Style Conversational Week 1122: Lining up 3,700 horses in the starting gate
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The Style Invitational Empress gives a turn-by-turn look back at this year’s foal name contest

Loser Jonathan Hardis saved the Empress many hours and a lot of sanity with his program that sorted and cleaned up the 3,700-entry list of horse names. Here are two random snippets. (The Washington Post)
By Pat MyersApril 30, 2015
Happy Derby Weekend to all, including you 58 presumably happy Losers and 312 presumably less happy ones.

Judging The Style Invitational’s horse name contests is always a time-consuming, labor-intensive task; it’s always going to be when one person is pondering almost 4,000 crosses of two horse names and deciding whether each is funnier and cleverer than the others.

But it’s one I always look forward to — I’ve judged this contest more than 20 times, if you count the “grandfoals” spinoffs — because the entries are just so dang good. And this year, the process became far less of a slog with the offer of help from Jonathan Hardis. Jonathan happens to be a PhD physicist with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an expert in optical metrology who has been known to write up such juicy fare as “Enhancement of lanthanide evaporation by complexation: Dysprosium tri-iodide mixed with indium iodide and thulium tri-iodide mixed with thallium iodide.” But far more significantly, Jonathan is also a 42-time Loser who evidently likes to write computer programs (and loves the horse names).


While working through the list pictured above at right — a combination of all 370 e-mails I’d gotten for the week, and then removed all identifying data from the entrants (a task I’ve been doing each week, though the pool is usually about half the size) — I posted to the Style Invational Devotees page on Facebook a screen shot of a snippet of the list in which the entrant had used some formatting that had caused the elements of the horse name to scatter about the page, plus one in which an embedded link had turned into a garble of code.

The thread ended up with a 28-comment discussion about tab replacement and Excel possibilities, but the upshot was that Jonathan had a very cool idea, and he created a program on a Mac application called BBEdit that, after a fair amount of cleaning up on his part, gave me, the same evening, what you can see (if not read) in the left photo: all the entries sorted alphabetically, from 001 x 002 (Acceptance x Action Hero) to 099 x 100 (Your Thoughts x Zip N Bayou). He made it work even though some people started their entries with numbers; they’d numbered their lists. And they were all perfectly spaced, and in the same Horse x Horse B = Horse C format, no matter what had been submitted.

But this part was the real time-saver: In the past, I searched through my whole master list of entries, one horse name at a time, copying out the entries I liked onto a shortlist. Each horse name, of course, was a part of many different entries, sometimes well over 100. So I’d just hit Find, Find, Find ... until I found all the entries for Horse 1. Then for Horse 2 — etc., etc., literally a hundred times over. The thing was: With this method, I ended up looking at all the entries twice — because the names also came up when I was looking for the matching horse: The entries featuring Horse 92, for example, had already come up when I did the previous 91 searches. I tried marking the entries I’d already looked at, but that took even more time than looking again.


But under Jonathan’s alphabetizing, when I got up to Horse 92, I simply skipped over the list of “092 x 001; 092 x 002,” etc., and looked only at the few remaning Horse 92 entries I hadn’t read yet. I saved hours and hours and hours of judging time.

Another thing: As I read through the lists , it was easy to mark the entries I especially liked with the letter A in front of the number at the beginning of the line. And ones I super-duper liked, I put “AA.” Then, at the end, I sorted the list alphabetically (it was in Microsoft Word) and my short­list immediately appeared on top — topped by the AA group of about 25 entries. The A-group was more than 300. Then I made my final list: All the AAs (with the four winners chosen from them) plus as many A’s as I could fit on the print page, once I finally looked up the authors of the inking entries: 63 entries, 58 people (including multiple inks for remarkably few people, and double credits for really remarkably few people).

If you’re of the techie persuasion and would like to discuss details of the program with Jonathan, e-mail me and I’ll forward your note. I say this with a sense of shame rather than pride, believe me, but I still use words like “magic” when it comes to computers.


And I shouted out “YESSSS!” in the middle of the newsroom on Tuesday when, near the very end of my Loser-name-looking-up task, I discovered that the 63rd inking entry of 65 was by (Jonathan Hardis, Gaithersburg).

Arbitrary, somewhat. Subjective, very. Random, no.
So why did some entries get ink and other clever entries not get ink?

Sometimes, the same entry was sent by too many people. Ocho Ocho Ocho x Pain and Misery = Oucho Oucho Oucho. Great entry, but I’m not going to credit six Losers. Other excellent entries too frequently submitted: Carpe Diem x Far Right = Seize the Gay; Help From Heaven x Action Hero = Manna War; Acceptance x Itsaknockout = OKO. Just a slew of similar entries using In the Pocket that produced Happy to See Me, That’s No Banana, etc, that all canceled one another out. (Sometimes, though, I gave ink to an name that came from a better cross of parents than the others did.) Sometimes an entry would overshadow similar ones with one winning detail: There were several “Kneel Armstrong,” but only Matt Monitto turned it into a sentence with the comma making it “Kneel, Armstrong.” (If you indeed sent in an entry identical to one that inked and you weren’t credited, contact me ASAP.)

But in large part, my choices rested on what I, at that moment, reacted to with a laugh or “hah, cute!” Judging horse names is much less objective than judging song parodies (our previous contest); for that, you can point to a line that doesn’t scan, or strained syntax, or a blah ending after a strong beginning, or a trite or screedy sentiment. It’s just that hundreds of entrants now get the horse names — they understand what we’re looking for. But I’m going to mail out only so many magnets — and I can tell you from experience that reading twice as many entries isn’t necessarily twice as fun. But yes, I did read every one, often while awake.

Win, Place, Show, Other Show
This week’s Inkin’ Memorial winner wasn’t just funny and creative, with a different approach from the usual puns and transformations that characterize most of this week’s entries. But it also managed to use the name Mujtaahib, one I’d included only because he had a good chance to do well in the Derby. And it was also the favorite of Bob Staake, who used it for this week’s cartoon.


Keeper of the Stats Elden Carnahan has a page on the Loser website, NRARS.org, headed “Most Cantinkerous.” It’s a list of the 100 people who have the most Invite ink but have never won first place. Elden himself held the top (?) honor for a while (before going on to win 20 times), as have such future notables as Tom Witte (26 wins) and Jeff Contompasis (7). But for the past two years and change, topping the list — with 106 inkblots without a win — was Brad Alexander, an Amerian expat living in Wanneroo, Western Australia. I met Brad and his wife, Shani, a couple of years ago when they were visiting relatives in the States, and he told me that he made it a point to enter the Invite every week, even if were just a single entry or an idea for an honorable-mentions subhead. I’ll be sending Brad an Inkin’ Memorial, and he’ll have to hand the Cantinkerous crown back to former laureate Kyle Hendrickson, who has 83 inks and used to be the Cant himself. We’ll give the special Cantinkerous plaque back to Kyle at the Flushies banquet on May 30 (see YOUR invitation right here), when he’ll be serving as MC.

None of the others in this year’s Losers’ Circle qualify for the Cantinkerous list; Doug Frank has two wins, Jeff Shirley has one, and Ben Aronin has five. Doug’s entry, Apollo Eleven x No Problem = No Movie, is a strong example of the “transformational” style, in which the result is a changed version of one of the elements; and it manages to get in a dig at Hollywood to boot. Ben’s Neil Strongarm is an ingenious (and unduplicated) combination of Apollo Eleven and Gangster. And Jeff Shirley, who actually understands fluent dentist, being a retired one, scores with the coffee-spitter Let My Pimple Go.”

Both Courtney Rukan and Doug Norwood, both aces of The Post’s copy desk, are back this week to weigh in with their faves. What Doug Dug: Doug “loved all the American Pharoah and Apollo 11 entries. And the winner, of course.” Laugh Out of Courtney, who’s just back from vacation: “All four of the winners are fantastic and each got funnier from fourth to the winner. Love Let My Pimple Go and Chat With Dentist.” Courtney, whom I’m loving more and more each week, the way the woman agrees with me, did say that one honorable mention “might be my favorite of the bunch”: Medieval Knievel, sent by both Lawrence McGuire and Malcolm Fleschner. She also thought Mae Scanlan’s “Connery Row” was “brilliant.”


Meanwhile, the Beyond Nerdiness entry of the week goes to this one, which I quote verbatim, complete with accompanying note: “Easy to Say x Data Driven = 45617379746F536179 (This is ascii hex code for ‘EasytoSay’ just in case you are not fluent in ascii codes. I would have done binary but that would have exceeded the 18 character limit. I could have compressed that with gzip but then might have lost about half the audience reducing the impact of the joke).” My favorite thing is how the person assumed that most readers would get that entry just fine, as long as he didn’t do it in binary and compress it with gzip, which would cause a 50 percent audience reduction.

Foaling down: The next generation
The grandfoal contest is a whole lot like the foal contest, but a little harder: First and less significantly, you have 65 horses rather than 100 to work with. More of a challenge is that most of the names are already puns: Your grandfoal might pun on the words or names in the foals name, or the names that they’re punning on. Times two, for the two child brides. The way out of it is not to try to incorporate all of these elements, but also not ignore the most conspicuous ones — an arguable standard, as you’ll see. Here are some winners from past grandfoal contests:

Criminal in Tent x Lookn Mighty Fat = Osama Been Lardin’ (double winners Jennifer Rubio and Lois Douthitt, Week 814): The first element works both ways as “Intent” and “in tent” with bin Laden, and the second element wasn’t a pun; it was a transformational entry for Lookn Mighty Fast x Sumo. So that worked super-well: It was easy to read, and of course fun to mock Osama bin Laden.


Myth Congeniality x Paul Bunion = Sandra Bull Ox (Kathy Al-Assal, winner of Week 969). Here, Kathy’s playing on both source names, rather than the pun names. Nothing about bunions or myths (well, the ox is also a myth). But it’s very clear and clever, playing on Sandra Bullock’s name and movie, and obviously it worked for me.

&*^$ Mammogram x Clans Casino = Squish and Chips (Danielle Nowlin, winner of Week 1070). The first element isn’t a pun, so Danielle could work freely with that; then she ignored “clans” and really only tenuously alluded to its source, “clams casino”; okay, it’s a seafood dish like fish and chips. But just “chips” and “mammogram” were enough to make the funny pun.

See what you can come up with. All I know is that Jonathan is going to run my list again. Note; Please do not break a single entry into two lines! This really messes up the software. Thankew.

So sip your mint julep this Saturday and root for one of “our” horses — FOURTEEN of the 20 horses made our 100-horse list, out of the 429 I chose that 100 from. And 11 of them got ink today. And on Friday, you can root for Condo Commando and/or Puca in the Kentucky Oaks race for fillies.

Get Flushing! RSVP for the Flushies, May 30
You should have gotten an e-mail invitation. Here it is online. It’s a potluck with just a $5 fee to defray costs for paper goods, door prizes, plunger rental, etc. Please RSVP to Elden; Danielle Nowlin can fit just 60 of us into her house, even if we sit on her kids.