The Style Invitational Empress ruminates all over this week’s
contest and results
(Frank Mann, Washington), this week’s Meet the Parentheses subject,
selfie-poses in front of a poster by Gary Taxali, who designed the cover
of the album “@#%&*! Smilers,” by Frank’s sister. (Selfie by Frank Mann)
By Pat Myers
Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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March 10, 2016
Welcome back tothe contest we’ve been calling Questionable Journalism
since 2005. It goes back a lot further,
though: In Week 254 (1998), the Czar of The Style Invitational
introduced a contest called, God knows why, Double Jeopardy. It was
suggested by Jacob Weinstein of Los Angeles, who went on to accumulate
36 blots of ink — and an amazing five wins — until disappearing from the
Invite a decade ago. Jacob got several of those inks in that first
contest but not for any of its successors, headlined “Sentence Us to
Death” and “Deform of a Question” before we settled on, for some reason,
its current title.
When I realized last weekend that we hadn’t done this contest for well
over a year, I asked the members of the Style Invitational Devotees
group on Facebook if they’d like to offer some examples from that’s
day’s Post — since the Week 1166 restricts the sentences to papers from
March 10-21, tipping them off to the contest topic wasn’t going to
matter. There were several funny suggestions;you can see the thread here
along with the complete results from 2007 (if you haven’t joined the
group, go to on.fb.me/invdev and ask to join
and I’ll wave you in; in return, the Devotees will anagram your name
every which way).
For further inspiration in Week 1166, here’s a sampling of winners and
runners-up from 10 previous contests. If you want to see the complete
sets of results, go to Elden Carnahan’s Master Contest List
and
search on the week numbers below (or the word “questionable”); then look
at the right column three or four weeks down to find the link to that
week’s results. (Nonsubscribers to The Post: The links on the list don’t
count toward The Post’s monthly limit of free articles.)
*Line from The Post:* /Great legs in a short skirt make me melt./
*Question it answers:* Hey, Pillsbury Doughboy, why won’t you work with
Tina Turner? (Jean Sorensen, runner-up, Week 254, 1998)
A. /We gain information, via photons, of distant objects./
Q, How does Al Gore challenge the notion that he is too wooden and
remote, and that he lacks vision? (Russell Beland, winner, Week 415, 2001)
A. /I know I have to get up in the morning and put my underwear on first
and my pants on next./
After receiving some helpful advice on the subway today, how will I
change my dressing regimen tomorrow? (Marc Leibert, winner, Week 561, 2004)
A. /To some, the smell is an unpleasant mix of volatile organic
compounds (including benzene and acetone), mostly given off as gas from
the vinyl and other plastic materials, plus adhesive and sealers./
Q, What’s it like to be in an elevator with Cher? (Brendan Beary,
runner-up, Week 621, 2005)
A./I feel for the guy./
Q, Ms. Hilton, what do you do upon entering a darkened room? (Kevin
Dopart, winner, Week 667, 2006)
A. /They must also not appear partisan./
Q. In addition to being partisan, what’s expected of a U.S. attorney?
(Russell Beland, winner, Week 706, 2007)
A, /Adjö, Saab./
Q. Can you really type with your eyes shut? (Jeff Contompasis,
runner-up, Week 847, 2009)
A. /“We’re working our way happily and steadily through the process of
production.”/
Q. What did the mechanical engineer reply when his mother-in-law said,
“We hope you’ll soon make us proud grandparents”? (Cathy Lamaze, winner,
Week 962, 2012)
A. /“I think it’s a shame. The whole process of buying a record was so
special.”/
Q. What was Mark McGwire’s reaction to baseball’s latest steroid
suspensions? (John Folse, winner, Week 1053, 2013)
A. /Will begin to wane on Wednesday night./
Q. What was the phrase that persuaded the Weather Channel not to hire
Elmer Fudd? (Beverley Sharp, Week 1099, 2014)
*FAQ about the Q: If you’re entering Week 1166 *
*Can I quote a question to answer with my own question? * Yes, a
question is a sentence.
*How about a sentence fragment? What’s that vague “most of a sentence”
supposed to mean? *Yes, you can use a fragment (a phrase that doesn’t
have both a subject and a verb); see Beverley Sharp’s quote above from
the weather forecast. By “most of a sentence,” I mean that you don’t
have to include “Jones said” or even a sizable part of a long sentence,
as long as you’re not just excising a few words. Certainly don’t cobble
together disparate words within a sentence to make it say something else.
That said, sometimes there’s humor to be found within the attributions
and other seemingly throwaway words; for instance “Jones said” might
originally refer to Quincy Jones, but you could direct your question to
Geraldine Jones. Russell Beland, who was for many years the Invite’s No.
1 ink-blotter — and an ace at this particular contest — told me he
prided himself on figuring out how to incorporate those in-the-way
elements into a funny entry.
*How about capitalization and punctuation? * You have to leave it as it
is, except that you may omit the quotation marks in a quote. You can’t
add punctuation either, though a sentence doesn’t have to have quotation
marks for you to use it as a quote; see Kevin Dopart’s “I feel for the
guy” above. (Of course, if you’re omitting the beginning words of a
sentence, you should capitalize the beginning of “your” sentence.)
*Can I use a headline? * No, because the directions say “not a
headline.’ I know someone’s going to send me headlines anyway.
*How about a photo caption?* Yeah, that’s okay.
*How about the sentences that appear on The Post’s home page online?
*All right. See next paragraph.
*I don’t get the print paper, and I didn’t even buy even the $19-a-year
super-deal digital subscription to The Post. How can I do this contest
if I get to read only 20 free articles a month? * Find a few really long
stories and use them. Use the sentences on the home page. Also, articles
shared through Facebook and Twitter shouldn’t count against the paywall.
Give them a try. Or, you know, subscribe.
*I do subscribe. But why are you forcing me to look at every story in
The Washington Post for the next 11 days so I don’t miss the very best
sentences for this contest? *Go take a nap or something, Mr. Contompasis.
*ONION RINGERS*: THE HEADLINES OF WEEK 1162*
/*A non-inking alternative headline suggested by both Chris Doyle and
Mark Raffman, and possibly others/
Clearly a lot of you really /get/ the Onion and its headlines. I was
going to say “unparalleled headlines,” but I think we made it to the
same plane in Week 1162
.
I read through 135 straight pages of nothing but one-line hea dlines,
and culled a shortlist of well over 100 entries. After finishing the
print version of the Invite, I was planning to run more headlines on the
Web, but then realized that I’d already included 42 heads. I expect to
see some wuz-robbed entries in our yearly retrospective in December.
We ended up with a good mix of the news-satiric and the
everyday-events-satiric, juxtaposed as they are in the Onion itself (as
well as an online publication can do it; the Onion folded its print
edition a few years ago). Some of them would no doubt be great sources
for actual articles, but the Invite doesn’t have the format for that.
Anyway, the headlines are funny in themselves, and often the stories in
the Onion often just reiterate the joke that’s already told so pithily
in the headline anyway. (One thing that’s not a hallmark of the Onion is
the pun headlines. So for once, I mostly ignored the numerous pun entries.)
Neal Starkman’s ISIS tote bag — I read it just as my local NPR affiliate
had started its pledge drive — showed that you can indeed do a printable
ISIS joke. It’s the third win for Neal, and his 57th blot of ink
overall. Second place, though, goes to a new name to me: Mark Briscoe.
Mark had just eight blots of Invite ink, and only one them was during
the Empress Era — in 2005. But I’m delighted he’s back; among those
eight blots were a contest win and two-runners up. And now he’s 4 for 9
“above the fold.” (Early ink from Mark, in a contest for cynical takes
on sweet sentiments: “Every dog has his day. Of course, his day consists
of smelling other dogs’ butts.”) Filling out the Losers’ Circle are edgy
headlines by a couple of Invite big shots, 200-time Loser Lawrence
McGuire and Virtually at 500 Jeff Contompasis.
*Amor of Vincent:* The Invite was edited this week by super copy editor
Vince Rinehart, whom I hired decades ago for the Style copy desk — home
of the pun headline in the 1980s — in part because of a cover letter
consisting largely of fish puns. So of course I asked Vince for his
faves, and not surprisingly he kind of liked Megan Durham’s grammar
joke: “I just got to the copy editor headline, and have to change my
pants now.” After he freshened up, Vince also cited Art Grinath’s
Chipotle joke, Bruce Niedt’s weather forecast, and ink from two First
Offenders: Brian Finch on Chris Christie’s “I Participated” trophy, and
Michael Ginsberg’s “Schindler’s List on Ice.”
*The Onion might run these, but we wouldn’t: * The Onion has always been
very edgy with its satire, sometimes considerably edgier than even the
Invite. In any case, I wasn’t going to run these admittedly clever entries:
Abstinence-Only Group Kicks Off ‘Who Doesn’t Love Hand Jobs?’ Ad Blitz
(Brendan Beary)
And even edgier: Scalia Very-Late-Term Abortion 79 Years After Birth
Enrages Conservatives (Jeff Brechlin)
And with that, let’s ...
*MEET THE PARENTHESES: (FRANK MANN, WASHINGTON)*
** /Frank first dipped his toe in the inky Invite water in late 2012,
but it’s the last couple of years that he’s amassed most of his 42 blots
of ink so far, including two wins and four runners-up. Like our previous
Meet the Parentheses subjects, Frank used the Empress’s basic Q&A
template, adding and deleting whatever he wanted. /
*About me: *Age: mathematically speaking, there are three 19-year olds
living inside me. Residing in Glover Park, whose pronunciation is still
TBD (does it rhyme with “clover” or “lover”?); DEA lawyer; former TV
reporter; brother of Aimee Mann
(hush
hush, keep it down now).
*What brought me to the Invite:* Visited a museum and learned about
these things called newspapers. Read one and realized this was a way to
make a lot of money. Actually, I started sending in entries hoping to
get my name in the paper and make all my ex-girlfriends regret dumping me.
*Proof I’m a Loser:* Alfred E. Neuman is still my hero.
*Favorite entries:* The super-dumb ones. Like Week 1046, in which we
crafted a word or phrase containing the letter block SANE (in any order)
and then defined it. I wrote: “Mouse anus: Where one can easily fit
every good justification for the government shutdown.” I’m also proud
that I pushed the WaPo envelope in Week 1137 in the contest for spicy
titles for boring books: “The Joy of Doggy Style: 50 Cute Outfits for
Your Poodle.”
*What do you do outside of the Invite?* Practice guitar; annoy people by
playing guitar; ruin perfectly good dinner parties by whipping out my
guitar in lieu of socializing; read Thomas Pynchon novels and Samuel
Beckett plays and pretend I understand them. I also made two 48-hour
films — short films, 5 or 6 minutes, that you have only 48 hours to
write, cast, shoot and edit — that were politely applauded during their
premieres and never shown again. Here they are:
“French Toast”
(I’m the “French chef”)
“48 Hours to Nowhere”
(a western featuring a rubber duck)
*Who do you want to be when you grow up?* Walter Mitty.
*Do you have any decent stories?* As a TV reporter in Baltimore, I did a
live broadcast from the Great Blacks in Wax Museum. While helping the
photographer drag in the cables, we accidentally sawed off Marcus
Garvey’s index finger. Hoping the curator wouldn’t notice, we placed the
severed digit out of view, but he noticed it right away. Something tells
me he wanted to give us the finger, just not the one we amputated.
I also spent an entire morning chatting with Gilligan, the Professor and
Mary Ann, and I interviewed Barbara Eden at Elvis’s grave. And people
think my /sister / is some big deal.