Style Conversational Week 1210: What to do when you don’t have enough class With just 50-some congressional freshmen this year, we had to pad the ‘joint legislation’ list For the next 1,000 "honorable" mentions: The 2017 Bob Staake magnets arrived yesterday at the Empress's palace, Mount Vermin. (Pat Myers/The Washington Post) By Pat Myers Pat Myers Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003 Email // Bio // Follow // January 12, 2017 The “joint legislation” contest — today in Week 1210 we bring you the 15th running — was my first real contribution to The Style Invitational: Many years before, the Royal Consort (in his pre-Consort days) had shared a game he was playing with co-workers: to come up with co-sponsored “bills” based on the combination of congressional names — e.g., “the Pepper-Laxalt Sodium Control Act.” And so I suggested it to the newly (self-) appointed Czar of The Style Invitational, and ta-da, Week 5, “There Ought to Be a Law,” April 1993. That first contest invited readers to combine any two names in the whole Congress, and it was so successful that the Czar ran the results over two weeks, with two full sets of winners. The two first prizes: The Watt-Eshoo-Dunn-Furse-Leahy Pork Barrel Protection Act (by Carol Vance) and The Cantwell-English-Read Dyslexia Research Funding Bill (Jacki Drucker). But the entry the Czar remembers after all these years is the first week’s second-place winner: The Traficant-DeLay-Akaka Roadside Port-A-Pot Act (Carole and Stephanie Dix). Naturally, the Czar wanted to do the contest over again, but didn’t want to get the same entries. So in Week 90, just after the 1994 elections, he put up a list of the 102 freshmen of the 104th Congress — the famous (or infamous) Republican “Contract With America” invasion in the middle of Bill Clinton’s first term, headed by the new House Speaker Newt Gingrich. You could argue that this year’s 115th Congress might have just as significant an effect on American society, but it won’t be because there are so many new faces: This year’s freshman class is barely half the size of the 1995 group. And so, as I did in 2015 to a smaller extent, I’ve padded out the list of lawmakers with a sizable number of incumbents: the rest of the Maryland and Virginia delegations; D.C. Del Eleanor Holmes Norton; and around a dozen I chose arbitrarily, one per state, until I felt the list was long enough. Some of those names have never appeared in our previous contests; others have, but then again, almost every freshman class includes /someone/ named Johnson. But of course you’re combining them with different names, so there should be plenty of fresh joke material. (And last time we neglected to include the brand-new Rep. Brat.) If you’re new to the joint legislation contest, it’ll be useful to look at my comments in The Style Conversational in February 2015 about the results of Week 1107, our most recent Send Us the Bill. I share one particularly impenetrable entry, along with the guesses from theStyle Invitational Devotees Facebook group about what it might mean. The takeaway: Ask someone else to read your entry to see if it’s understandable outside the confines of your own skull (without prompting). The visiting-from-Michigan Loser Jesse Frankovich managed to graft himself onto Mark Raffman's head at a hastily arranged Dorkness at Noon lunch at a downtown Potbelly. Across the table, from left, are John Hutchins, Kevin Dopart and the Empress. Sometimes I’ll be scratching my tiara at an entry, unable to get it, but it’ll be clear to everyone else — and, once it’s explained, I’ll sometimes say, “Ohhhh. Well, huh, that’s pretty good.” And give it ink. This is why, for the Week 1107 results, I ran two separate pages: one with explanations at the ends of the entries, one (the primary one) without . I’ll probably do that this year as well. In any case, I do appreciate your sending me explanations beneath your entries; when I’m looking at literally thousands of these, there’s only so much time that I’m going to puzzle over one before going to the next one. But do give me a chance to try — so please put the explanation at least on a lower line, or in a block under all the entries. (Please /don’t /put the explanations in a whole separate submission; that would be really inconvenient and would lead to some less-than-regal words coming out of the royal kisser.) For more inspiration, you can see the results of all the Joint Legislation contests in the Master Contest List at the Losers’ own website, NRARS.org : The easiest way is to search that list for “Congress”; when you see the description of one of the contests, say Week 903, then look at the right column of the chart for the Week 903 results a few weeks down. *THE DO-OVER DO-OVER: THE 2016 RETROSPECTIVE, PART 2 — WEEK 1206* (If I didn’t call Week 1206 “Week 2016” at least once, I’ll give myself a magnet.) This second of two consecutive weeks of retrospective contests proved even more Usual Suspecty than Week 1205, which did yield a First Offender; the entry pool consisted largely of Invite regulars sending their 26th through 50th favorite non-inking entries of the past year, with the substitution of some new tries. I did have plenty of inkworthy submissions both weeks, but if I do a two-week retrospective a year from now, I think I’d run one contest for the first half of the year, the other for the second half. And once again, a quartet of moderate-to-severe Invite Obsessives took up the four spots in the Losers’ Circle, topped by the 15th win by Nan Reiner. For the second straight week, Ridiculously Successful Phenom Jesse Frankovich got four blots of ink, this time including a runner-up; last week’s winner, William Kennard — up to then a sporadic ink-getter — netted three honorable mentions to add to his four inks from last week. (In last week’s Conversational I wondered what William had started putting in his Alpha-Bits; he wrote in to say that it was “Fiber Two, of course.”) *What Doug Dug:* Ace copy editor Doug Norwood agreed with me on the four winners (as our future president would conclude, he is very smart); he also singled out Kathy Al-Assal’s horse name Loo Tenant; Chris Doyle’s “When you’re a Jet” dig at Tom Brady; and Jesse Frankovich’s parody of “The Joker,” featuring the great line “Some people call me a base clownboy.” *Speaking of Jesse: *The 124-time Loser from Lansing was in Washington this week to attend a transportation convention. He had warned the Style Invitational Devotees a few days earlier, and several of us (Kevin Dopart was at the same convention) were able to get together on Tuesday for a quick lunch downtown. And even after meeting us in person, Jesse swears he still wants to keep entering the Invite. *WINTRY MIX? SO? * As I type this on Thursday afternoon, Jan. 12, it is, I swear, 70 degrees in Washington. The forecast for two days from now, the day of the annual Losers’ Post-Holiday Party? 33 degrees, with light precipitation. Angela Fritts of The Post’s Capital Weather Gang says that “most precipitation is expected to be light, and temperatures before and after the storm are unlikely to be cold enough to solidify any iciness.” It’s not ideal, but we’re going to have the party Saturday night at the House of Langer-Fultz in Chevy Chase, Md. . The gathering starts around 6; we’ll probably start the “entertainment” of song parodies around 8. Remember that the house is within walking distance of the Friendship Heights Metro. I hope you’re still counting on being there; feel free to email me for the Evite if you didn’t get one, or for any other information. Now I have to polish my tiara and cook my appley thing. See you soon — and Think Nonsnow.