Style Conversational Week 1109: A matter of laugh and death; The Style Invitational Empress discusses the new contest and results Washington Post Blogs January 29, 2015 Thursday 8:02 PM EST Copyright 2015 The Washington Post All Rights Reserved Length: 1402 words Byline: Pat Myers Body (That's Tom Witte's headline, which didn't get ink because it didn't fit on the page) Well, after I die, I am definitely going to call up some Losers and ask for a poem. (Someone will write something about my "in-tiara-ment" but I will reject it.) The obit poems in Week 1105, as always, were clever and fun, managing in a number of creative ways not to be too tasteless or mean in making fun of the recently out-of-here. And this year might have the best assortment ever of subjects: fascinating animals (a little easier to joke about than people) plus, as maybe a dozen people decided to use, various people who were on a list of Darwin Award nominees. I ended up fitting 20 entries into the print version of the Invite, nestled cozily in the higher-numbered pages of The Post's Arts & Style section, and a rather profligate 29 into the online version. There were at least that many on my "short"-list that got robbed. There were also, as always, hundreds and hundreds of really awful poems -the kind that you (or at least I) tend to wince at when a relative reads one at a wedding. They tend to rhyme, or sort of rhyme, but don't have any consistent meter, and often painfully twisted syntax to effect said rhyme/sort-of-rhyme. One almost always lethal phrase, when it comes to ink, is "he did [verb]" rather than "he [verbed]" -especially if it kills the rhythm ("Many careers he did mold"). A notable exception this week: Diane Wah used this very construction in her sonnet about "radium girl" Mae Keane -"Mae's brush with fate did point her way to heaven" -but I thought it worked because the whole tone of the poem was self-consciously and humorously "poetic," and so a little twisted syntax adds gently to the joke. Diane's sonnet was an exception in another way: While I regularly give ink to two entries on the same subject, as I did for the poems about Marion Barry, I normally do that only if the two entries make different points, or use diffferent styles of humor. But in this case, I had two fairly lengthy (in Invite terms) rhyming poems that told the same story. And they both told them really, really well. I finally decided to put the shorter of them at the very top -it turned out to be by Chris Doyle -and the other, the 14-liner, near the bottom -because how could I deny it ink? So the radium-unpoisoned Mae Keane gets two glowing tributes. All four of the Losers "above the fold" this week, and many of the honorable-mention Losers as well, have gotten lots of ink in earlier Invite poetry contests: From my scanning of the Losers' own Master Contest List, I see that Chris Doyle has won the top prize in at least fourteen Invite poetry or song contests since Week 503 in 2003. Melissa Balmain and Frank Osen, both well-known published poets, have sharpened the Invite's funny-poetry new contest and results chops even more since they started entering within a few weeks of each other in 2011. And Beverley Sharp steps merrily onto the steps leading up to the Hall of Fame threshold -watch the ice! -as she nears her 500th blot of ink, a lot of it in rhyme. The favorite this week of Copy Editor Extraordinaire Doug Norwood was Rob Cohen's OMG tribute to Eric Hill, the "Where's Spot?" author. Doug's daughter and my son are about the same age, and both of us fondly remember reading this book to our respective offspring approximately 362,000 times. Last night I had the fun of watching perhaps a dozen clips on YouTube of babies being read to or reading "Where's Spot?" -had my kids been born in the digital-video era, they surely would have been among them -and I linked to one of them in the heading of the poem, with a child who clearly has been through this book many, many times. I also found one with Eric Hill himself reading the book, with the aid of a stuffed Spot. It's very entertaining in his plummy English voice, and he's very animated as he elaborates on the drawings as he lifts the flaps, but I'm partial to seeing and hearing the delighted kids themselves. As veteran contest-suggesters know, I'm much more optimistic that a new contest will work if I see some great examples to go with it. Mark Raffman suggested this one to me just this week. I'd have thought that Bob Staake would have chosen the L'Enfant Terrible example to illustrate (I usually let him choose from the examples) but he went for the river. I acknowledge that there's an inherent danger running a local-angle contest in this global era -Jeff Bezos himself has explicitly said the The Post would focus more and more on national and international coverage and readership -but I think it will still be fun. It'll be the locals who read the Invite in the print edition, while I can might add some links to online entries that help explain the joke if necessary. (But it's not always: For example, I wouldn't expect out-of­towners to have heard of the Anacostia, but it's clear from the joke that (a) it's a river and (b) that it's associated with some bad thing, either pollution or bodies being dumped there, which is enough knowledge for the joke to be funny.) In the past week, two Losers -both funny people with significant quantities of ink -noted to me that this year's magnets for honorable mentions have proved problematic: One said that she decided she'd better take down her "Wit Hit the Fan" magnets from the refrigerator when guests came to visit, because of the language of the wordplay. The other asked me if I could henceforth not send the "Hardly Har-Har" magnet because his kids found the graphic violence of the clown drawing - especially the bloody saw - disturbing. Let me emphasize that neither of them complained to me, or argued that we should have used different slogans or art. (Incidentally, the pistol in the clown picture originally didn't have a "bang" flag; it was just a gun.) I'm mentioning this to say that if you also feel this way about either of the magnets, you're not alone -and that if you have a magnet preference (or don't want one at all), I'll be happy to accommodate you if you let me know before the Tuesday after you get the ink. To the tech-types who've been following my Saga of the Lack of Auto-Reply with a mix of amusement, pity and perhaps a bit of contempt: I know, I know. Anyway, everyone who sends entries to losers@washpost.com will now get a receipt for each e-mail, with varying degrees of immediacy. On Tuesday, Will of IT installed a program on my personal laptop with which, in case the auto-reply doesn't work on its own (which seems to be almost always the case right now), I can just click on an icon and it will create an e­mail with the whole text of the auto-reply directions. And the subject line will retain the week number you sent, so you'll know which entry it refers to. So if I'm at my laptop at home and I see your entry come in, I'll just hit that button. The other improvement that Will made was to fix my iPhone so that I can now get the losers@washpost.com e­mail as well as my pat.myers@washpost.com e-mail, all in the same feed with my personal-personal Gmail e-mail. So if I'm away from my laptop and I'm looking at my phone -and I know you already know all the info in the auto- new contest and results reply -I'll just reply to the e-mail with a "got it." If I think you need to see that information, however, I'll wait till I get home and then click on the manual "auto"-reply thing. One problem with this is that the auto-reply will sometimes work on its own, and so some people will end up with two receipts. This problem, however, will not keep me up at "night" (i.e., 3 to 8 a.m.). Meanwhile, we at The Post were told this week that starting at 10 a.m. tomorrow, we're going to a new, improved spam-filtering service, which we cannot access until then. My prediction -not that I have any reason to be pessimistic or anything -is that at the beginning, more of your entries than usual will end up in spam. Currently I have a list of 100 e-mail addresses that always bypass the spam filter, and I doubt that list will move over to the new system, so I'll have to reconstruct it. But as always, I systematically check the spam filter every Tuesday night, and send out an e-mail to the affected people to explain why they didn't get the auto-reply. So sorry, if you didn't get ink, it really was because I liked somebody else's stuff better.