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Style Conversational: The Empress gets as blubbery as she’s gonna get
By Pat MyersDecember 24, 2014
I’m not going to keep you (and myself) here on Christmas Eve — I have to do my shopping sometime,. and that fruitcake-on-clearance isn’t gonna buy itself. But since this is the final Style Invitational weekend of the year, I did want to take a moment to thank those who continue to put such large shares of time, effort and resources to keep this unlikely vehicle running on most cylinders well into its 22nd year.

— To The Washington Post, which has kept us around longer than it’s kept its own recent editors and publishers. This year, as the Style department’s two Sunday print sections merged back to one Arts & Style section, we found ourselves on a black-and-white Page 16 or 18 or whatever, but we have just as many column inches of space as before. And what’s more important, as The Post inevitably shifts its priorities online, and toward a national and global audience, we’re surely reaching more readers than ever. (And it even gives me a page for this column here.)

— To the Loser Community, all of you who’ve taken the Invitational beyond its role as a yuk-yuk newspaper feature into a thriving and continually expanding social group. The primary culprit of course is Elden Carnahan, Keeper of the Stats, Baron of the Brunches, Founder of the Flushies, uh, Webber of the Website. (Not to mention someone who’s found time to get more than 500 blots of ink.) But also to many others who Make It All Work: Pie Snelson, who passes out name tags at brunches and door prizes at parties. Dave Prevar, who’s been organizing the annual Flushies banquet. Kyle Hendrickson, who for years organized full-weekend “Loserfest” field trips. Randy Lee, who revived the dormant Style Invitational Devotees page on Facebook, which now is up to 868 members who yuk it up 24 hours a day (I know because I monitor it 24 hours a day). And those who’ve opened their homes to Loser events — including Steve Dudzik, Sarah Gaymon, Dion Black, Maja Keech and, this coming Jan. 10, Post-Holiday Party host Craig Dykstra. And the many of you who’ve provided entertainment at the Flushies and parties — writing up song parodies just for the occasion: Mae Scanlan, Nan Reiner, Mark Raffman, Pie Snelson, Dave Zarrow, Greg Arnold and whomever else I’ve stupidly forgotten.


— To the numerous Losers who’ve volunteered their technical expertise to make the contests work: Elden for his now-indispensable Master Contest List. Kyle Hendrickson, Steve Langer, Gary Crockett, Jeff Contompasis, Craig Dykstra and I’m sure more, who’ve helped me out over the years when I needed, say, to figure out if a given entry contained any words that were not in the U.S. Constitution. And most recently Steven Papier, who spent three hours this past weekend at my home — plied only with pie and cookies — to figure out how I could continue to combine all the week’s entries onto a single text file without calling up each of the hundreds of e-mails, after the method recommended by Microsoft failed to work (it would include people’s e-mail addresses but would reject — rather snottily, if you ask me — the content of many of the entries themselves).

— To The Czar of The Style Invitational, the Founder of Our Feast, and his earthly incarnation, Gene Weingarten, who, collaborating closely and almost incestuously, charmed/bullied Washington Post management into giving space in Our Distinguished Newspaper to a weekly contest celebrating the humor of excretory functions; shaped it for almost 11 years; and continues to contribute to the Invite by writing sample verses for poetry contests (next week’s is already done), as well as letting me bounce my short-list of entries off him almost every week.

— To Bob Staake, who in 1994 was an up-and-coming illustrator based in St. Louis and delighted to score a gig that sent him a check every single week, but who is now The Really Big Deal, with the New Yorker covers,and the dozens of successful children’s books, and the Intel commercial that aired during the Super Bowl. But out of a sense of tradition — and a chance to bicker with me every seven days — Bob continues to work up a cartoon (or five!) every week, squeezing it in between book tour stops, supervising the gardening staff at his Cape Cod waterfront estate, etc.


— And, of course most significantly, to the contestants, who jump through whatever verbal hoops I hold up in front of them week after week, in exchange for seeing perhaps 95 percent of their work go unacknowledged, and the rest “rewarded” with junk (some of which they bought themselves and donated to the cause). I am truly in awe of their talent, wit and just plain wackiness. In my totally objective view, the Invite puts out the cleverest stuff in journalism, week after week. (Okay, the Onion isn’t bad either.)

So until they tell us to stop — and nobody’s said anything to me like that — bring it on.

DID YOU GET YOUR INVITATION TO THE LOSER PARTY?
It was e-mailed Monday afternoon Eastern time, to everyone on the Invite mailing list. Anyway, you’re invited simply by virtue of reading this column. Here it is minus Craig’s nifty artwork:
DO YOUR REVEL BEST: PARTY WITH THE STYLE INVITATIONAL LOSERS


Yes, you are so gosh darn fun to be with that you’re invited to the
Style Invitational Losers’ Post-Holiday Party
Saturday, Jan. 10, 7 to 10 p.m.
At the home of Craig and Valerie Dykstra
Centreville, Va.
It’s a potluck -- Craig and Valerie will put out some food and drink, and we bring the rest.
Spouses and other handlers are welcome -- and there will be movies for kids.
Dress: Loserly (i.e., anything but un-)
RSVP to the Empress of The Style Invitational, pat.myers@washpost.com, and she’ll provide the address and further information.
Need a ride or want to carpool? Let the Empress know and she’ll see what the Loser Community can do.
With malice toward none,
With parody for all.

We have about 30 RSVPs so far, including some people from out of town. You don’t have to send regrets unless you live in the area and you’re someone who usually comes to Loser functions.

The ABCs, er, EFGs of Week 1104
So we’ll wrap up the year with Week 1104, a contest in classic Style Invitational form: to compare or contrast two entirely unrelated items — in this case two entities that happen to be abbreviated with the same three letters. Elden suggested this contest the first time around, for Week 1071, and I wasn’t surprised it was a success. Here are the results, for inspiration. (Scroll past the Week 1075 contest.)

Intentional groaning*: The story puns of Week 1100
*Un-inking title entry from Jeff Contompasis

Owwwwwwwwwwww. No, they were fun, for the most part — all the inking entries were, for sure. I think readers are going to love them.


While judging them — I didn’t count the entries but I estimate a pool of about 1,000 — I found myself first reading the pun at the end of the story, to see if it would be worth having a long paragraph to set it up. Some entries I couldn’t even figure out — it took the Devotees to figure out for me “toupees in iPad” was supposed to be a pun on “two peas in a pod,” though I did manage to guess that “Own leader. G’day, Young” was “only the good die young.” I was going to give ink to Larry Gray’s “Juan spit in Dwight’s chai,” but none of several people I showed it to got that it was “once bitten, twice shy,” even though in my book it’s a perfectly valid pun, clearly approximating the sound of the original, once you figure it out.

I also steered clear of entries in which the punchlines depended on obviously contrived names: “In the early 1900’s, a hurricane devastated the city of Approval,” began one that would end in something about sea lions and “seal of Approval”; or “Farmer Odd had a set of bees” ... “May the Odd’s bees hover on your flavor”; or one starting “John Huck and Tom Finn” and something about burying.

It’s the 22nd win for Ultra-Loser Kevin Dopart of the 1,100-and-some Inks, but his first in a whole year. I’ll present his Inkin’ Memorial at the Loser Party. Chris Doyle — who’s famed for his trademark limericks that end in puns like these — not surprisingly inked up the place this week, with four feghoots. This week’s outlier in the Losers’ Circle is Marc Shapiro — it’s just his second blot of ink. And I’ll also be bringing a mug or bag to the Loser party for Nan Reiner, whose hilariously over-the-top fourth-place pun is topped over even farther by the long Web-only honorable mention ending in “a park ridge in a bare tree.”

Maybe at the party we should take turns reading some of the feghoots out loud — and have everyone join in on the punch line.

Merry Christmas to all — we’ll have another Wednesday Invite next week, on New Year’s Eve. Send me your party RSVPs!