Style Conversational Week 1171: Our compliments to The Jeff Hall of Famer (Jeff Contompasis, Ashburn, Va.) tells us how he’s blotted up 500 inks Among Jeff Contompasis’s many talents: shaking his head so that a ball on a string lands into a cup. Nose Aerobics Basketball was a Loser prize. (Yes, Jeff suggested we use this photo.) (M.K. Phillips) By Pat Myers Pat Myers Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003 Email // Bio // Follow // April 14, 2016 (Click here to skip down <#report> to the Empress’s discussion of this week’s new contest and results) Except for a couple of minutes each Thursday, when I’m writing up the Conversational and check to see how many blots of ink that week’s top winners have, I don’t tend to follow the Loser Stats, the jaw-droppingly comprehensive set of Style Invitational ink standings that’s been maintained and enhanced by Loser Elden Carnahan since Year 1 in 1993, now atnrars.org. And so it slipped my mind that for weeks, Jeff Contompasis had been baby steps away from the Hall’s doorbell — and boom, he hit the magic 500-ink mark three contests ago. If Jeff tooted his own horn about it, he didn’t toot it to me. Anyway, we’re delighted that Jeff is now Haller No. 11, with eight wins and 34 runners-up among his 502 blots of ink. As he notes below, he’s not one of those people who decided to enter the Invite and immediately started inking up the joint; in each of his first four years, his ink total was in the single digits (his first was in a contest for right-leaning humor: “The difference between a conservative commentator and a liberal commentator? One is called a conservative commentator; the other is called a commentator”). But then, clearly, The Obsession struck, and the chemical engineer was entering a full “dance card” of 25 entries a week, and scoring in just about any kind of contest I threw out there. Meanwhile, JefCon — as he’s often called on theStyle Invitational Devotees Facebook group — became a beloved Invite celebrity with his “Is it just me, or ...” nerdy musings, like: “Is it just me who finds the concept of do-gooders and evil-doers inconsistent? Wouldn’t it be better if there were do-evilers? Or maybe good-doers?” While he’d avoided it for some time, Jeff agreed this week to do a “Meet the Parentheses” bio. And after I saw his Devotees post about all the polishing he’d done on an entry that was a single crossword clue, I also asked him to write about the process of being A True Loser. MEET THE PARENTHESES: (JEFF CONTOMPASIS, ASHBURN, VA.) *Age:* A few months younger than Sandra Bullock, but she’s held up a lot better. Bob Staake, who’d met Jeff at a book reading, drew Jeff for the ScrabbleGrams contest Jeff suggested. Jeff goes all nerdy in telling about that contest in his “Meet the Parentheses” bio today. (Bob Staake for The Washington Post) *Residing in *Ashburn (or Bun Rash for the anagram fans out there), in D.C.’s outer suburbs. Before that, Southern California after having survived growing up in the rough-and-tumble affluent suburbs of Boston. *What brought me to the Invite:* I moved from California to Virginia in 1996 and started subscribing to the fishwrap edition of The Post. There was this funny contest in it and upon reading the results, I said, “I can do better than this.” Note: My First Ink finally came in 2004. *Proof I’m a Loser:* I was once pulled over for going through a green light. Although colorblind (I prefer the term Daltonian-American*), I knew that wasn’t right. I went to court after obtaining photographic evidence that the light was staggered, and the clerk-magistrate dismissed the ticket and requested my license. Then he noticed that my stated residence did not match the one on the card. “Did you move?” he asked. “Yes,” I answered. “More than three weeks ago?” he asked. “Yes,” I answered. “That’s a $25 fine.” Snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. /*John Dalton published one of the first papers on colorblindness and had the condition himself. / *Favorite entries:* Anything not involving bodily waste. I say this knowing that my Ink No. 500, the multiple-choice question à la “Wait Wait ... Don’t Tell Me,”referenced camel urine . On a more serious note, I do have a most memorable entry from Week 893, which asked for a humorously witty story in 25 words or fewer. This contest happened to run during a family health crisis in late 2010. While sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, I tried to distract myself by writing something — and I figured that if I could laugh, even in that time and place, over my one-line, updated telling of “The Manchurian Candidate,” the joke had to be pretty good. It won the Inker: Hanoi, 1969: General Nguyen asked the colonel, “How can we use the prisoner to defeat America from within?” Ha replied, “I have an idea.” — “The Wasillan Candidate” *Favorite recurring contest:* Ask Backwards . There’s a reason why it’s been run over 30 times. *Least favorite recurrent contest:* Joint Legislation. If you need a pronunciation guide to get the joke... *What do you do outside of the Invite? *If people didn’t already know, I generate many of the anagrams of Loser names posted at Elden Carnahan’s nrars.org site. I’m a Disney trivia expert specializing in the history of the US-based theme parks. Also, I have two rabbits, Irene and Lily, who wear a cowboy hat and a kicky beret while we explore various urban legends as the MythBunsters. *Who do you want to be when you grow up? *The copy editor for Scrabble Grams. *Do you have any decent stories?* During Easter services, my daughter Emily was being fidgety. I gave her a pen so she could draw on some scrap paper. Suddenly I noticed that she’d started playing connect-the-dots with the musical notes in the hymnal. And just when as the priest intoned, “Do you reject Satan?” I shouted, “No!” to my child. It was around then I took up snake handing. *What would someone be surprised to learn about you?* I have never owned or even used a firearm. *Your official Loser anagram:* Enjoys Office Tramps. I rather like the fact that the letter “J” is hidden inside a word. Myopic Fan of Jesters is also a favorite along with about 80,000 other permutations. *What do people who’ve never heard of the Invite know you as?* Rap Master SquigglyB rendered as the German character /Eszett,/ or ß. It’s just one of the many ways I maintain my unlimited supply of street cred. *Anything else to say for yourself?: * I was Loser of the Year for Year 18, but because of a delay in scheduling the Flushies awards, I ended up holding the LoTY trophy for the shortest length of time of any recipient. I am the William Henry Harrison of the SI. /Jeff’s “So You Want to Be a Hall of Fame Loser” appears farther down this column. / Meanwhile, the Empress ruminates all over this week’s contest and results: . MUSICAL ’GATES: THE WEEK 1171 CONTEST Theresults of our Week 970 “tailgater” contest were classic. The winner: Since there’s no help, come, let us kiss and part; I read Dave Barry books, and you read Sartre. (Michael Drayton , 1563- 1631/ Brendan Beary, Great Mills, Md.) So in a tailgater, you quote a line from a poem, then add your own, rhyming line to make it a funny couplet. And this is what we’ll be doing as well in Week 1171 , in which you have to quote from a song rather than a spoken-word poem — /you’ll still be forming a rhyming couplet, / even if the second line of the /song /doesn’t do that: It’s not — or not necessarily — the second line of a song parody; it doesn’t have to follow the tune. */Can / it match the tune as long as it rhymes?* Sure. Will that make it a funnier entry? Possibly. Duncan Stevens’s examples for this contest are all at least somewhat singable with the original tunes, and I thought they were all very good. *Please check the lyrics you’re quoting;* don’t just guess — I can’t use your line if it’s not really from the song. I haven’t decided whether I’ll be attributing the original line to the writer, as we did in Week 970, or just the title of the song. In the online Invite, I’ll do my best to include links to the lyrics or a performance of the whole song, for context. I know I’ll love to have a wide variety of song genres in the results. *Is it a problem if the song isn’t well known?* Probably not that much; my guess is that many readers didn’t know all the poems in Week 970. It’s certainly not the same with a song parody, in which if you don’t know the tune, the joke just dies. But a recognizable line in a new context can indeed be a potent source of humor. *What counts as “a line” of a song? *I’m going to be flexible here. If two short lines can be read as one long line, that’s fine with me for the purposes of this contest. *Does it have to be the first line of the song?* No, you can use any line. *Should you add your name to the line you write, right within the entry *— like the examples at the top of the Invitational? NOOOOO, please don’t. I greatly prefer to judge the entries blindly, without seeing the entrants’ names. It would take a long, long time to delete the name from every entry — it’s long enough taking the name off every email. And if this contest inspires you to write a full-length song parody, be my guest; you can share it on the Style Invitational Devotees page after the results run. SOME LINKAGE MAY OCCUR*: THE RESULTS OF WEEK 1167 /(*Non-inking headline by Tom Witte) / My judging of this perennial contest was made far easier this year with the help of Loser Jonathan Hardis. Jonathan offered to use a program he’d devised to sort all the entries by each of the 18 phrases I listed in Week 1167 , for you to compare, contrast or otherwise connect. Given that the Losers phrased their entries in every conceivable format, I didn’t think he’d be able to do it without a ton of work, but Jonathan shot back the list I’d sent him (I’d deleted all the names and other non-entry material) within a few hours. And just as he’d helped me do (and will do again) in the horse-“breeding” contest, I was able to see all the “Hillary’s emails” combined with “the last Cheeto in the bag,” and then all the “Hillary’s emails” with “tiny hands,” and so on. So I could then select my favorite among several similar entries, or occasionally credit two people. I chose the 18 phrases almost at random from a long list that I crowdsourced from the Style Invitational Devotees a few weeks ago. I didn’t rigorously ensure than no single person had written two of the phrases, but I’d be gobsmacked to discover that anyone got ink this week by comparing two items that he’d suggested. It’s the third win and 75th blot of ink for Mike Ostapiej, who’s been following the Invite from both San Diego and his current base in South Carolina. Kathy El-Assal, whom we met at a Loser brunch last year when she was visiting Washington from Wisconsin, gets Ink 35 and her fourth ink “above the fold.” Kristen Rahman — whom I recently took out for a milkshake in return for a contest idea (I am soooo magnanimous) — gets her choice of mug or shirt with her dig at Apple’s production practices. And Danielle Nowlin saunters for the — yeeks — 27th time into the Losers’ Circle. *What Doug dug: * The faves of ace copy editor Doug Norwood this week: the Cheeto/tiny hands “orange mess” by First Offender Paul Totman — the first ink ever from Alberta? — whose analogy was my favorite of numerous similar entries; the “official server” for buffet/emails, for the second ink ever from Hildy Zampella, also the best of several “server” entries; and the mildly risque “big plow” with the mildly risque “tiny hands” by Gary Crockett. SO YOU WANT TO BE A HALL OF FAME LOSER? /Jeff Contompasis tells how it’s done — or at least how he did it. / *How to go about it. Step 1. Enter.* That seems obvious, but one should not summarily dismiss a contest by saying “That’s too hard.” Even one good entry is enough because so many others give up thinking it’s too hard. There are a number of different contest types and the Master Contest List at nrars.org already has many of them categorized. Several perennial contests offer exceptionally good examples to guide an ink-thirsty contestant. Horse names are run every year and the prior years’ results reveal common elements such as names with puns of common phrases and homophones. My favorite contest, Ask Backwards, is supposedly based on Jeopardy! and its “Answers and Questions” format. However, it’s more like Johnny Carson’s recurrent Carnac routine, so watching some videos of those segments provides a good background. *Some contests are “crank and grind” efforts.* The epitome of this is the three-letter abbreviation contest. There is an extensive list at Wikipedia where all permutations are covered. If a range of four starting letters is given, that yields 4 x 26 x 26, or 2704, abbreviations to look at. Brute force won’t get very far — believe me. I’ve tried. Go for abbreviations you recognize and see what surprising other things share those initials. *Some contests require finesse.* Poetry and song parodies come to mind here. There are online resources available with rhyming dictionaries and just about every song imaginable has its lyrics stored somewhere though many transcriptions are not quite accurate. Read potential poems aloud and attempt to sing potential songs to a karaoke version of the piece. For pretty much every contest, if you have time,*let your entries sit around for a few days.* Then go back to them; it’s surprising how a cold reading reveals flaws and inspires better wordings. You don’t get any advantage in the judging from sending in your entry early anyway. *If you’re stuck, try lateral thinking.* Don’t write an entry. Try to come up with a Revised Title or Honorable Mentions section name. You’re still thinking about what the contest concerns without being focused solely on writing a joke. Inspiration comes from the weirdest places. On the opposite extreme are*things that destroy entries.* *Screed kills.* Genuine anger seeps through and poisons humor. That’s another reason to let entries lie fallow: with distance, a knee-slapping joke that skewers some much maligned figure suddenly sounds more like a cheap shot. Another common humor reducer is *the circular reference.* Defining a new term by using the same word almost always ruins the entry. Try to substitute a synonym that doesn’t sound strained. Remember there are*other ways to get ink.* Some Losers supply the runner-up prize. Others try to come up with a new contest, or a new variation on a previous contest. I’ve only created one truly novel contest exclusively for The Style Invitational. That would be the Tile Invitational, which is based upon the ScrabbleGrams puzzles that appear in The Post. Here’s the origin story: I was looking at the printed solution to a ScrabbleGrams puzzle one day, and it had given CANOLA as the best yield for the seven letters NOCALAT. Well, I have two degrees in chemical engineering, and so I saw OCTANAL, which everyone knows is the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry’s name for octyl aldehyde or, more commonly, caprylic aldehyde. How dare they not accept it! From then on, I started noting six-letter solutions and tried to come up with better seven-letter neologisms complete with funny definitions. And it took a year before I finally persuaded the Empress to use it as a contest. As with so much of the Invite, obsessive persistence pays. --- And of course, it also pays to be naturally funny. And Jeff just might be funnier than you.