Style Conversational Week 1103: Get ready to do your revel best; The Style Invitational Empress talks about the contest and the Loser Community Washington Post Blogs December 18, 2014 Thursday 8:00 PM EST Copyright 2014 The Washington Post All Rights Reserved Length: 1496 words Byline: Pat Myers Body First, some Important Loser News: Please watch your e-mail for your invitation -I'm hoping it goes out on Monday -to the 16th annual Loser Post-Holiday Party, a potluck hosted this year on Saturday evening, Jan. 10, by 314-time Loser Craig Dykstra and his wife, Valerie, at their house in Centreville, Va., a few miles off I-66. You'll RSVP to me at pat.myers@washpost.com, and if you're coming, I'll send you the address, etc. The Dykstras will put some food and drink out, and we'll bring the rest. You don't have to be a regular Loser -or have any ink at all -to come, and spouses or other handlers are welcome as well. (You can bring kids, too; Craig and Valerie will play family-friendly movies on the humongous screen in the basement, and they even have an ultra-cool sliding board that goes down there from the kitchen.) Hopefully, some of our Loserbards will contribute song parodies or read poems -the Dykstras have a piano, and there's a good chance that someone from the Loser Community will provide accompaniment. (And if not, we'll all be "singing" along anyway.) If you'd like to write something, preferably about the Invite, let me know. Dress for the party is anything you like except un-. In general, though, just as with all Loser events, it's just plain old chatting, not scintillating repartee: the official name of Loserdom, NRARS, stands for NOT READY for the Algonquin Round table Society. If you RSVP to me and I don't know you from the Invite, I might chat you up a little before giving out all the info. (Or just explain in your e-mail who you are.) If you don't get the weekly e-mail notification about the Invite, contact me at pat.myers@washpost.com and I'll forward you the invitation personally. (Or ask to get on the mailing list.) One more thing before I lose you: For the next two weeks, the Invitational and Conversational (surely a very short one) will be published on Wednesdays, Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve. It's going to be super easy to write entries for Week 1103 of The Style Invitational. It's not going to be so easy to write really clever ones, not "duh" ones. The song can't just be appropriate for the show - it has to be humorously appropriate. Whichever ones you end up writing, please don't send them one at a time on 25 separate e-mails -at least not until we've solved the problem we've been struggling with under the Invite's new "dropbox" in Microsoft Outlook that's the repository for all the entries sent to losers@washpost.com (Details farther down in the Technerds Only section.) Really, there's no advantage in sending your entry early in the week -I look at them all the same time. So I'd be perfectly thrilled if you let them all pile up in a draft e-mail until you send it off to me. (But certainly please don't sweat it if you want to send in another entry or two because you just thought of the most brilliant thing ever.) the contest and the Loser Community All the examples are of bare-bones form -just the TV show name and the song name -but I absolutely don't forbid some elaboration that would add to the humor. We like the fun-nee. I am, however, going to stick to the rule that both the song and the TV show have to be real titles. A note about this week's second-place prize hand sanitizers: While I just received the lovely Pee-Pee Poo-Poo product from Diane Wah, who'd brought it all the way from Seattle for last weekend's Loser Brunch, the Dog Slobber (remover -it's not claiming to be dog slobber in the bottle) has been on my desk at work for some time and managed to run away from the name of the person who donated it. If you were the Slobber Donor, please let me know and I'll make sure that Keeper of the Stats Elden Carnahan gives you a point. Let me know right away and I can credit you in the Invite this weekend; let me know later and I'll credit you four weeks from now when we award the "prize." Having posted the Invite online while I'm still writing this column, I'm already hearing rave reviews on the Style Invitational Devotees page for the results of this go-round of our perennial Questionable Journalism contest. Clearly, The Post's paywall, the limit of 20 online articles a month for non-subscribers, didn't hurt the quality of this week's ink. But there's no reason it should have, really, since a single story can provide fodder for a dozen entries; I'm pretty sure that even among the inking entries, one article is the source for multiple ink blots. Given the almost infinite source material for this contest -any sentence in the paper or online over the space of 11 days -I was surprised to get a number of entries based on the same sentence. "Not every turkey escapes the White House" does seem especially tempting, and Jon Gearhart's entry topped the field. "My head seemed disconnected from my body" also drew Loserly eyeballs. I tended to laugh most at entries that played on the meaning of the words in the source sentence -which means that it was clear what the original was about. The triumph in that category was Jeff Shirley's runner-up entry on the tidal forecasts, turning "waves" into a verb. On the other hand, wry comments on the actual meaning of the sentence - like Jeff Hazle's runner-up about Iraq - also proved fruitful. Oy! Beverley Sharp now has 490 blots of ink!! That's with her LOLling Inkin' Memorial winner - her 12th win -and two honorable mentions this week. So Beverley is probably polishing up her Sunday shoes (or at least some fuzzy bedroom slippers) to cross the threshold of the Style Invitational Hall of Fame. I'm afraid that Beverley and her long-suffering husband, Dick Amberg -such a good sport that at one Flushies he wore a name tag labeled "Dick Sharp" -are just going to have to come back up to Washington next year from their exile in Montgomery, Ala., to be "honored" in person. Pat Boone's priceless dating-advice tome "'Twixt Twelve and Twenty" goes to Jeff Hazle, who's racked up 44 inks including and 10 above the fold since his debut in Week 802. Surely it was a record week for Steve Honley, whose four inks this week bumps him eight spaces up the all-time stats list to a total of 43. And Jeff Shirley is back in the Losers' Circle with this 10th ink above the fold. (Unprintable entries from Week 1099 are at the bottom of this column.) When I judge the Invitational every week, I've been using one long master file in which I've combined all the e­mails for a particular week. (Actually two master files; I make two copies, then take out all identifying info from the second copy -everything except the text of the entries themselves -and that's what I judge from. I don't look at the full one again until I put the inking entries on the page; then I check to see who wrote them.) Combining all the e-mails into one searchable file was especially easy to do in our former system, Lotus Notes -you just highlighted all the subject lines in the inbox or another folder, and hit Forward, and you had one giant e­mail. This doesn't work in Outlook, to which the Loser dropbox has just been moved, years after all the regular e­mail moved there. Super-Helpful Loser Jeff Contompasis did show me a similar system in Outlook that saves all the e-mails to a giant .txt file, but it turned out that some of the e-mails (especially from Gmail and Yahoo) didn't show up on this combined list except for the headers -the person's name, email address, etc. Our IT guy said he's going to try to figure out why this would happen, but until then, I obviously can't use this method. the contest and the Loser Community But this morning, Also Super-Helpful Loser Steven Papier thinks he got it to work with a combined CSV file, whatever that is, that you then call up with an Excel spreadsheet. I'm going to try it out tonight. If that doesn't work, I guess what I'll do is use the Jeff Method, then copy in, one by one, all the entries that didn't make the transfer automatically. So obviously, one e-mail containing 25 entries is going to be a lot less time-consuming than 25 e­mails each containing one entry. Obviously, my fingers are really crossed for the Steven Method! (Which makes it kind of a bear to write this column, but you gotta do what you gotta do.) Just two this week, but both exceedingly clever - we'll give them both the Scarlet Letter: Post: If you're going to fumble pulling the box out of the bag, you should show that. (From a story about a hit video of women opening pocketbooks) Q: Why are surgeons required to videotape their hysterectomies? (Edward Gordon) It's a massive, bulbous, inexplicably sexual thing that droops down from the ceiling and fills the whole space. (From an article about avant-garde art at the Hirshhorn Museum) How would you describe one of the hanging hard-ons of Babylon? (Chris Doyle) Happy Hanukkah and, to those who inexplicably won't be reading this column on Christmas Eve, Merry Christmas.