Beary got 179 blots of Ink? Even Chuck Smith when he dominated the Invite in the early years? If there has been, that runner will surely let me know (or even another stats-obsessive Loser will, now that baseball season is over), and I'll let you know. And it was pretty yada-yada-yada with the others in the Losers' circle, as well. Beverley Sharp is just daring me to change the powder room guest towels of the Invitational Hall of Fame, as she glides smoothly toward Ink 500; and Lawrence McGuire and Danielle Nowlin have more than 300 inks between them. One Loser whose entry didn't quite make it -though I enjoyed its mix of yuckiness and utter wackiness -is Sandy Moran of Santa Rosa, Calif., who deserves a special Comedy Is In The Timing award, since four weeks ago she obviously calculated that this very day, her subject would be on the front page of every newspaper: "The Bumgarner Booger Blast: In celebration of the public nose-clearings of the Giants' star pitcher, two people face each other three feet apart, block one nostril and attempt to blow a snot rocket at their opponent. All for the Snotless Children of East Bermuda Fund." It took only 32 years, but I finally made the front page of The Washington Post. See the photo!