The Style Invitational Empress ruminates all over this week’s
contest and results
By Pat Myers
Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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December 30, 2015
Happy holidays, all. For the third time in four weeks, The Style
Invitational’s schedule was moved up to publish on Wednesday instead of
the usual Thursday — which, combined with some extra-Invite obligations,
made for even more blunderations than usual. Thanks heaps of bunches to
the eagle-eyed Losers who alerted me immediately to a “check date” note
that wasn’t supposed to print but did last week, and to various other
mistakes that I was able to fix before the print paper went to press.
Our Week 1156 contest for obit poems — I’ve
been running these contests every January since 2004 — produces
consistently great stuff.. Part of the fun is providing a mix of the
best-known past-tense people and the more obscure. In the interests of
today’s rush schedule, I’ll link to my comments in Week 1105 Style
Conversational for guidelines about what we’re
looking for in an obit poem. And you can see last year’s winners here.
By the way, if you are in any way confused by Bob Staake’s cartoon about
Madame Claude: The pink “meat” swinging from the hook at the Paris
charcuterie is the especially shapely bottom half of a woman’s torso.
It’s a biting commentary on the degradation of sex work.
*THE WHOLE SCHMEAR: THE RESULTS OF WEEK 1152*
As I mention in the intro tothis week’s results
,
I got tons of great material, as always, from our annual retrospective
contests, with the vast majority of the past year’s Invite challenges
represented among the entries. But there’s only so much room, and only
so much that a soul can take in at once. There weren’t all that many
/entrants,/ but more of them sent full cards of 25 entries than in a
typical week. This will always be a contest to draw a higher proportion
of regular Losers, both because it requires diligent research and
because so many of them — clearly — were eager to resubmit entries that
some idiot failed to award ink to the first time around. (In some cases,
they were right. A number of this week’s inking entries had been sent
earlier in some form, though I believe the “above the fold” entries are
all new.) But we did end up with a First Offender — yay, Al Larsen — and
two people who got just their second ink — including one of the runners-up.
I had lots of fun judging the entries — it’s much less taxing to
consider a variety of contests all at once, and more important, they
were good. I remembered a lot of the entries from before, because I’d
put them on my shortlists for those contests. (I almost gave ink to one
especially good clerihew about Justice Scalia, until I checked and saw
that it had gotten ink the first time! It had run three weeks after the
regular results, in Week 1139 , so Mae Scanlan
might have missed it. ) I ended giving ink to entries from 19 contests
(a couple of the song parodies could have gone to any of two or three).
Next year, I’ll remember to ask people to remind me briefly what the
contest was, as in the way I indicate it in the results.
Among the parodies — a number of which were robbed of ink once again in
the interest of variety — Matt Monitto’s “Tomorrow” tune and Mark
Raffman’s “Uptown Funk” made the print page. I especially enjoy seeing
parodies of contemporary songs , since they’re more of a challenge to
fit witty words to — and also because it’s important that the Invite not
act as if an entire generation’s worth of music doesn’t exist. The
Invitational will soon, inshallah, celebrate its 24th birthday, and I’m
thrilled that many of us have been along for the whole ride. But we
don’t want to ossify. But some of the very best ink of the week went to
parodies and poems that ran only online, for space reasons but also
because they were set to tunes that readers weren’t likely to be able to
sing along with without the link.
A very clever Your Mama/Yoda joke makes the first win ever (though he’s
had three runners-up) for Gregory Koch, bringing him to 21 inks in all.
Gregory first started getting ink in the Invite in 2011, when he was a
freshman at the University of Connecticut; now that he’s graduated, he’s
come down to work in the D.C. area, and showed up at our December Loser
brunch in Virginia.
Also breaking into the Invitational at the same time was another college
freshman, /from/ Connecticut but attending Elon University in North
Carolina: A philosophy major but a theater kid, Matt Monitto immediately
proved himself brilliant at writing parodies of show tunes. This week’s
second place is Matt’s 75th blot of ink starting with Week 902 — and his
fifth runner-up in addition to three outright winners.
But it’s only the second blot of ink at all for Michael Weiner, for a
pun that really did make me laugh out loud. On top of that, I think
Michael sent just that one entry, for Yoplait as the name for a New
Jersey kids’ gym. I hope to see lots more from him. And Rob Cohen hits
the Losers’ circle for the second straight week, with his Mess With Your
Heads bank headline. I’m looking forward to meeting Rob for the first
time, at the ...
*LOSERS’ POST-HOLIDAY PARTY, SATURDAY EVENING, JAN. 9*
For which it is not too late to RSVP. Schmooze with some of your
favorite Losers, munch the potluck food, and sing along with Master
Parodists Nan Reiner and host Mark Raffman, who, I believe, are
collaborating on a new number about the Invite, set to a medley of
familiar tunes played by Loser Steve Honley at the keyboard. Nan is
flying up from Florida just for the event, while Mark is coming down
from the shower upstairs. The festivities start around 6:30; please
contact me at pat.myers@washpost.com to get directions Chez Raffman.
We’re currently up to about 35 people.
*WON TOO MANY? ALTERNATIVE PRIZES *
If you’re in that terrible situation of having won so many Invite prizes
that you’re rolling in duplicates, e-mail me shortly after you get ink
and let me know if you’d rather have an alternative. If you’re a winner
or runner-up, you can choose a vintage Loser T-shirt as an alternative
to the Inkin’ Memorial, Grossery Bag (just a few left, though),
Love/Loser mug or This Is Your Brain on Drugs mug, a vintage or regular
magnet, or something from my Mystery Bag. Magnet winners can ask for an
older-model magnet — there are at least 20 designs — until I run out of
the stash.
Happy New Year, all, and dang, we made it to 2016.