Style Conversational Week 1113: It's our parody - try if you want to; Plus new lies about D.C. - and we have a date and place for the Flushies! Washington Post Blogs February 26, 2015 Thursday 7:51 PM EST Copyright 2015 The Washington Post All Rights Reserved Length: 1570 words Byline: Pat Myers Body Oh boy oh boy, I love song parody contests. I grew up on Mad Magazine in the 1960s , learning every word of Frank Jacobs's "MG" (sung to "Born Free"), "War" ("More") and one about a pampered poodle, set to "On the Street Where You Live" ("still he sits upon/ his own private john/ that I built for the dog that I love"). My predecessor, the Czar, though he also grew up on Mad, has never taken to song parodies. But within months after my Empress tiara was ceremonially implanted in my skull 11 years ago, I asked the Losers to offer advice to our nation's leaders in the form of a Christmas carol parody, and immediately realized that the Loser community could well out-Frank Jacobs Frank Jacobs. (The results.) Since then, we've had parody contests almost every year, with various themes and parameters: Sometimes you've had to work with a particular genre (holiday songs, Beatles songs, Stephen Foster songs, music that had no lyrics, "The Star-Spangled Banner" and no other choice); other times the music field was wide open but you had to write on a particular theme: campaign songs, songs about natural disasters, songs describing particular TV shows. This week's contest, Week 1113, is in the latter category; use any music you like. Feel free also to make a video featuring your song, and send me a file or preferably a YouTube link; sometimes I do a little editing to lyrics, though, so the final products might not be the same. My choice for ink, though, depends on the lyrics rather than the video. As always, because this is a column that gets read rather than heard, I'm looking for parodies that also work as well-crafted humorous poems; that means they have to really rhyme, not just have the assonance of the same vowels, a practice that works fine on pop recordings (current examples include reckless/breathless, feet/cheeks; mouth/out). That's true even if the song you're paroudying doesn't have "perfect rhyme." The structure of a parody-as-poem is also different from parody-as-performance: It works better when it ends with a sort of punchline, rather than a refrain that repeats earlier material; also, when we want people to read the lyrics of 10 or 14 or 25 songs (I tend to overshare because they're so good), there's just no room for verses that don't add to the wit. And, yeah, wit: However well crafted, the song still needs to make a funny or ironic point; it just can't be a translation of some other writing cleverly fitted into the form of some song. There's no limit on the length of a parody, but it has to be worth the length. Very often, the best parodies are no more than eight lines. On the other hand, just sending in a single couplet parodying two lines of a song is unlikely to get ink over more ambitious successes. date and place for the Flushies! Note that I specifically permitted collaborations for this contest, something I hope not to regret. Parodies are complex works that surely benefit from a bit of brainstorming, and I think we'll end up with even better material than usual with co-written songs. And so I don't mind spending a couple of lines crediting people; it's different from, say, a horse name, where multiple credits would be longer than the entries themselves. And this really isn't my department, but for Losers who care about their standings in the ink-gathering competition presided over by Keeper of the Stats Elden Carnahan, being part of a co-written entry gets each contributor a whole point of ink, in Elden's system. This seems kind of unjust to me -you know, Lennon and McCartney took double credit for every song, but they didn't make double the money -and so I don't plan to welcome double crediting except for the most labor-intensive contests, or perhaps for visual-art contests, in which one person comes up with the idea and the other makes a graphic out of it. This week's theme -it's pretty wide open. Creative "occasions" are welcome. And the song may be sung to a particular person. *Mark Raffman's allusion to a comment by D.C. Council candidate Christopher Barry, son of Marion. It seems that the Losers are ready for jobs as Capitol interns. I was a bit concerned for a while as I read through my master-list printout and swooshed off whole pages of fictoids at a time, but Week 1109 turned out to be one of those fairly frequent contests in which I ended up with a funny and even fairly long list of inkworthy entries. (I added a number of honorable mentions to the online Invite because they didn't fit on the print page.) The inking Losers not only are clever at spoofing the trivia genre, but they get the difference between satire and plain untruth: The former uses untruth -and writing that's is designed to make it clear, either subtly or in a comically over-the-top way that it's untruth -to make a joke or pointed comment about something that is essentially true. Or at least something that has the elements of a joke, not just an inaccuracy. It's the difference between The Onion ("Report: Only 40% Of Celebrities End Up Marrying Their Stalkers") and a hack clickbait factory like Empire News ("California Woman Shocked After Waking Up With A Drunk Channing Tatum In Her Bed"). But to tweeze out the gems of humor, I had to step over gobs of "Pierre L'Enfant's tomb is in L'Enfant Plaza" and "William Howard Taft was distantly related to Moe Howard of the Three Stooges." For the second straight week, the Inkin' Memorial -whose polyresin comes from the same Tennessee quarry as the actual Lincoln Memorial statue -goes to Rob Huffman of Fredericksburg, Va. As I noted to Rob last week, as he also marked his 100th blot of Invite ink along with his win, he's the 71st Loser to reach the 100-ink mark -and one of only six I haven't met in the flesh (and that includes numerous non-Washingtonians). So I'm really hoping that Rob comes up for either the March 22 Loser brunch or the May 30 Flushies (see below). The rest of the Losers' Circle is filled with other Invite veterans: Jeff Contompasis, with 435 blots of ink, is next in line to make the 500-ink Hall of Fame, and is already considering the Week 1112-style neologism contest based on his name. Frank Osen is "above the fold" so often that he just keeps a cot there. Fourth-place Thad Humphries, however, has seen fit to have a life; it's his 16th blot, dating way back to Week 263, when he sent his entry in by Pony Express. (He didn't get the auto-reply then, either.)The favorites this week of ace copy editor Doug Norwood: Chris Doyle's Brian Williams joke, Kristen Rahman's about President Ford refusing to go to the Lincoln Theatre, and Ivars Kuskevics's entry about the Capitol dome being named for Rotunda, the Goddess of Pork. Unprintables? Well, I sneaked in Art Grinath's factoid about the topiary at the base of the Washington Monument, but still thought it Too Soon for this one by Kevin Dopart: "Target sponsored the 1997 renovation of the Washington Monument; it was denied a similar role in the restoration of the JFK bust at the Kennedy Center." Huge blubbering thanks to 2014 Loser of the Year Danielle Nowlin and husband Ryan for offering to host the Losers' 20th Flushies awards, banquet and toilet paper toss at their house in suburban Fairfax County, Va. After several years of angsty arrangements with hotels, restaurants and caterers, the Flushies organizing team of Dave Prevar, Elden Carnahan and Pie Snelson will be able to disconnect their blood pressure cuffs once in a while. date and place for the Flushies! I'm thrilled to hear that both Beverley Sharp and Frank Osen plan to come in to Washington for the Flushies, from Montgomery, Ala., and Pasadena, Calif., respectively though surely not respectfully. Jeff Shirley also tells me that he'll be driving up from Richmond. Where the food will come from is still to be determined, but we now have time to work that stuff out. And you know we're going to have plenty of song parodies! We decided on the May 30 date -later than usual for the Flushies -because of some scheduling conflicts but also to give a chance for the out-of-towners to make it a Double Crazy Things From The Post Weekend: On Sunday, May 31, is the Post Hunt, the spectacularly nutty brain-teaser/scavenger-hunt/mass-gathering devised and run every year in downtown Washington by Gene Weingarten, Dave Barry and Tom Shroder, who created the original in Miami. Loser teams have been getting closer and closer to winning in past years. The Huntmasters haven't said too much about this year's event, but to give you an idea, here's the advance from 2014. Also with out-of-towners. At Paradiso on Franconia Road just outside the Beltway between the Van Dorn Street and Springfield exits. I'll be there doing my typical buffet overeating. This one is in conjunction with the Cherry Blossom Festival. Details under "Our Social Engorgements" at the Losers' website, NRARS.org; please RSVP to Elden Carnahan through that page. We had at least 20 people at our last Paradisofest, so it's important that we can give the place a head count. I got an e-mail from Mary Pershing, the daughter of 269-time Loser Mae Scanlan, who's been in and out of the hospital for several weeks. Mae was back in, Mary said, and was too weak to write -but she dictated some entries for Week 1111, and she was passing them on in time to make the contest deadline. There were 18 entries.