Style Conversational Week 1159: You’re darn tootin’ it’s a game contest
It’s hard to outdo an actual family fart game, but I have faith in you
No Loser offered a bio for our Meet the Parentheses feature, so instead
we’ll show you, um, Sheldon. Donated by uber-prize-giver Cheryl Davis,
he goes to this week’s first runner-up, Christopher Lamora. (Cheryl Davis)
By Pat Myers
Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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January 21, 2016
Unfortunately, we’ve given out the Doggie Doo game (at the Loser party,
after the original winner declined it), because that might have been the
only extant game to be worse than “Ewww, Who Tooted?” Doggie Doo
consists of a large plastic dachshund into whose mouth you shove
Play-Doh-like “food,” then vigorously pump a bulb to propel it out the
other end. Especially because it did not work. (Video here
of the Empress, the Royal
Consort and donor Nan Reiner trying to make it work.)
This week’s contest, Week 1159 , is pretty
wide open: It can have topical humor; it can be a really stupid idea; it
can be nifty but impractical; it can be cerebral. It doesn’t have to
have a board as such, but it shouldn’t be something that would be called
“sports” or be on a large scale. “Board-type game.”
Don’t bog down into a complex scenario; remember, at bottom, you’re
telling a joke. Jokes can be long if they’re fun to read; they’re
tedious if they’re not. Writing in a conversational, story-telling style
helps.
*AI-AI-AI, WHAT A CONTEST! THE RESULTS OF WEEK 1155*
When Kevin Dopart suggested this “Vowel Movement” contest — complete
with title and clever examples — I went right for it, because it had so
many elements of successful Style Invitational contests: an almost
infinite pool of source material (books, movies, plays, TV shows), and
the opportunity to play on those sources in wholly different ways. And
of course it was in the alter-the-word genre that Losers never seem to
tire of.
In the contest, Week 1155, you first deleted
all the vowels from the work’s title, then added vowels to the remaining
consonants — whichever ones, as many, and in whatever location you
liked. After I posted the contest four weeks ago, a discussion ensued in
theStyle Invitational Devotees Facebook group
over what would constitute a vowel, but I don’t think it ended up being
much of an issue.
More of an issue was that a sizable number of entrants — or maybe just a
few entrants who submitted a lot of entries — didn’t heed the
instruction to alter the vowels “to create a new work”; they just used
the altered title as some phrase to be described. Given that the contest
encompassed books, movies, plays and TV shows, “a work” could be a lot
of things. But not one like this: “Raging Bull”→ “Arguing Bill”: Though
Congress is supposed to do the latter, they usually do the former.
Compare that with: “Raging Bull” → “Rouging Belle”: In this sequel to
“Beauty and the Beast,” an aging Beauty tries to regain her self-esteem
through lip gloss. And with: “Raging Bull” → “Rug on Gay Bill: The Hair
Club for Men documentary. (None of these got ink, but the second and
third at least followed the instructions.)
I was blessedly saved from the slog of vetting the entries — making sure
that none of them gained or lost consonants as well as vowels during the
alterations — by Loser Todd DeLap, who wrote to the Empress with an
unsolicited offer of a computer program he’d devised to check this very
thing. Hot dog! On Monday night I sent Todd a list of several dozen
pairs of original plus altered titles, without the descriptions or the
entrants’ names (which I didn’t know at this point, either). Then I went
ahead and made my choices, hoping they’d pass the Todd Test, and started
looking up the names of their writers.
The next morning, Todd sent me back a list of six “problem children”:
Animal Farm → Namely a Loafer (too many L’s)
Lady and the Tramp → Lardy and the Trump (added a consonant, R, not a vowel)
Lady and the Tramp→ Lordy, End “The Trump!” (ditto)
The Sting → Thirsting (ditto!)
War and Peace → War on Peace (dropped a consonant, D)
Roger & Me → Our Ego Ruined ’Em (extra N and D — that one, of course,
was easily solved by replacing the ampersand with “and”; it got ink for
Ellen Ryan).
Todd added: “Nice to know I made the short list.”
At that point, I decided to see who’d written the “problem children.”
And the first one, “Namely a Loafer,” was by . . . Todd DeLap.
“You didn’t use this program you devised FOR YOUR OWN ENTRIES?” I replied.
/Todd: “Yes, I did. I think I did. Okay, I’m pretty sure I did. /
/“/
/“Okay, I didn’t. But that is because I suck. I truly suck. I really,
really suck. What’s worse is I didn’t even recognize that [“Namely a
Loafer”] as one of mine. Okay, well, at least I got a good story to
tell, a story of my total suckitude./
/“(* heavy sigh *)”/
It was another entry on my shortlist that Todd did recognize as his
own; it didn’t get ink either.
Loser.
I really had no idea, until I checked, of who’d written which entry.
Except for this week’s winner. I would have been mildly surprised had it
turned out to be anyone but Chris Doyle: virtuoso wordplay (“Much Ado
About Nothing” turned into “A Much-Eyed Booty in a Thong”) combined with
a a juxtaposition of high and low art. A classic Style Invitational entry.
Also devilishly brilliant was Christopher Lamora’s second-place entry of
“The Interview” → “The Nature View” with its double-entendre about
photographers out to “shoot the North Korean cuckoo.” This entry is
Exhibit A of the trick of making the altered title reflect theplot of
the original
. That’s
237 blots of ink for Christopher, who’s back Inviting and back in the
D.C. area after a West Coast hiatus, when he was heading the L.A.
passport office.
Howard Walderman gets Ink No. 152 with his D.C.-friendly “Ennui Hill,”
and George-Ann Rosenberg — who played the Invite a few times many years
ago, then popped up this past year to ink up the joint week after week,
grabs the final spot in the Losers’ Circle.
I don’t know if you’d call it “unprintable,” but I don’t go for ethnic
stereotyping, even if it’s supposed to be complimentary: “ ‘Jeopardy’ →
‘Jew Parade’: One particular group tends to dominate a game show that
requires knowledge and intelligence.” Nah.
Okay, this one is unprintable: “Smells Like Teen Spirit” → “Smells Like
Tuna, Sport”: Nirvana’s tip to adolescent males. (Chris Doyle, who sent
that in as a Conversational-only entry.)
*SAVE THE DATE: THE FLUSHIES! SATURDAY AFTERNOON, MAY 21*
Whoohoo — we didn’t even have time to start our annual fretfest about
when and where the Flushies award “banquet” will be/ will it cost too
much/ will we have enough people/ will they throw us out etc.: At this
month’s Loser Post-Holiday Party, 15-time Loser and mcedo prize donor
Robin
Diallo offered, unsolicited, to host a Loser event at the horses-and-all
spread in Anne Arundel County, Md., where she’s finally settled down
after zipping around the world (including in Malawi, Manila, New Dehli,
Dakar and Kabul — I know this because she’s sent entries in from each of
these places) for the State Department.
Robin even has a llama.
We chose this date because (a) we’ve traditionally held the Flushies in
May; and (b) it worked best for Nan Reiner to come up from Florida
(where she plans to relocate permanently after many years in the D.C.
area) — and she writes all those song parodies for the occasion. And can
sing them.
The cost will be minimal because it won’t be catered; we’ll just bring
stuff to eat and drink. May is usually the nicest month of the year
weatherwise in the D.C. area. Robin’s house is out in the sticks in
Lothian, Md., about 15 miles east of the Beltway, but we should be able
to organize some carpools, as we did to Reston, Va., for the party /chez
/Raffman.
And she says that “of course” we can pet the horses, and spit back at
the llama.
*MEET NO PARENTHESES*
I’ve had no more volunteer Losers to supply bios for this column’s “Meet
the Parentheses” contest. In reply to my last-ditch plea on the Devotees
page, someone suggested that we spotlight the Empress of The Style
Invitational. I thought: ugh, haven’t I already bored everyone already?
But I do remember that my predecessor, The Czar, once hated all the
entries one week, and decided to fill the page by answering questions
that people had sent in. So if there’s anything you want to know about
me, e-mail me at pat.myers@washpost.com and I’ll see what we get. But
really, it’s the Losers whom I’d like to introduce to readers. Write to
me if you’re a regular or longtime Loser and would like to tell about
yourself.