Style Conversational Week 1183: Ooh, wouldn’t that make a nice Invite trophy? There are exactly 29 Inkin’ Memorials left. Then we’ll need something new. The Style Invitational appears in the print Washington Post in black-and-white, so it didn't make sense to show the Illumibowl there. Here's this week's second prize. (Illumibowl.com) By Pat Myers Pat Myers Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003 Email // Bio // Follow // July 7, 2016 Actually, the photo above is of a full-size toilet (or several of them) beautified courtesy of the Illumibowl, a little box that might have also been called the Headlight; I’ll be giving it away to the second-funniest person in Week 1183 of The Style Invitational. So no, it wouldn’t be the best choice for a Loser’s bookshelf, and so I’m now thinking up other ideas for a first-place trophy to replacethe Inkin’ Memorial when I send the last of them away, probably in January. The Inkin’ Memorial — a.k.a. the Bobble-Linc — made its debut in Week 966, in 2012. It replaced the Inker, which I instituted when I ascended to the Empress-ship in Week 536 more than eight years earlier (before that, there was no trophy; the special gag prize went to the winner). I hadn’t planned on it — the supply of cheapo “Thinker” bookends had suddenly dried up when I did my annual surfing of wholesale-kitsch sites to find the best price for the next 50 boxes — which meant that it was a bit of a scramble to come up with something fitting, cheap, and available in quantities of at least 100. But after a night of Googling, I did find a bobblehead of the Lincoln Memorial statue, and bought up the entire supply from Bobbleheads.com — all 15 of them. And evidently there were no more to be had anywhere. But after some negotiation in the ensuing weeks, Bobbleheads Honcho Warren Royal agreed to commission a new Lincoln from a (but of course) Chinese manufacturer, if we would buy 200 and he’d keep the other 50. Anyway, even if Warren were interested in doing that all over again, I think it’s better to get a new first-place trophy. It’s not just that Abe has had an unfortunate tendency to arrive at the winner’s home, well, decapitated (the Royal Consort, who’s repaired a number of them, suggested I send a little tube of superglue with each trophy). It’s that some Losers have had the rotten luck to win a whole lot of them: Since Week 966, Kevin Dopart has won six, Chris Doyle eight, Brendan Beary and Mark Raffman 10 each, and Nan Reiner /thirteen. / Not surprisingly, they’ve all asked me to stop sending any more of them. Nan arranged hers in the field of a little baseball diamond along with a designated hitter before calling off the Lincs. So come January, I hope to be offering something as Invite-appropriate as the Inker and the Inkin’ Memorial. I found something that I think would work really well, but will welcome suggestions. The current guy cost us about $12 apiece. The Inkin’ Memorial has served us well as a first-place trophy for more than four years. Meanwhile, I do plan to commission very soon a new Grossery Bag for runners-up, since we’re out of the Whole Fools tote bag and its predecessor, (Al)most Valuable Player. I think I’ll use one of other the inking entries from the 2012 contest for bag ideas, Week 964, which supplied the first two versions. And I’m down to about a dozen Loser Mugs — between the “This Is Your Brain on Mugs” and LOVE/LOSER designs — and so hopefully I can get the money for a new mug order as well. They’re all, in my opinion, great little prizes — even the magnets are. But I’m also happy that none of these prizes is of significant /monetary/ value. Because otherwise, disgruntled non-inkers might start complaining of being robbed financially, rather than just being unappreciated by an incompetent judge. And you can imagine what can follow from that. (My robotic answer to kvetchers: If the Invite is no longer fun for you to play, please don’t play.) *HONESTLY, WHAT’S TO SAY ABOUT WEEK 1183?* Well, let’s see: Week 1183 should be a wide-open contest, since “honest” has a lot of meanings, and I’m willing to consider any observational humor that’s funny and clever. I’d think there’d be some similarity in content (not format) with our contests that asked contestants to translate a quote in the newspaper into “Plain English,” such as this entry by Russell Beland in Week 729: Quote: “And — let’s be honest here —” PE: “And — let me sugarcoat this a little less than usual — ” Note that I said “roughly in the form of ...” If a slightly different format results in a better joke, go for it. *The BACcalaureates*: THE RESULTS OF WEEK 1179* /(non-inking headline by Jeff Contompasis)/ The Week 1179 contest was to come up with any three-word A-B-C phrase (or ACB, BAC, or any other arrangement). In general, I found that I preferred the phrases that could conceivably be used as an ABC abbreviation, such as Gary Crockett’s “Business Class Alternative” (you could imagine an airplane ticket labeled BCA) or Duncan Stevens’s legalistic Collective Boinking Agreement Ed Gordon’s “BAC” as textspeak for ancient times, or “before advent of cellphones.” But I also got a kick out of just-three-words phrases like Amanda Yanovitch’s “ ‘A Bear!’ (Crunch.): The final line in Quentin Tarantino’s new Goldilocks film,” and this one by Kimberly Baer: “Affairs, Being, Confusion”: How fifth-grade wiseacre Ethan Splunk responded when asked by his geography teacher to name three states. It’s the first Inkin’ Memorial, and just the 10th blot of ink overall, from newcomer Chris Damm, who proposed Cot And Bagel as a term for a cheapo bed-and-breakfast. I was delighted to meet Chris in January at the Losers’ Post-Holiday Party, to which he’d driven all the way from West Virginia, and am similarly pleased that Chris gets props after going inkless with a slew of song parodies in Week 1177, some of which were great but whose length and repetition didn’t work as songs-to-read. Melissa Balmain has two kids /and / teaches college students, so I’d be shocked if she turned down the fabulous grandpa-shaped electronic bubble fart machine that Chris Doyle didn’t want. Her “Aryan Battle Cry,” of course, has only gotten better in the past week in a wider context. Meanwhile, Jon Gearhart picks up his seventh ink “above the fold” as he barrels past the 75-ink mark, and the legsome Gary Crockett (“don’t send me any more stuff”) snags his 32nd ATF ink as he lopes toward 300 blots of ink. There wasn’t a lot of Scarlet Letter fare this week, but there was this unprintable from Alex Jeffrey: Bactrian Abortion Clinic: Because a camel’s gotta hump. We have used “abortion” in Style Invitational a few times in the past 23 years (“a PROLIFERATION of abortion protesters”). Alex’s entry wasn’t going to be one of them. *COME HAVE BRUNCH WITH ME AND THE LOSERS, JULY 17* This month’s Loser brunch is on Sunday, July 17, at noon, at Grevey’s pub just outside the Beltway in Northern Virginia. It’s typical brunchy-lunchy food (they’ve dispensed with the buffet). I’m always eager to meet new Losers and reconnect with the regulars. RSVP on the Losers’ website at NRARS.org (click on “Our Social Engorgements”) . *LOSERFEST CONTINUES TO FESTER* Loserfest Pope Kyle Hendrickson continues to enhance the slate (or coal?) of activities for this year’s Loserfest field trip, to Pittsburgh Aug. 25-28 (or parts thereof). The Royal Consort and I plan to go up on Friday. Check out Loserfest.org to see what’s in store, and to sign up. **