Style Conversational Week 1176: You can’t Flush without water ... The Farm Flushies are on despite the rain forecast—and you can still pet the animals Rain or shine, Loser Robin Diallo's horses are among the animals ready to greet the Losers at Saturday's Flushies. It's not too late to RSVP! (Robin Diallo) By Pat Myers Pat Myers Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003 Email // Bio // Follow // May 19, 2016 Bad news: Chance of rain: 90 percent. Good news: Robin and Khalil Diallo have both a barn and an actual human-house. So not only will the Loser Community enjoy its 22nd annual Flushies awards banquet (in potluck form) and songfest safe from the elements, Robin says we can go into her barn — or even drive to it — and pet the goats, chickens and various other fauna at RK acres, her little farm in Lothian, Md., in Anne Arundel County. She just suggests that you not wear your best shoes — and that when you take them off when you come into the house, you might not want to be wearing your most holey socks. If you care. The Diallos — Robin is a 15-time Loser and notable prize-donor — are welcoming some 60 of us for the entire afternoon, from noon to about 6, so that we can take time after the structured festivities and lunch to tour the grounds and commune with the horses, llama, sheep, peacocks and sundry other fauna. And of course there’s always a chance that sunshine could make an unscheduled appearance. (Well, that would be a 1-in-10 chance.) Meanwhile, I’ve just printed out 55 copies of each of three custom-written song parodies — actually two parodies and a poem — that were written by Loser Extraordinaire Nan Reiner with contributions from other LEs as well. They are fabulous. And emcee Kyle Hendrickson has prepared a second edition of his Loser Jeopardy game, which he debuted at last year’s Flushies, at Danielle Nowlin’s house in Virginia. I’m delighted to report that the Loser of the Year, the Rookie of the Year and possibly some Other Things of the Year will be in attendance to be showered with honors as well as with precipitation, as will our newest Hall of Fame member, Jeff Contompasis, and Double Haller Brendan Beary. Nan is coming up from Florida just for the Flushies and Sunday’s Washington Post Hunt, while Matt Monitto is coming down from Connecticut for same. And as usual there will be lots of veteran Losers as well as some who’ll be joining us for the first time. And Mae Scanlan will be our keyboardist. The presentations, songs, Jeopardy, Empress-heckling, etc., will start around 2 p.m. and run for an hour or so. Before that we’ll schmooze and eat, and afterward we’ll do more of the same. While we hit the 60-person mark in RSVPs earlier this week, there were some late cancellations, and so /*it’s not too late to decide to come * /and to tell Flushies Pooh-Bah Elden Carnahan. (elden.carnahan (at) gmail (dot) com.) He’s asking each of us to pony (hahaha) up a big $5 to cover miscellaneous expenses; you can pay him at the event. I’ve also promised Door Prize Queen Pie Snelson that I will be bringing ten (10) pieces of miscellaneous crap to be wrapped up and “awarded.” And I just may, finally, regift to Robin the amazing carved-wood ashtray she sent me as a possible Invite prize (not EVER) from the Philippines, featuring a carved-wood life-size erect phallus. The Philippines was just one of the many places around the world from which Robin has sent us prizes: As a State Department diplomat, she’s reported to us from Malawi (the famous mcedo penis cap), Senegal, New Delhi and Kabul. And be sure, at the Flushies, to wish her well on her next posting, this fall: She’ll be the public affairs officer in Baghdad. For a year. For the second time. *EXTENDED DEADLINE FOR YOUR DEAD LINES* Once in a while I remember that there’s a holiday a couple of Mondays from now and I’ll give you an extra day to file entries. It’s more of a tradition, though, than a necessity: Back in the early days of the Invite — we started in 1993 — a lot of people needed to get back to the office fax machine to send us their entries. John Hutchins, who’s one of those people who show up and immediately start blotting up ink after ink — his first ink was for Week 1162, then Week 1165, and then at least once in six of the seven weeks since — displayed his acute Invite affliction when he suggested, in rapid succession, three different contest ideas, all of which show promise. This one, Week 1176, should allow for a variety of good joke-writing; I’m optimistic that the results will be perfectly lively. *THE NEW ENTRY SYSTEM — REALLY, IT’LL BE FINE * Last week the Invite shuffled into the 21st century with a Web-based entry submission system, rather than the old e-mails. And after tinkering with a few things, I can report that it seems to be going well. Some things we discovered after posting the debut contest for this, Week 1175 : -- The URL (Web address) we gave in the print edition was hard for some people to read; one person wrote to me that subpl.at/invite1175 looked exactly like subpl.at/Invite1175 (capitalization matters in these abbreviated URLs) and he couldn’t get it to work until his wife noticed the dot over the i. So from here on in, it’ll be subpl.at/INVITE1176 etc. — At least one person was irked to have to fill out his address in a form each week (not everyone has auto-fill), and someone else was concerned that some non-U.S. addresses might not work in the form. So I switched the address part to an open box where you can copy in your address. (This after I used two other inappropriate formats; I’m learning ...) But if people continue to send me addresses without the Zip code or even the name of the town, I’m going to have to go back to the form. — At least one person lost his entries because he closed out the page, or turned off his computer, before submitting his form. I do strongly suggest writing your entries on a Word document, email, etc., and then copying them over to the Web form; really, it’s good to do that for any site where you’re submitting comments. — I’ve gotten some nice bribe propositions in the comment field. Please feel free to let me know if you have any other problems or suggestions; some things I can fix myself, and Sruti the Web developer has been marvelously responsive and helpful for things I can’t. Email me at pat.myers@washpost.com. YOU WERE REALLY BRONCIN’! THE RESULTS OF WEEK 1172 Using the song “American Pie” for Week 1172, our latest word bank contest, worked just as I’d hoped: The Losers — especially a few of them — went to town combining words from the classic song’s multi-verse lyrics into jokes, funny dialogues, and even limericks and double dactyls. And while of course this is true to varying degrees to our readers, I think that many of us will quickly remember the original context of the words, and so catch the humor of how the Invite entry used it in a totally different way. This is why it’s best to use well-known writing for a word bank contest — in the past we’ve used the Gettysburg Address, “Hamlet,” “The Cat in the Hat” and the Book of Genesis — rather than, say, that week’s Invitational column (we did that, too). Some people didn’t seem to understand that we run a humor contest; they sent some lovely haiku and other musings; I have a feeling they’re gonna hatethis week’s results . One person cited various phrases in the song and “defined” them in his or her own words; I have no clue how the person got that idea that this was the contest. I wouldn’t have been able to have done this contest without the help of Gary Crockett, who was one of several Losers who offered to validate the entries with a custom-designed computer program. (See the bottom of this column for Gary’s description of the program, complete with some of the code.) This past weekend I sent him a list of 42 entries, and Gary promptly returned a list of nine that didn’t pass, with the invalid words marked in red. One of them was a long dialogue between God and Satan over who should get John Lennon, and whether a Rolling Stone was due imminently; that one had so many extra uses of “him,” “the” and other words that it was clear the author hadn’t read the direction that you couldn’t use a word more frequently than it appeared in the song. But most of the others were easily remedied by dropping the word or making another simple change, and some are among today’s inking entries. And the Losers would have had a much harder go of it had not Loser Todd DeLap not, immediately and of his own volition, assembled a word list specifying the number of times that each word appeared , Todd compiled his list the very morning that I posted the Week 1172 contest, fast enough for me to link to it in The Style Conversational a couple of hours later. At least Todd got ink today; although Gary got to see that one of his entries had made the short­list, it didn’t make the final cut. While runners-up Danielle Nowlin, Mark Raffman and Jeff Shirley are ubiquitous denizens of the Losers’ Circle, it’s the first win — indeed, the first appearance at all “above the fold” — for Mary Kappus, who gets her eighth blot of ink with her Inkin’ Memorial win, a tour-de-force description of the “quartet” of presidential candidates (before Ted Cruz had dropped out). Brilliantly funny stuff; I especially enjoyed “the Pink-oh” and, in reference to Cruz’s taxation philosophy, “no levee.” *Kress Has Fallen for ... * Steve Kress, who has the copy-editing duties for the Invite for the past few weeks, singled out three honorable mentions this week as his faves: Chris Doyle’s lament of a woman with 10 children in eight years, “He was into rhythm and I got the blues” (“This one made me laugh, and it was very well constructed … not a single awkward phrasing in the whole thing”; Jeff Shirley’s account of “the space people” coming down to mess with “my ‘can’ ”; and Kevin Dopart’s dig at opera: “Music of the Met: People die singing, and they take a long, long time to do so.” “This one is just plain snarky, so it was right up my alley,” Steve says. *Foul your mortal soul ... * An unprintable by Steve Honley: “The last gym I was inside was James,” said the good-looking man to the sweet teenage boy. Okay, people — see you Saturday! *OF NERDULAR INTEREST: HOW GARY CROCKETT VALIDATED THE WEEK 1172 ENTRIES * /I asked Gary if he’d like to share How He Did It: / What I did could be done with any number of programming languages, but there’s one called Python that’s very convenient to use for this kind of thing, and is becoming a common choice as the language used for introductory programming courses. I started by taking Todd DeLap’s word list and reformatting it so that it was a single list of comma-separated words, with each word appearing as many times in the list as in American Pie, rather than using the numbers from Todd’s list. I did that reformatting with a simple Python program, probably about a dozen lines of code (I didn’t keep it around). Then I wrote another Python program that repeatedly prompts for text to be tested and for each word in that text looks for it in the list, modifying the list as it goes along so the “used a word too many times” error will be caught. It spits out the same text in lower case except for words that are invalid, which it outputs in upper case. There’s a little more fiddling to deal with punctuation, upper/lower case, etc. Here is the whole program, except with a shortened version of the word list: AmPieWords = [ “a”, “a”, “a”, “a”, “a”, “a”, “a”, “a”, “a”, “a”, “a”, “a”, “a”, “a”, “a”, “a”, “a”, “a”, “about”, “above”, “adjourned”, “admire”, “again”, “ago”, “air”, “all”, “all”, “all”, (and so on for the rest of the words in American Pie...) “you”, “you”, “you”, “you”, “you”, “you”, “you”, “your”, “your”, “you’re” ] def standardize(word): ret = ‘’ for c in word: if not c.isalpha() and c != “’”: continue c = c.lower() ret += c return ret.rstrip(”’”) wordList = list(AmPieWords) for line in sys.stdin: outLine = ‘’ wordList = list(AmPieWords) line = line.replace(’-’, ‘ ‘) for word in line.split(): word = standardize(word) if word in wordList: outLine += word + ‘ ‘ wordList.remove(word) continue else: word = word.replace(”’”, ‘’) if word in wordList: outLine += word + ‘ ‘ wordList.remove(word) continue outLine += word.upper() + ‘ ‘ print(outLine)