Style Conversational Week 1162: 42 giraffes and 21 ‘Screams’ later ...
The Style Invitational Empress ruminates all over this week’s
contest and results
Loser and pack mule (Duncan Stevens , Vienna, Va.) with
Loser-in-Training Simon. Duncan supplied this week’s Meet the
Parentheses bio; see below. (FAMILY PHOTO)
By Pat Myers
Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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February 11, 2016
Washington Post writers were admonished this week by management to
“respect our readers’ time” and write shorter articles. If the Empress
really gave a hoot about her readers’ time, she wouldn’t ask them to
write elaborate song parodies in return for a 2-by-3-inch scrap of metal
with a cartoon on it (if that). But if for no other reason than to send
you to work more promptly on (or at least laugh at) this week’s Style
Invitational, she’ll try to show a little more
self-discipline.
When the entries started coming in forr Week 1158, I got a few gripey
notes that Bob Staake’s artsy, shaded drawings of seven everyday objects
were harder to misinterpret than the stark doodles he’d done the first
time we did such a contest
,
back in 2001. But they didn’t seem to deter the 200 or so Losers who
entered this time around, and who revealed their minds to be warped in
many different directions.
Still, I’m glad that this contest, like all our caption contests,
offered a choice of pictures to work with: When 200 people are looking
for something funny in a single simple picture, a lot of them are going
to have the same general idea. At least 21 entries — probably quite a
few more — evoked Edvard Munch’s iconic “Scream” painting in the
description of the electric plug; and the mottled shading of the peanut
in Picture 4 prompted 42 entries mentioning giraffes — giraffe-moth
hybrids, giraffe larvae, giraffe slugs, giraffe seeds, giraffe coffee
beans, giraffe testes, giraffe scrotum, giraffe goiter, giraffe sperm,
giraffe poop, giraffe wearing camouflage, a boneless giraffe, filet of
giraffe. I ended up going with Kathy Hardis Fraeman’s giraffe in the
snow, which imaginatively incorporated the negative space of the picture.
Melissa Balmain, who’s an award-winning poet and editor of the
light-verse journal Light ,
often blots up her Invite ink in various verse contests. But her
family-focused humor has also served her well in a variety of other
’Vites; this Inkin’ Memorial — for seeing a flashlight battery and the
positive-side “+,” and thinking of Fisher-Price exorcists — marks her
seventh contest win and 81st blot of ink, all since Week 941. (Hmm, I’m
thinking we’d want to Meet These Parentheses, no?)
Meanwhile, longtime Loser Edward Gordon gets Ink No. 62 and his eighth
“above the fold,” while Bruce Niedt (also a published poet
)
gets just his sixth ink but a second trip to the Losers’ Circle. But the
milestone news is for Really Longtime Loser Roy Ashley, who this week
smears his shirt pocket with his 350th blot of ink — scoring with an
entry that didn’t interpret Picture 5 as anything but a paintbrush, but
did so in a very funny way.
*AREA NEWSPAPER STEALS FROM OTHER PAPER, CALLS IT ‘HOMAGE’*
I adore the Onion — the proliferation of totally
craven, unwitty fake-news sites only puts the Onion’s pointed, almost
always perfectly aimed satire into sharper relief. And I wasn’t
surprised that so many in the Loser Community were able to produce
Onion-quality and Onion-toned headlines in our Week 794 contest
back
in 2009. The Onion has been through a number of changes since then; most
notably, it had to fold its print edition, and recently was bought (this
is true! not the Onion!) by the Spanish-language broadcast network
Univision. But its satire of both Great Issues and Quotidian Life
continues to use the form of deadpan straight-news newspaper articles,
complete with headlines.
If you haven’t read a lot of Onion heds, I strongly suggest you go to
TheOnion.com and sample a variety of them. As with this contest, the
actual articles aren’t necessary, though they’re often worthwhile. Our
first Onion contest, by the way, was inspired by a fascinating cover
story
in
The Washington Post Magazine. If you have the time — trying to be
respectful of it here — it’s worth the read.
*A little thing I wanted to address ... *
My requests on datat to include with entries has varied over the years,
as I’ve started different systems to keep track of Losers’ addresses.
Some years ago I’d told the regular entrants that they need not include
their mailing addresses week after week, since I’d already entered them
into a database. But these days, when I look up Losers’ entries before I
send out their prizes, it’s handy to have the address right there, so I
don’t have to go to another list. Not a yuge deal, but in a week in
which I’m sending out 30-plus letters before the post office closes (I’m
talking about you, backward-crossword), it does help me out to have the
address right there on the e-mail every time.
Actually, now that I’m hand-writing the envelopes rather than making
labels (this actually saves me time), I’ve managed to memorize the
street addresses of a bunch of Recidivist Losers. But I still need to
double-check the Zip codes. (I promise I won’t stalk your house.)
*MEET THE PARENTHESES: (DUNCAN STEVENS, VIENNA, VA.) *
/Duncan got his first ink back in 2012, in Week 970. But it’s been just
the past few months that he’s emerged as a Loser Phenom, winning prizes
so often — including this week, for his 30th blot of ink — that the
Empress knows his street address by heart. She’s still looking forward
to meeting him in person, however, since he hasn’t appeared yet at a
Loser event. As with our previous Meet the Parentheses contributors,
Duncan adapted a basic Q&A template. /
*Age: *Evidently not old enough to know better.
*Official Loser Anagram (aka Granola Smear):* Unscented Vans. Though I’m
also partial to Nuns Dent Caves and Nuns, Vets Dance.
*What brought me to the Invite:* I had been enjoying the Invite ever
since I moved to D.C. and started subscribing to the Post in 2000, but I
would glance at the contest, think “hey, I should enter,” and almost
never get around to it. But last summer I said to myself, “Self, this is
lame. You like wordplay. There’s a lively wordplay contest in your paper
every week. You have no excuse.” So I started sending in entries more or
less every week, and I found that a lot of contests that I had never
thought to try — like neologisms or snarky notes to “glassbowls” — were
a lot of fun once I put some effort into them.
*What’s an example of something that confirms your Loserosity? * I’m a
longtime Ultimate Frisbee player, and it’s a tradition (though a waning
one) that each team makes up a friendly cheer for the other team at the
end of the game. I’m the designated cheer-person for our team, and I’ll
often do a song parody or limerick, like this one for a team called
Fifi’s Nasty Little Secret:
We got on the phone with our scout,
Who said “Fifi’s great, there’s no doubt!”
But the whole NSA
Was listening that day,
So now Fifi’s secret is out.
I also sometimes spoof hymns for my church choir: “Jesus Christ is risen
today/Man, that guy won’t go away.”
*Favorite entries:* I was proud my long parody of the Sesame Street song
“I Love Trash!”; it was about the movie “Wall-E.” Some of it got ink in
Week 1029 :
Oh, I move trash!
After centuries of mankind’s excesses,
They’ve left me to clean up their messes,
So I move trash!
I’m a robot compactor of unit class Wall-E,
I clean up the residue of human folly;
At night I sit back and rewatch “Hello, Dolly!”
By day I go out and move trash! (the whole thing is on Facebook here
).
*Some non-inking entries I was similarly proud of:*
/For Week 924, fake facts about U.S. history:/ Before Francis Gary
Powers’s U-2 plane was shot down in Soviet airspace, his last words to
his CIA handlers were “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”
/For Week 1041, answers to questions posed in songs:/ Q. Does anybody
really know what time it is? (Chicago) A. At the sound of the tone...
/For Week 1142, tweets from a hybrid of two people:/ Nikita
Khrushchevita: Don’t cry for me, Soviet Union/ The truth is I never left
you/ I gave long speeches/ Till you were woozy/ And at the UN/ I banged
my shoesies.
*How about favorite Invite entries by other contestants? *
Beanie Babies is a good name for stuffed animals, but a bad name for a
Jewish preschool. (Edward Gordon)
Post headline: Doesn’t get any easier for Virginia
Bank head: Tyke to be told there is no Easter Bunny (Mark Raffman)
Name the panda Elvis
CIA reveals Bin Laden’s cryptic last words (Frank Osen)
Fake facts about U.S. history: As a community organizer in the Windy
City, young Barack Obama walked down eight roads before someone called
him a man. (Jonathan Hardis)
*What do you do when you’re not composing Invite entries?* I’m an
attorney at the FDIC, where I worked with famed Loser parodist Barbara
Sarshik before she retired. I sing tenor in the choir at my Episcopal
church in downtown D.C., where I also serve as treasurer, bread-baker
and homeless-breakfast cook. I also play Ultimate Frisbee, and dabble in
improv comedy. When not doing those things, I’m often playing with my
proto-Loser six- and three-year-olds, who wish the Invite involved more
Sesame Street and Thomas the Tank Engine.
*Do you have anything else to say for yourself? *
1. When I was 4, I went to see “Peter Pan,” twice. There’s a point when
Tinker Bell gets sick and the audience has to clap to make her better,
so the second time I started clapping long before she got sick.
Preventive medicine, you know.
2. I’m descended directly from two Civil War Union generals, one of whom
was the other’s son-in-law.
3. As an attorney in private practice, I once helped represent the
natives of Bikini Atoll in their (unfortunately unsuccessful) attempt to
get compensation from the U.S. government for the irradiation/partial
obliteration of their native islands.
*What is your favorite color?* Blue. No, yellow.