Style Conversational Week 1152: Even if you first succeeded ...
The Empress revisits The Style Invitational’s revisiting contest
Loser (Larry Gray, Union Bridge, Md.) has won The Style Invitational
four times, but he says the celebrity in this picture is the tree. See
our Meet the Parentheses section below. (Family Photo)
By Pat Myers
Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
Email //
Bio //
Follow //
December 3, 2015
Style Conversational: Even if you first succeeded ...
The Empress revisits The Style Invitational’s revisiting contest
The Style Invitational has been doing second-chance contests like Week
1152 for almost as long as there’s been something to look back on: The
first one was in Week 94, Jan. 1, 1995, and it invited readers to enter
any contest from Week 1 through 93 with “an answer you may have thought
of after the contest deadline was over.” The results contained entries
to 17 different contests from 14 people. I know this because for the
past several years, links to the Week 94 results
—
and all others — can be found on Elden Carnahan’s Master Contest List
on
the Losers’ website, NRARS.org.
But no such website existed in 1995, three years before the founding of
Google. The Invite itself wasn’t even online until well into 1995 (The
Post has since gone back and put up old Invites and many other old
stories from the archives). It wasn’t until Week 54 that the Invite even
started accepting e-mailed entries, judging from this announcement that
betrays a little fuzziness about e-mail vs. websites: “This week the
Style Invitational goes on line. You can submit entries through the
Internet at this address: losers@access.digex.net.”
So the entrants in Week 94 most likely either had to remember their
favorite Style Invitational contests of the preceding two years or had
saved paper clippings. The situation was probably the same, at least for
most contestants, in 1997, 1998 and maybe even 2001. What weirdos!
Just after the Empress took over the operation at the end of 2003, she
was able to refer Week 538 entrants to the index of 100 previous
contests atwashingtonpost.com/styleinvitational,
the same automatically
compiled index that we use today. It wasn’t till 2005, though, that we
started limiting the contest pool to those from the previous year,
rather than Of All Time.
Now that the old contests are so much easier to access, though — both
through washingtonpost.com and, usually more completely, with art,
through PDFs on Elden’s list — maybe we should have a contest to reenter
contests from 1998 or whatever.
*General guidelines (though often broken) for retrospective contests: *
Short entries are more likely to get ink than longer ones, BUT I almost
always run a couple of lengthy entries as well, especially song
parodies. This is both because I want to provide an interesting mix of
contests and because so many worthy parodies — often the most impressive
work of the year from the Losers — lose out on ink the first time around
because of space limitations. Also, caption contests and others
involving graphics are unlikely to ink; we might reprint one cartoon in
the results, but it takes a lot of space when there’s also the new
contest on the page. And if a contest requires a long explanation for
someone to understand the entry, that’s also a big strike against it for
this contest. (I try to limit the descriptions to what’s really
pertinent: For example, for Week 1118 I would say “‘Breed’ two
racehorses from a list we provided” and not bother to explain that it
was a list of 100 names of horses nominated for last year’s Triple Crown
events, that the limit was 18 characters, etc.
In the early days of the Invite, there was a rule against resubmitting
an old entry; I dropped that condition when I took over. My predecessor,
the Czar, thought that was a big mistake because my judging could prove
to be inconsistent. And perhaps it has; a few resubmissions have indeed
gotten ink. But in general, that’s because I didn’t have room for them
the first time around.
And there’s always a chance that you’ll get ink with an entry that
someone else — or several someones-else — sent the first time around,
and went inkless. Unfair to the first people? Arguably. But as long as
the entry (or one like it) didn’t already run, I won’t disqualify it
just because it was submitted earlier, even if it reveals some
inconsistency on my part. Readers will enjoy the humor — what’s it to
them if it had been submitted by someone else; I’ll save untold hours of
research into my entry archives; and whoopee, you get a 20-cent magnet
that that first person didn’t.
But don’t, of course, send an entry that you /know / someone else
submitted earlier; on the Style Invitational Devotees
page on Facebook, and in the Yahoo e-mail group
Losernet, contestants sometimes share their “noinks,” and come on, I
know that none of you would be such a cad as to consciously steal them.
*THE TIGER OF TANKA: THE RESULTS OF WEEK 1148*
If you belong to theStyle Invitational Devotees
group on Facebook, you’ll see numerous posts
from someone who writes under a pseudonym and whose profile photo shows
a woman wearing a tiger costume, her face covered by striped makeup.
That would be Nan Reiner, a huge fan of the Princeton Tigers and a huge
ly good writer of verse that plays off today’s headlines. And so I
wasn’t shocked in the final stage of judging Week 1148 — the part where
I search through my e-mail to find who wrote each of the inking entries
— that over and over, Nan’s name kept showing up. This week’s Inkin’
Memorial gives Nan her 13th Invite win, and an amazing 41st ink “above
the fold” among her 280-some blots of ink.
On the other hand, it’s just the 10th blot for the less Invite-addicted
but clearly talented first runner-up Perry Beider, who gets our
Ecumenically Tasteless Holiday Pack: the ugly white “Jewjitsu” T-shirt
and the Christian jelly beans (“Red is for Christ’s blood). And the
Losers’ Circle is filled out as is often the case, with zings from
Beverley Sharp and Gary Crockett.
I was going to reluctantly self-censor First Offender Michael Rolfe’s
TankaWanka about Germaine Greer, so I’m glad I consulted first with copy
chief Courtney Rukan and ace editor Doug Norwood, who both thought
saying “lop off your penis” in this context was all right even in the
print Invite. However, I thought the following two very good TWs were
better suited for the Conversational:
*National Knee Day (October 22)*
He told her, “Well, jeez,
Today’s in honor of knees.
To show my respect
In a manner that’s correct,
I’ll say: Get down on them, please!” (from the often saucy Brian Allgar)
And this one from the usually highly decorous Matt Monitto, who shows
that today’s world can drive anyone to bad language (especially if it’s
a foreign one):
The Paris attacks:
Mankind’s resolve never cracks.
We stand and issue
A response to this crisis:
“Va te faire foutre,
ISIS.”
*FAVORABLE CURRY: THE NEXT LOSER BRUNCH, DEC. 13*
I can’t wait to return to the buffet at the sun-splashed London Curry
House in the spit-spot Cameron Station
section of Alexandria, Va. We’re having our first Loser Brunch there,
and while I know it’s a crazy time of year, I hope many of you will join
me. RSVP to Elden here . We’ll
start at noon, as soon as the restaurant opens; I’ll need to leave by 1:30.
*MEET THE PARENTHESES: (LARRY GRAY, UNION BRIDGE, MD.) *
/In his 4 1/2_years with the Invite, Larry has spent a lot of time
hanging around the Losers’ Circle; he’s won four Inkin’ Memorials and
six runners-up. His first ink was a neologism from the recession era:
“Sellulose: Superabsorbent substance that sucks value from whatever it
touches; commonly used as home insulating material in the past decade.”
While Larry lives way out in the middle of nowhere, close to the
Pennsylvania line, he’s come down for several Loser events and joined us
on at least one of our annual Gettysburg day trips. As usual in our Meet
the Parentheses series, Larry modified the Empress’s basic Q&A to answer
what he felt like answering. Maybe all the Losers should participate in
a political debate./
*Age:* 50-mumble
*Where I Live:* The bucolic outskirts of Union Bridge, Md.
*What do people who’ve never heard of the Invite know you as? *Larry.
What? Oh, you mean, “What do they know about me?” Well, as a young’un I
aspired to follow in the footsteps of noted naturalist and keeper of the
Wild Kingdom, Marlin Perkins, and I studied hard so that I could sell
Mutual of Omaha Insurance. No, wait ... I attended West Virginia
University, where I majored in wildlife management.
I graduated just after the election of that great environmentalist
Ronald Reagan, who apparently believed that “preserving wildlife” meant
“making spotted-owl pickles.” Result: I never found a job working with
the woodland critters. I got the last laugh, though; I rode the Ronnie
wave and landed a job with the Defense Department. (From one kind of
Predator to another.) Now, I spend as much of my time as possible
acquiring expensive wood and reducing it to sawdust; playing a game
called Whackdammit (which more coordinated people call “golf”); and
making sounds come out of a guitar that should never be permitted in a
civilized society.
*Closest Brush With the Famous:* See photo. It was taken in Mount
Victoria Park in Wellington, New Zealand, and I’m perched in the tree
from “The Lord of the Rings” under which Frodo and Sam spent their first
night as they fled the Shire. That tree is a celebrity.
*What’s Your Loser Anagram?* My official Granola Smear is “Ay, Grrrl,
Ay!” but if I could use my full name (with middle initial) I’d be
“Crawly Avenger.” Who wouldn’t want to be “Crawly Avenger”?
*When Did You Start Losing?* I submitted my first entries (and scored my
first ink) in Week 923 in 2011. So far, I’m at somewhere north of 75
official blots plus a few unofficial mentions in the Conversational.
*What’s Your Favorite Ink?* My favorites tend to be submitted by others,
but here are two of my own that I’m particularly fond of:
/Week 949, analogies:/ “A hand on a Bible is to a politician’s honesty
as truck nuts are to a driver’s virility.”
Week 955. pair a word and its anagram: “Has-been banshee: Roseanne Barr.”
*Proof of Loserosity:* None needed. But I can give it up any time I want
to. Really.