Style Conversational Week 1121: The author’s storied history with the Invite
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The Empress of The Style Invitational discusses this week’s contest and results

“Book of Bad Days” author Michael Farquhar -- onetime Style Invitational Flunky and now some graybeard — at dinner with the Empress and Royal Consort last November. (Pat Myers)
By Pat MyersApril 23, 2015
This week’s contest is your chance to outdo the Empress — something I’m sure you’ll accomplish easily.

Just over a year ago, my long-ago colleague Michael Farquhar got hold of me. Mike, who’d grown up (-ish) to become a successful author with a series of popular-history books beginning with “A Treasury of Royal Scandals” in 2001, had another project for Book No. 7 — one that needed 365 headlines.

So over the next several months last year, Mike would send me a month’s worth of fascinating historical vignettes, and I’d send back to him and his editor at National Geographic’s book division a heading for each one. Like these:

Feb. 1, 2004: Keeping a Breast in the News: “On a day that saw two suicide bombings in previously calm Kurdistan, hundreds of pilgrims crushed to death in the Muslim holy site of Mecca, and continuing genocide in Darfur, media attention ... was focused on something else entirely: the brief exposure of Janet Jackson’s nipple ...”


Feb. 2, 1685: Doctored to Death: After Britain’s Charles II woke up pale and unable to speak, the royal physicians began a five-day ordeal of “treatments” ranging from “spirits of the human skull” to burning his skin with hot irons to “draw out the bad humors from his brain” to the usual bleeding, till the poor monarch finally expired.
And in a headline that I hoped readers would get — we went ahead with it after I tested it on the Style Invitational Devotees Facebook group last summer:

Feb. 3, 1959: Bad News on the Doorstep: A small plane crashed into an Iowa cornfield, killing rock ’n’ roll stars Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “the Big Bopper” Richardson. The obvious heading, of course, would have been “The Day the Music Died,” but as I point out ad nauseam, making the reader think for just a moment longer results in a much bigger payoff — as long as the reader gets it.

So this week’s contest is for more items like these. Of course, I’m not expecting you to go out and buy “Bad Days in History” (although it’s a really fascinating read, with many events that will be new to even you), so it doesn’t matter whether the book already features the same event you’re using (as long as it doesn’t happen to have the identical heading, a small but unavoidable risk). And as I mentioned in the instructions, you don’t have to know the exact day and date of some ancient history — it can be a longer-term event, like a war. But do write a concise description of the event, so that the point of the headline will be clear — anywhere from just a few words (“The Japanese invade Pearl Harbor”) to a short paragraph like those above. It does have to be an actual historical event, not something you make up.


Remember that this is a humor contest, and Mike’s book, while written in a breezy tone, isn’t really a humor book. So I’m hoping that the Invite entries will be more funny-clever than poignant-clever.

Even if you don’t win second place — for example, if you end up with the Inkin’ Memorial instead — you can still get Mike to sign a book for you: He’ll be appearing at Politics & Prose bookstore, in upper Northwest Washington, on Sunday, May 17, at 5 p.m. I’ll be there, too, to say, “I knew him when he was the Style Invitational Flunky.”

Indeed, all this book-plugging is something of a restitution to Mike, who was the Invite’s aide — prize mailer, prize buyer, fax gatherer, etc. — when the contest debuted in 1993 and for a couple of years afterward. (There is no Flunky now; the Empress must self-flunk.). Mike went on to write for Horizon, The Post’s unfortunately defunct weekly section about history and science, until he started writing books full time.


When he worked in the Style section in the 1990s doing mostly scut work, Mike also had the chance to write several historical-vignette pieces for the Sunday section, which was run by one Gene Weingarten. “A Look at History’s Least Compatible Couples,” “Pop Was a Weasel” (bad dads through history), etc., are what caught the eye of book publishers — and the rest, so to speak, was history. But under Gene’s editorship, that mean ol’ Czar of The Style Invitational gave Mike some clips like this:

Week 240, October 1997: “This Week’s contest was proposed by Michael Farquhar, who worked for years as the Style Invitational flunky before he received a promotion. Now he is the Horizon section flunky. Why, in a few years, if Michael keeps his nose to the grindstone, he might rise to be chief executive Washington Post urinal attendant! Michael proposes that you come up with elegant insults ...”

Week 273, June 1998: “This Week’s Contest was proposed by Michael Farquhar of Washington, who wins a handsomely embossed promise that we will no longer humiliate him in print every time he proposes a contest. Michael is a fine lad, a man of irreproachable moral character, a highly competent professional who, with just a few career “breaks” along the way, might have made something of himself instead of becoming a simpering lickspittle. Also — and we mean no disrespect here — Michael has absolutely no behind. It is as though God simply forgot, for a moment, at the birth of Michael Farquhar, that humans must sit, wear pants, and in his case, display the occasional “Kick Me” sign. Anyway, Michael suggests that you provide examples for any of the four above categories. ...”


For the record: I have no recollection of the size or shape of Mr. F’s posterior, then or now, though I do think he was awfully cute back then, and still is, although the gray beard could go. He can’t fool me by trying to look grown up. (The photo above doesn’t show that he was wearing sneakers to the restaurant.)

Clown Criers*: The news parodies of Week 1117
*Tom Witte’s non-inking headline

A mere four weeks after another parody contest (for birthdays and other personal occasions) I was deluged — as I knew I’d be — with dozens of excellent song parodies about topics and people in the news. Of course, far fewer people enter a contest that requires so much skill and effort — there were fewer than 100 entrants, as opposed to close to 400 for the next week’s horse name contest — but still, so many clever lyrics have been robbed of ink, because you just can’t expect a reader to take in dozens of songs at once, especially while singing or listening along with the melodies.


I’ve evolved over the years, I’ve realized, in how I run parodies; in earlier years, I would sometimes run only perhaps four good lines of a parody, so I could spread the ink around. But I’m more likely these days to run songs at length, and only rarely cut a song off before the end of at least a full verse. People who sent just a few lines with a good idea, but didn’t finish a verse, didn’t get ink.

All four of this week’s “above -the-fold” Loserbards — Stephen Gold, Nan Reiner, Barbara Sarshik and Mark Raffman — have gotten lots of parody ink over the years; Nan, this week’s first runner-up, won the contest four weeks ago. By the way, the links for Nan’s parodies are to Nan singing them herself — you’ll see why she’s become the perennial entertainment at recent Flushies and Loser Holiday Parties.

I will feature some “noinks” in the coming days on the Style Invitational Devotees page.


ARE YOU GETTING THE E-MAIL?
Well, obviously you found this column, and many of you reached it through the link your received in your weekly e-mail “newsletter” sent by The Post, with links to the Invite and Conversational. But some crazy thing seems to have happened: Hundreds of names among the more than 6,000 “Losers, aspiring Losers and hangers-on” fell off the mailing list. Fortunately, some people wrote to tell me that they hadn’t gotten their Thursday afternoon notification.
If you’re in this boat, this seems to be the easiest way to fix it: If you’re not getting the e-mail, use this link — https://subscribe.washingtonpost.com/newsletters/#/newsletters — to go to The Post’s newsletter sign-up page, and sign up (even if you’ve done it before) for The Style Invitational. The only information you need to enter is the e-mail address where you’d like to get the notification.


For one thing, you don’t want to miss your personal invitation to the Flushies — the Losers’ annual awards lunch — to be held this year at Chez Danielle Nowlin, in Fairfax Station, Va., on Saturday, May 30. It’ll be a potluck, and the organizers just ask $5 a person to pay for the sundry Stuff They Have to Get. There will be a 60-person limit so that people’s elbows don’t end up too often in other people’s baked beans. I should be sending out the e-mail through the usual newsletter method in the next few days, perhaps as early as tomorrow.

Until then ....