Style Conversational Week 1146: The Invite’s lode of magnets
Some of the first Loser Magnets shown with one of our best prizes ever:
a stained-glass magnet box crafted and donated by Loser Peyton Coyner in
2005. (Julia Ewan/The Washington Post)
By Pat Myers
Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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October 22, 2015
Back in the Czarist Era, The Style Invitational’s first 10-plus years —
which coincided with the Age of Newspapers With Big Circulations and Big
Budgets — the prizes were bigger, too. (Mostly.)
The Invitational debuted March 7, 1993, in a revamped Sunday Style
section under a new section editor, Gene Weingarten. That same Sunday,
Gene also instituted a weekly essay, “Noted With ...” — with a different
noun each time. That first week, “Noted With Disdain” was by Gene
himself, and was a rant against President Clinton’s Timex Ironman
Triathlon, “a plastic digital watch, thick as a brick and handsome as a
hernia.” (Here’s a link to it
from another paper that printed it and still has it online.) That piece
ran on Page F1. And on Page F2 was Week 1
of The Style Invitational, a contest to come up with a new name for the
Washington Redskins.
The grand prize? “An elegant Timex ‘Ironman Triathlon’ digital watch,
valued at $39.”
In Week 2, a contest for a new motto for Maryland, the prize was “a
huge, tasteless Maryland crab-motif cheezy souvenir” valued at $50. And
the inaugural runner-up prize was announced (though not yet shown)):
“the coveted ‘Style Invitational’ loser’s T- shirt” — a prize that, in
numerous models, would be sent to runners-up until just a few years ago,
when I went to mugs and then also tote bags. Two weeks later, the Czar
awarded five runner-up T-shirts, but nothing to the honorable mentions.
In fact, it wasn’t until nine months later, Week 41,
that the Czar announced a contest to create a Style Invitational bumper
sticker for the HMs. Three weeks later “Shirt Happens” (by Elden
Carnahan) and “How’s My Drivel? Fax 202-334-4312” (by Stephen Dudzik,
using the fax phone number for entries) got to be the first of a long
series of HM bumper stickers. They were clever, if often insidey
(another was “F2 2U2”), but they had a few shortcomings as prizes:
1. They were ugly — plain black and white, with unattractive, amateurish
type.
2. They were permanently stuck to whatever you stuck them to. And so,
surely also because of (1), nobody ever seemed to use them.
3. They were remarkably expensive for such crappy-looking prizes. Not
only did the Czar’s flunky (those were the days) order them for close to
$1 apiece, but they also were too long to fit flat in a standard
envelope, which meant that The Post was paying something like triple the
regular postage.
Get inside the noodle of Loser (Dave Prevar, Annapolis, Md.) in the Meet
the Parentheses section of the Conversational. (Dave wore this to the
2013 Flushies and later donated it as a prize.) (Nan Reiner)
And so, as the Empress-in-Waiting was getting ready to depose the Czar
in late 2003, the Style section office manager trooped us both into a
meeting and said: We need to stop sending out those bumper stickers.
Which turned out to be win-win-win-win: Since Jan, 18, 2004, we’ve been
issuing two new magnets (with the occasional reprint) every nine months
to a year — all of them colorful, masterly artworks by Bob Staake, and
all featuring Loser-supplied slogans. They’re easy to mail, they don’t
take up much room, they’re portable, they will usually stick to your car
for a while before fading or falling off, and they run us about 21 cents
apiece.
Meanwhile, if you’d like to have one of the vintage bumper stickers,
just come to a monthly Loser brunch
, where Pie Snelson will give
you one of the hundreds that Elden Carnahan amassed during the Czarist
Era, and regifted along with his Loser T-shirts (one of which an Inkin’
Memorial winner or runner-up may request in lieu of the usual prize).
So now in Week 1146 , it’s time for two new
Loser magnets; as usual, I’ll order 500 of each design that Bob makes
(I’ll also be seeking his view on which ideas will work best). Below are
the ones we’ve done so far; click on each link to see what it looks
like. Often they came not from magnet-slogan contests, but from
also-rans for the Loser Mug or Grossery Bag. Wouldn’t they make a great
poster, all together?
2004: The Style Invitational Makes Me Gag
(Dave Zarrow)
The Pen Is Mightier Than the Mind
(Josh
Borken, repeated for 2005-06 and also 2008-09)
2005: Surely I Jested
(Marty
McCullen, repeated for 2005-06 and 2008-09)
I Empressed
(Cecil Clark)
2006-07: Near-Do-Well
(Howard
Walderman)
I’m Ink-competent
(Dave
Zarrow)
2007-08: It’s a Dishonor Just Being Nominated
(Bruce
Carlson)
Aging Quippie
(Tom
Witte)
2009-10: Honor Among Dweebs
(Lee
Dobbins)
Certifiably Inane
(Edward
Gordon)
2010-11: Putting the Rude in Erudition
(Craig Dykstra)
Mirth Certificate
(Kevin
Dopart)
2011-12: Sunday Drivel
(Tom
Witte)
Middle-Wit Champion
(Tom
Witte)
2012-13: Not(e)worthy
(Bruce Carlson)
Discredit Card
(Beverley
Sharp)
2013-14: Po’ Wit Laureate
(Roger
Hammons)
Puns of Steel
(Jennifer
Hart)
2014-15: The Wit Hit the Fan
(Jon
Hamblin, Bird Waring)
Hardly Har-Har (Barbara Turner)
As I noted in this week’s Invite, I still have a few weeks’ worth of the
current magnets, which (unless it’s your slogan that ends up on the new
magnet) I’ll mail to you until I run out of them — unless you e-mail me
with a request by the Monday after the results are announced.
*Speaking of alternative prizes: * The Post will be moving in December
to new offices a few blocks away in downtown Washington, and I’ve been
told that there won’t be any room to keep prizes there. So I’m slowly
cleaning out the Invite Prize Closet and bringing home boxes of stuff to
sort through. And I’m finding a lot of little items that are fun or at
least nutty but don’t really merit being second prizes — a number of
books, plus various small novelty items. If, in lieu of the prize you
win in a certain week (say, if you already have a dozen of the same
magnet), you would rather choose *something from the Mystery Grab Bag *
— you don’t get to choose, and I won’t put much thought into it either —
e-mail me with your request by the Monday after the results are announced.
*Twicky tweets: The results of Week 1142*
Week 1142 — the contest to write a tweet penned by your creation of a
hybrid of two people — seemed like a novel idea. But as soon as I
started judging, a lot of the entries sounded awfully familiar. And
that’s because we’ve run /several / “Before and After” and portmanteau
contests that asked you to combine two names, and then quote the
resulting person.
I started to comb through the results linked to in Elden Carnahan’s
Master Contest List
,
and discovered that not only had we given ink to Marion Barry Bonds
saying “The pitch set me up,” (Dave Zarrow, Chris Doyle, 2003), but we
had also given ink to Marion Barry Bonds saying “Pitcher set me up!”
(Mike Gips, 2012). And in Week 287 (1998), Pollyanna Karenina was
described as “someone so annoyingly cheerful it makes you want to throw
yourself under a train (Susan Reese). In Week 489 (2003), Pollyanna
Karenina “cheerfully threw herself under a train” (Jennifer Hart). And
then, in a literature mashup contest, this won first runner-up:
Pollyanna Karenina: “Oh, my — isn’t that the most beautiful train?”
(Brendan Beary, 2005)
If there are let’s-call-them encore jokes among this week’s inking
entries, oh, well. They slipped through.
Gary Crockett’s “OrangeJulius” gives him his ninth first-place win and
30th “above the fold,” to add to his 250-plus blots of ink. And while
the instructions said to “combine two well-known names,” I really didn’t
hesitate to bend the rules a millimeter in favor of the week’s
cleverest, particularly timely idea. Gary’s entry was also the favorite
this week of ace copy editor Doug Norwood.
John Glenn’s runner-up was my favorite of several “Trumpelstiltskins”
(for the Invite’s sake, do I want this guy to win the GOP nomination?).
@JFKanye earns only the third blot of ink for Lela Martin — but it’s her
second runner-up entry: She was also a runner-up in Week 1031 for the
“air quote” contest: “M‘ale’: What’s inside a guy after a night of too
much drinking; fe‘male’: What’s inside a girl after a night of too much
drinking. (That entry drew a complaint from a woman accusing me of being
a victim-blamer and rape-condoner. )
*Laugh out of Courtney: * Copy chief Courtney Rukan loved David
Friedman’s “Swedish Chefferson” (“but I’m a Muppets fiend”). She also
especially liked John Glenn’s “Trumpelstiltskin,” Warren Tanabe’s
“RonaldonaldReagantrump,” Gary Crockett’s “JackLordByron” and Duncan
Stevens’s “GeorgeR.R.MartinLutherKing.”
*Blue Bird: * This week’s cleverest unprintable tweet was by Chris
Doyle: @MarcAntonyWeiner: The evil that men do lives after them; the
good is oft interred with their boners.
*MEET THE PARENTHESES: (Dave Prevar, Annapolis, Md.)*
Although once in a job interview, the secretary announced to her boss
that “Mr. Pervert is here to see you,” Dave prounounces his name
PRE-var. Dave’s 269 inks — all but one from the Empressive Era — place
him at No. 24 all time, but local Losers know him best as one of the
organizers of the annual Flushies award “banquet,” where he often steals
the musical segment of the event with his phenomenal playing on cowbell,
clapper and, once, triangle. Here are Dave’s responses to some
questionnaire items, including some he added:
*What is your official Loser Anagram?
*Pravda Diver is better than some other names I have been called.
*What do people who’ve never heard of the Invite (and some who have)
know you as?*
I consider myself a native Marylander, because it was just a car ride to
Washington, D.C. to be hatched. I officially retired this year after
nearly 44 years of being a Fed, and I am on two Volunteer Service
Agreements with USDA’s Agricultural Research Service. My first
government job was as a “climbing ranger” for a summer at Devil’s Tower
National Monument, Wyoming, and my career continued in ups and downs
until I became a biologist at the National Institutes of Health.
Eventually I changed gears to the NIH Division of Safety, then USDA,
where I became a manager to keep researchers and the environment healthy.
*What did your dogs know you as?*
Alpha Dog.
*What brought you to Loserdom?*
I noticed the SI around 1999 after exploring more of the paper beyond
the comics. I was over-analyzing the rules and my entries (thanks to
being science-oriented all my life) before loosening up at the end of
2003 about the time the Empress ascended to the throne. The SI became
stress relief.
*Name three of your favorite entries.*
One of them is a favorite because I usually don’t get ink in poetry
contestst. /From Week 935 poems about disasters:
/High life for Romans! Pompeii was for living!
None heeded omens of blast unforgiving,
Years after quaking, Vesuvius building,
Growing and waking to smother the gilding.
Heat would benumb this, the masses were punished;
Pummeled with pumice, Pompeiians were none-ished.
/Week 784: bad endings for a novel:
/ He had been in a long, slow denouement. He rocked rhythmically on the
porch, at once hesitant to turn the next page of his life, yet resolved
to face his fate. With a deep sigh and exhalation, he turned the page.
The page was blank.
The third was picked up by the “Car Talk” guys for their radio show. A
friend in Florida told me she heard my name and the joke while driving,
and had to pull over, laughing.
/Week 685, things to be thankful for:/ That dogs don’t know everyone
else hates you.
*What’s something you do or have done that confirms your Loserosity?*
I re-created the now-extinct Inker statue
winner
prize on my refrigerator, using only Loser magnets and a small paper bag
resembling the tiny one that went over the Thinker’s head.
Other Losers, I’m waiting to hear from you.