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
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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.