The Style Invitational Empress ruminates all over this week’s
contest and results
L-hands — created by Loserfest Pope Kyle Hendrickson — mark the spot of
Loserfest 2016 in Pittsburgh. That’s the Empress going natural-hand,
behind Ann Martin in the front. Notes on Loserfest below. (Legends of
Pittsburgh)
By Pat Myers
Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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September 1, 2016
Yay, my house has power today! (Last Thursday, while I was writing the
Conversational, my electricity went out for no discernible reason,
forcing me to decamp to McDonald’s with my laptop and race my battery
until a tall person — watching 5-foot-1 me tiptoe futilely on a
windowsill — reached a ceiling outlet for me.)
Still, even with the little power-plug icon smiling at me from my
taskbar, I’m still going to conserve energy (mental, my own) and offer
guidance on Week 1191, our 14th iteration
(including variations) of the Mess With Our Heads contest, by pointing
you back to the Week 1141 Style Conversational
, from last September. In that column I
prattle on about offer wise counsel and fascinating reminiscences on:
* What counts as a headline for this contest
* What counts as a “significant part” of a headline
* How to show me the headline you’re using
* How to consider capitalization
* The very first bank head contest and the top winners.
Plus a confusing graphic!
And here are the still-making-me-laugh results of that Week 1141 contest
.
Don’t
use the same jokes.
*IMPORTANT FICKLE-EMPRESS UPDATE FOR WEEK 1190! *
Loserfest Pope Kyle Hendrickson just needs a miter and scepter as he
sits in the University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning. (Mark Holt)
Nanoseconds after I posted the Week 1190 name
chain contest, Losers started asking me for a clarification: When I said
the chain must be “including one title of a work,” did that mean /at
least/ one title or /only/ one title? I immediately answered: Only one.
It wasn’t until days later that it finally sank in that /the example for
the contest /contained two names within quotes: “Anchors Aweigh” and
“Naked Cowboy.” (It was my mistake in transcribing Loser Sandra Hull’s
example; Naked Cowboy is a guy, not a work.)
And so I am — with six days left of the contest, since the deadline is a
Labor Day-extended Sept. 6 — changing my call, and will now take chains
that have two or more titles. And while there can’t be /that/ many of
you for this time-consuming contest: *If you have already sent the maxi*
*mum 25 entries for this contest, you may send as many as 25 more.; it
is my penance. *
*HOW LOSERY CAN YOU GET? YOU CAN STILL MANAGE TO ENTER THE WRONG CONTEST!*
I’d thought that with our move to submitting entries through the
Internet, I’d finally solved the problem of people putting the wrong
week number on their entries, which then weren’t seen till too late:
Now, each Invitational contest contains a link to a unique Web address;
this week, for instance, contains this link
, which goes to the form for Week 1191,
and nowhere else.
And the link to bit.ly/enter-invite-1187
goes
to, yup, the form for Week 1187, a neologism contest. The form even has
a giant headline on it with the week number AND the title of the contest.
And where did 323-time Loser Craig Dykstra enter his funny and
well-crafted full-length parody of “Jabberwocky” for Week 1186? Yup,
right onto the form labeled “Style Invitational Week 1187: Just Drop It,
Okay? A neologism contest.” I just saw it a few days ago, amid the stack
of neologisms, the best of which appear today.
The most Loserly Loserfest activity: Knockerball, in which you squeeze
yourself into a plastic ball, then crash into other people. This proved
not the gentle-bouncy experience we had expected. But we had the best
costume since the "SNL" Bees.
As Craig reflects ruefully: “As they say, nothing is idiot-proof; the
best you can hope for is idiot-resistant.”
Loser.
Yes, I could prevent this by not creating the easy-to-predict URL that I
do each week. But it’s very useful for me to do it this way, and we do
need an easy-to-type URL for the print Invite. So you’re just going to
have to submit your entries while you are at least partially awake.
*Another little problem with the entry form: * By request of a number of
Losers, the address field lets you copy your whole address in, rather
than the street in one field, the town in another, etc. However: *This
means that auto-fill will probably mess up your address*; I end up only
with your street address, no town or Zip code. So if you’re using
auto-fill, please check the address field to make sure it’s all there.
For this reason, I’ve had to look up a lot of your addresses when I’m
mailing out prizes. Which means I know what your house looks like! Keep
me out of your yard — give me your full address. (Nice house you have,
by the way, though that crabgrass is starting to get out of hand near
the mailbox.)
*OUR WITS’ ENDS*: THE DROP-THE-LAST-LETTER NEOLOGISMS OF WEEK 1187
*
(*Non-inking headline suggestion by Chris Doyle)
The neologism contest I call Our Greatest Hit, one we’ve done several
times over, and one of the contests that have been flying around the
Internet since 1998, is to change a word by one letter — and that
includes dropping a letter. And so the Week 1187
challenge, to drop the final letter of a word
or phrase, is actually a subset of that one. But unless I missed
noticing that one of this week’s inking entries already got ink in
another contest, that proved no obstacle: I had one of the larger sets
of entries that I’ve gotten for a neologism contest; there were at least
2,000 entries among the 257 Losers who entered; a whopping 35 of you got
ink.
And while this week’s Losers’ Circle features three Usual Suspects —
it’s Danielle Nowlin’s ninth Inkin’ Memorial, and Mark Raffman and Matt
Monitto blot up ink with so much regularity that they’re getting the
Serutan endorsement — this week’s third runner-up is a First Offender:
that’s Daniel Galef with his sarcastic “World Wide We.”
I was hoping to hear more soon from Daniel — and sure enough, just
yesterday afternoon I got the link to the new Lighten Up Online
magazine,
a British light-verse quarterly in which Loserbards regularly get ink
(well, sometimes it’s more that the Lighten Up folks get the occasional
Invite ink). And there, along with the poems by Invite stars Mae Scanlan
and Edmund Conti and Melissa Balmain and Brian Allgar, there was Daniel
channeling classic Ogden Nash, with couplets of absurdly long lines
rhyming (often creatively) with short ones. Here’s the opening to his
“Don’t Act Now”
:
/“Those who claim that the opportunity to chase your dreams is a
blessing have obviously been issued a defective edition of the
dictionary in which, possibly among several other minor errors, the
definition of the word ‘blessing ‘ has been substituted for that of the
word ‘curse’;/ /
After all, time changes things, for the worse:/ /
But, thankfully, on a note you will if you haven’t already, or won’t if
it’s too late, find discordant, / /
With time, you’ll see, dreams become less impordant./
Along with the nifty neologism/definition combos that got ink today, I
also marked about 20 great terms whose descriptions didn’t quite measure
up. Perhaps I’ll put them up to the minds of the crowd in a future
contest, as we’ve done before. (I also had some great no-inking anagrams
last week that deserve another go as sources for poems.)
*What Doug Dug:* Ace copy editor Doug Norwood, who read the column
yesterday, also loved Danielle’s deft “Obamacar” analogy. He also
singled out Kevin Tingley’s “Billie Jean Kin” (maybe I should have
linked to these lyrics
)
Sylvia Betts’s “finge,” Mike Gips’s “blunderbus,” Josh Feldblyum’s
“heavy meta” and Lawrence McGuire’s “beaten Pat.”
*YINS MISSED SOME FUN IN PITTSBURGH: LOSERFEST 2016*
Though putting out last week’s Invite/Convo caused me to miss the first
day, I’m still winding down from the breakneck (well scrape-knee)
weekend with a dozen Losers and auxiliaries in downtown Pittsburgh and
several outlying areas. After several years AWOL, Kyle Hendrickson
(aided by Ur-Loser Elden Carnahan) once again donned the self-awarded
miter of Loserfest Pope, organizing four days of morning-to-night
activities, many of them not on the typical guided tour.
Craziest was the game of Knockerball (see the third photo down), in
which we quickly came to terms with the fact that we were no longer
teenagers. But we also got a private tour of an avant-garde art gallery
featuringmind-blowing light effects;
a
chance to make blown-glass ornaments and other keepsakes with a
professional glass artist in his studio
; a sketch/improv show by a
touring Second City troupe; a visit to a fabulously bizarre bicycle
collection ; a tour of the
Nationality Rooms at the
University of Pittsburgh; one of those amphibious tours, in which both
Kyle and Cheryl Davis got to drive the boat; a visit to Fallingwater;
more stuff I forgot; a night of board games; plus a LOT of eating.
I am deeply indebted to the Royal Consort, who drove the car up and
back, enabling me to work (partially) through a yuge stack of Invite
entries.
See the photo album on Facebook
for
lots more evidence.
Where next year? People were talking about Iceland, but it will be
somewhere more budget-friendly. Closer than Pittsburgh would be fine.
Kyle is happy to hear suggestions.
*BACK TO THE BRUNCHES: SEPT. 18, CHADWICKS, OLD TOWN ALEXANDRIA*
I was planning for this one but I can’t make it after all; however, it’s
always been a fun and conveniently located Loser Brunch spot. It’s at
noon. RSVP to Elden Carnahan at NRARS.org, the Losers’ website; click on
“Our Social Engorgements.”
Meanwhile, let’s hope that Hermine mines her own business and books it
out to sea.