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
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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.