Style Conversational Week 1132: Avocado’s Number — a parody by 4 Losers The guacamole-with-pea ‘controversy’ breeds a quickie collaborative classic By Pat Myers Pat Myers Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003 Email // Bio // Follow // July 9, 2015 It’s an era of celebrity chefs and a food-fad culture in which restaurants try to outdo one another in weird culinary combinations, topping hamburgers with pumpkin-apple chutney or spreading beet puree on a steak. But a week ago, some of the bigger mouths on social media decided that novel food preparations should absolutely /not/ extend to adding peas to guacamole. Perhaps it was the tone of the tweet that the New York Times posted July 1 with a link to its recipe: “Add green peas to your guacamole. Trust us.” Maybe people just resent being ordered around by some snotty Manhattanite. Or perhaps the tweeters were once again engaging in that sheepy junior high behavior of piling on because the Cool Kids have proclaimed some hapless target Something To Hate, like Nickelback or the word “moist.” Or maybe people really, really /are/ wedded to a classic guacamole recipe and felt a need to protest any alteration to it without even trying the result. Whatever, the Twitterverse swiftly declared the recipe an utter outrage — joined in by @POTUS himself. In fact, in an astonishing show of bipartisanship, he was seconded by both @JebBush and even @TexasGOP . Of course, such an important issue could not remain unaddressed by Loserdom. Marcus Bales, an extremely prolific and clever poet who posts a new poem every day on Facebook — and who just recently got his FirStink from the Invite — posted this poem to the 950-member Style Invitational Devotees group on Facebook the next day: *My Mother Said* /I’d like to cut this in a frieze and make it holy: the world is wide, and you should seize the high and lowly equally, and be at ease not being solely offended by what chalk or cheese seems trolled or trolly. Always try what’s offered, please — perhaps, though, slowly — even if they’ve put green peas in guacamole./ Marcus’s poem, which eloquently refused to jump onto the hate-it bandwagon, drew numerous “likes” from his fellow Devotees, along with the usual string of supportive wisecracks that usually follow a creative post on the page. But then the bar was raised. The same day, Barbara Sarshik — one of The Style Invitational’s ace song parodists — posted in the comments thread an anti-guac-pea verse set to the tune of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” ): /The President and I agree. We hate the brand new recipe For adding green peas into guacamole. So let us rise up with Barack Against this outrage to our guac. We’ll protest from Pomona to Paoli! Guacamole, guacamole. Guacamole, guacamole./ Then Barbara graciously added a line that must have been music to many a Loser’s ears: “Anyone can feel free to add more verses.” That evening, the amazing Nan Reiner offered up a pro-pea Verse 2 in response: /Nay, I must stand with Ms. Michelle;/ /Nutrition-wise, we won’t do well/ /To snack on chips and avocado solely./ /To get your kids to eat their greens,/ /Each mother knows just what that means:/ /You have to camouflage the flavors wholly./ /Don’t get slowly roly-poly!/ /Calorie-lowly guacamole./ By the next morning, Mark Raffman — yet another parody winner and a collaborator with Nan on parodies for the Losers’ holiday parties and Flushies awards — had dipped his Tostito into the mix: /In Mexico, they all agree,/ /In guac, put not one single pea;/ /They’d rather get a bad case of E. coli./ /They’re furious, the hate’s intense,/ /They talk of putting up a fence,/ /To keep away the recipe unholy!/ /Guacamole, guacamole,/ /They’d control the guacamole. / Not to be outdone, Marcus Bales — the prolific poet who’d started the thread with his non-parody verse — joined the song with his objection to the traditional recipe: /Cilantro’s really awful, though — Those Mexicans, what do they know? I ask sincerely, not just merely drolly. If they can make it taste like soap, They can’t object to sweet peas — nope, Don’t put cilantro in the guacamole!/ /Guacamole, guacamole.../ Then the irrepressible Nan came back with another stanza — and in classic Invite fashion, it played off the political headlines: /And then along came Donald Trump (His toupee blowing in a clump) And said, “Beware of cooking Mexico-ly. There’s drugs and rape among that food! (Of course, some Mexican is good.) I’ll stick to ham and cheese with some aioli, Sipping slowly on some Stoli. Keep your lowly guacamole.”/ Marcus supplied the last word on this fabulous impromptu compilation: /It seems as if it’s always best To use the democratic test To make the guacamole aproposly. The anti-pea and -cilantro crowd Are both unmovable and loud, So careful what you put in guacamole. Guacamole, guacamole. Guacamole, guacamole./ (Marcus eventually posted an all-Marcus full-length version about the whole kerfuffle. You can see it on his Facebook page .) For what it’s worth, I bet the peas are fine. On my regular lunch rotation is a “skinny guacamole” that I make by chopping up a zucchini, microwaving it till it’s soft (five or six minutes), then mashing it up with an avocado plus the usual lime juice, garlic, onion and hot sauce. It takes about 10 minutes in all to make. It has something like 75 percent fewer calories than the classic mix (and that’s not even counting sour cream) and is so tasty that I’ll eat a bowl of it with a spoon. Soldier: A bill of goods — the Week 1132 contest We’ve done so many fictoid contests by now that there’s even a page of them on Elden Carnahan’s Loser site nrars.org . (That page contains links to the /announcement/ of each contest; to read the results, go to Elden’s Master Contest List and search on the week number of the contest you’re looking for; in the /right/ column, the week number is a link to the week with the results. Now that Elden is newly retired from A Government Agency We Cannot Mention, perhaps he’ll add the results links to the Fictoid and other theme pages, so you don’t have to go back and forth.) Anyway, as always, the point is to spoof the trivia genre by making up something that sounds sort of like a factoid, but is (a) not true and (b) making a joke. Just (a) is not enough, people. The “military” theme is deliberately wide-ranging. It can be about wars, about military life, people, sites — I can’t see myself saying “But this isn’t the contest” unless there’s no connection at all. Our little dronies*: The results of Week 1128 /*A non-inking entry from Jeff Contompasis./ Among the many genres of humor we call for in the Invite, most involve wordplay of some sort. But some are what I lump together as “jokes” — essentially standup comedy writing. That’s where I’d classify Week 1128, our contest for novel uses for one or a swarm of CICADAs, the new pocket-size(ish), low-cost stealth drones developed by the Navy. Contests calling for both creativity and writing tend to generate fewer entries than contests in which you work from a list and combine elements, move some letters around, etc., and sure enough, Week 1128 had perhaps our smallest entry pools this year, though some Losers gushed forth with full lists of suggestions for mischief with the little whirlies. For the second week in a row, this week’s Inkin’ Memorial winner was a runner-up as well (funny how this hardly ever happened back when the Czar and Empress had the entrants’ names in front of them when they were judging). Last week it was Mark Raffman with the TV spinoffs; this time it’s Lawrence McGuire, for his sixth win and 188th (and 189th) ink. Lawrence lives in the next town over from me here in Northern Southern Maryland, and I’ll be going to Waldorf anyway this Saturday, so Lawrence just might see some odd little creature placing a little box on his doorstep. Danielle Nowlin has shown her flair for comedy, as well as life-in-suburbia humor, many times in the Invite during her couple of years with us, and did it to miniature-sushi -winning effect this week, earning her Inks 166 and 167. Meanwhile, Danielle — the mom of an infant and two kidlets — shared this this morning on Facebook: “Note to self: Jokingly referring to the playpen as a ‘baby cage’ while you are setting it up will cause your older children to yell ‘ARE WE PUTTING THE BABY IN HIS CAGE WHEN WE GET HOME?’ while you are in public. #truestory” Note where fourth-place winner Mark Asquino is from! But he’s not just writing from Equatorial Guinea, a peanut of a nation nestled in that corner just below where West Africa juts out. Mark is the U.S. /ambassador / to E.G., which happens to be, per capita, the richest country in Africa, because it has oil. (Its citizens, alas, don’t tend to see the riches.) This is Mark’s 11th ink and his second “above the fold” since he started entering the Invite (now and then) since Week 900. *Laugh Out of Courtney:* Copy chief Courtney Rukan says she found Lawrence McGuire’s winner “hilarious” and added that Judy Blanchard’s “pithy brevity is lovely” in her two inking entries. Courtney also pegged Kevin Dopart’s Seder trick; Mark Raffman’s housefly substitute; Doug Frank’s Santa monitor; Warren Tanabe’s “HICKADA” on little cinder blocks; and the two last entries, Todd DeLap’s jab at the ’Skins and Ken Gallant’s smart idea about what everyone else would (and did) send in.