Style Conversational Week 1158: Not every dog song had its day The Empress ruminates all over the Style Invitational animal-themed song parodies Despite the contents of his cranium that he advertises on his sweatshirt, Loser (Edward Gordon, Austin) is an active member of Mensa. He’s featured below in Meet the Parentheses. (Courtesy of Edward Gordon) By Pat Myers Pat Myers Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003 Email // Bio // Follow // January 14, 2016 Week 1158 marks the third time we’ve done a contest in which we show you some unambiguous objects and you show us that /nothing/ has to be unambiguous if you try hard enough. The first was in Week 421 , in October 2001; while I didn’t ascend to Empressness for another two years, I happened to have judged while filling in as Auxiliary Czar. Among the winners (all of them are here ): *A. Butter stick with a pat knifed off: *Carving the very special Thanksgiving Tofu Turkey. (Jennifer Hart) Corporate Headquarters, Land O’ Lakes Inc. (Kelley Hoffman) *B. Hypodermic needle: * ** This magical beast can turn from horse to monkey. (Russell Beland; a runner-up) *C. Keyhole: * This image was submitted as a centerfold photo for the Taliban Monthly Review, but was rejected for its prurience. (Gene Gross) What old keys dream of at night. (Chuck Smith) Transamerica Pyramid meets Goodyear Blimp. Transamerica Pyramid wins. (Richard A. Creasy) Hitler wearing a clown nose. (Jean Sorensen) *D. A die, one of a pair of dice: * A prostitute in Lego Land. (Chuck Smith; a runner-up) After hours of persistent twisting, Charlton Heston’s Rubik’s Cube meets an untimely end. (David Moore) Captain Hook appears to have had trouble getting his ice out of the tray. (Russell Beland) After the tragic accident with the trash compactor, there were only 100 Dalmatians. (Jennifer Hart — that week’s winner) *E. A Chinese restaurant takeout container, with the little metal handle: * Purse by Givenchy (shown actual size): $3,500. (Leslie Hughes; Jennifer Hart) The attache case of Condoleezza Rice. (Russell Beland) The Social Security lockbox. Once you dip into it, you want to do it again an hour later. (Russell Beland) *G. Roll of toilet paper standing on end: * Christo wraps the Washington Monument. (Stephen Dudzik) Though it proved quite effective, the new masonry prophylactic never became very popular. (James Noble) It would take centuries for early man to realize that it would work much better on the curved side. (James Noble) A confused marshmallow who is wearing a yarmulke AND holding rosary beads. (Jennifer Hart) Then we did it again in 2009, in Week 819 , with a teapot, Christmas tree, mailbox, paper clip, hair comb and push pin. Among the winners: ** *Comb:* The one thing that drove Mr. Centipede nuts: his wife’s pantyhose draped over the shower rod. (Brendan Beary) — A giant hot dog fails to hide behind a white picket fence. (Vic Krysko) *Mailbox: * It’s a mailbox without a post, signifying that people don’t get The Post delivered anymore. So it’s a visual metaphor for the death of print journalism. I’m pretty sure this is right, because I got the answer from Wikipedia. (Brendan Beary) The most successful invention of Albert Gore Sr. (Tom Lacombe) So you get the idea. Usually I ask Bob Staake to make his cartoons somewhat ambiguous, to allow for a wide range of interpretations in the captions. A contest like this makes you think a little harder. *WE’LL HAVE FAUNA, FAUNA, FAUNA: THE PARODIES OF WEEK 1154* Oh, wow. There were so many clever, well done, really interesting parodies — and sources — in Week 1154, our contest to write a song to, for, about — and I also took “by” — cats and other animals. It was relatively easy to choose entries for this Sunday’s paper; the limited space and my inability to provide links to the melody excluded both long songs and less well known ones. The 13 songs in the print invite comprise the four winners plus Pizza Rat (to “Yesterday”), “Benji’s at the Vet’s,” the two to “Be Our Guest,” the “Fox-Gnus” ditty, the centipede song to “One singular sensation,” the cat songs to “Tonight” and “You’re the Top,” “My Ken-L-Ration” — plus, to make it fit perfectly, “Soft Kitty.” But there were /so /many songs that I had marked “Web” — not for the paper, but certainly deserving. And finally, last night, when I was expanding the print Invite for the online version, I had to face the reality that a lot of people’s finely crafted, ingeniously clever creations were going to get bupkis. So in the coming days I’ll be using the Style Invitational Devotees Facebook group to post Jon Gearhart’s multi-verse story song culminating with “You picked a fine time to jolt me, juiced eel”; Melissa Balmain’s play on “The Farmer and the Cowman Should Be Friends,” featuring the Elephant and the Donkey; Kathy Hardis Fraeman’s song about Internet “dog shaming”; Gary Crockett’s about laser pointers to “I Saw the Light,” and other gems. I judged the entries first for the humor in the lyrics, and the creativity and originality in their ideas, and whether the humor stayed fresh and interesting through the length of the song. After that, I considered how well they parodied the original songs, and I aimed to include a mix of music genres, though the final results do mostly consist of the show tunes and ’60s-’70s songs that reflect the age and interests of most of our parody contest entrants. I did post on the Devotees page a fun parody of Lana del Rey’s“Summertime Sadness,” called “Reindeer Sadness” andsung on video by new Loser Nathanael Dewhurst. And I don’t hear much country music; the beautiful George Strait song “Amarillo by Morning” — which I will now and forever link with Drew Bennett’s “Armadillo, I’m Warning” — was new to me. The whole song didn’t hold together enough for ink, but my cat, Joey, and I could certainly relate to the opening lines of Judi Levy’s parody of Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day” : Where is my cat when I need him the most? He’s lying around on The Washington Post. Judi’s rhyme, by the way, improves on Powter’s, which is “most”/ “lost.” Many of our winning parodies over the years have had better rhyming than the originals, which can get away with “near rhyme” because the music compensates, and because the assonance of vowels is often more prominent than the rhyming of consonants. (And because precise rhyming is just more clever.) It’s the fourth win and the 51st (and 52nd) blot of ink for the Glasgow Loser Bureau, i.e., Stephen Gold, who over the years has inked with a series of brilliant song parodies, limericks and other verses, among other entries. No one who attended last Saturday’s Loser Post-Holiday Party and heard Nan Reiner and Mark Raffman sing a series of holiday song parodies they co-wrote will be surprised that each of them ended up in this week’s Losers’ Circle for the umpteenth time. Meanwhile, Duncan Stevens might have gotten his first ink back in Week 970, but it’s just recently that he’s caught fire Invite-wise, soaking up ink every week for something like two months straight, in a variety of contests. So that lifetime total of 24 blots should be turning into a vat before long. One tack that didn’t work for me: I know that the Invite often rewards edgy, irreverent humor. But I’ve never taken to sick humor about cruelty or suffering. I’m sure it was just an effort to be outrageous, not sincere, that prompted various Losers to include parody lyrics fantasizing about the gratification of drowning, hanging, or pulling the claws out of an irritating cat, burning animals alive, seeing them shot, etc. Ugh. (As an aside: I’m convinced that the it’s asick-comedy shtick, not real political opinions, that Ann Coulter uses as her stock in trade. Just: “What’s the most outrageously nasty comment I can possibly make?”) *BAGGING IT, FOR NOW* I have just one Grossery Bag left, the runner-uptote bag with the “Whole Fools” logo . Meanwhile, I have a bunch of Mug 1.0 — the brain region design with the slogan “This Is Your Brain on Mugs” — that we discovered when moving offices last month. So for now, future runners-up may opt for either that mug or the LOVE/LOSER mug — or choose one of the assortment of vintage Loser T-shirts of past years, some of them gently used and regifted. Or a Mystery Prize from my Bag O’ Little Stuff. *Meet the Parentheses: (Edward Gordon, Austin)* /Ed Gordon has been entering the Invitational, on and off, from various locations, since Week 422 (back in the Czarist era) and fairly regularly now. He’s acquired 61 blots of ink in the process, including a win and five runners-up. As with our previous subjects of Meet the Parentheses, Ed modified the Empress’s basic Q&A template to answer what he felt like answering. / /Have you been getting a fair amount of Style Invitational ink recently, or are you one of the top 100 or so all-time Loser? Introduce yourself to the Greater Loser Community with a short bio. E-mail the E at pat.myers@washpost.com; your current waiting time in the queue: 0 minutes. I am out of bios. / *Age:* I am so looking forward to the ad nauseam parodies of Beatles songs next September. *Home:* Yes, I’m an ex that lives in Texas — both my wives were good house keepers, and they kept them. I was raised in Marblehead, Mass. I’m proud to be a Magician — had I gone to nearby Salem High instead of Marblehead, I would have been a Witch. *Official Loser Anagram:* My Granola Smear is Good Nerd, given to me somehow in the days before Facebook. Works for me, for it is appropriately nebulous and vaguely complimentary. *What compelled you to start entering the Invite? * I was working for a federal consulting firm — a “Beltway bandit” — in the D.C. area back around the turn of the century, and my wife and I would sit around the house on Sunday and read The Post, rather than cleaning. I thought the SI was a support group for the certifiably inane (more on that later), and so I entered, and got an ink. After I moved to Fort Lauderdale, it was a while before the Internet found me and I started entering again. I think I wasn’t credited for two of my entries: a parody of a “BC” comic strip, and another to some individual named Magnum Steel or something like that./[Ed is referring to this runner-up entry in Week 700. from 2007, for campaign slogans. We don’t have records from back then of entries that didn’t get ink, so we’ll take his word for it that he sent entries much like these.]/ *Favorite entry:* By far, it’s the one that saves me from being in contention for Most Cantinkerous: the magnet slogan “Certifiably Inane,” which won me a sketch by Bob Staake. I think I would have gotten more ink over the years if I’d been willing to embarrass myself more; my recent ink for suggesting “Beanie Babies” as a good name for a Jewish preschool didn’t go over well at the synagogue. *Proof that I’m a Loser: The Empress spent a whole week trying to teach poetry to me by e-mail, and failed.* *What do people know me as outside of the SI:* Well, a high school friend still calls me “Mr. 5-by-5,” for my svelte physique. I’m a retired software engineer, and have done more than my share of teaching Anonymous how software security is ripe for the intrusion. Now I write books that nobody reads; I intentionally use titles that are so terrible that people won’t pick them up. *What do I want to be when I grow up:* Besides Chris Doyle, a foot taller.