Style Conversational: FAQs on ABCs The Style Invitational Empress discusses the Week 1229 contest and Week 1225 results Our Bob Staake's homage to the darkly funny artist and kindred spirit. (Art and design by Bob Staake) By Pat Myers Pat Myers Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003 Email // Bio // Follow // May 25, 2017 Before we get to our Week 1229 contest and the results of Week 1225 , I wanted to invite you over to the house. Actually, it’s someone else’s house: The Loser Community’s 22nd annual Flushies awards “banquet” will be at RK Acres, the 10-acre farm/house of Loser Robin Diallo and her husband Khalil in rural Lothian, Md., south of Annapolis. It’s a potluck on Saturday afternoon, June 17, and if you’re interested enough in The Style Invitational to find yourself reading this column, then you and yours are hereby invited. Last night I sent out an Evite (you can read it, with all the details, here ) from my personal email address; if you got it and you’d like to go, please respond to it (duh) so we’ll know and so that you’ll get any updates. (I think you’ll also be able to see who else is coming.) If you’d like to come and /didn’t / get the Evite from the Empress, please email me at pat.myers@washpost.com and I’ll add you. (If you’re a total stranger to me, we might chat first.) *NOW WE BURN OUR ABC’S: THIS WEEK’S GOREY CONTEST * As I mentioned in the intro to Week 1229, we’re doing a third run of our “Gashlycrumb Tinies”-inspired contest because it fits so well with our prize this week: the coming-soon poster for “Gorey: The Documentary,” a film by Christopher Seufert, who made much of the footage, with Edward Gorey’s participation, from 1996 until the artist and author died in 2000. (Filmmaking requires a lot of resources; this project is being funded with the help of Kickstarter and Indigogo campaigns, as well as proceeds from Bob Staake’s gorgeous poster.) Gorey surely provided his biographers with plenty of material. While his faux-Victorian/Edwardian Gothic style leads many people to assume he was English, he actually grew up in Chicago, eventually making it to Manhattan, where in the 1950s he illustrated books and covers for Doubleday, like this classic 1960 reissue of H.G. Wells’s “The War of the Worlds.” My knowledgeable personal source, Ms. Wikipedia, also notes that he published under such anagrams as Ogdred Weary, Dogear Wryde and Ms. Regera Dowdy. (How fitting for the Loser Community, in which virtually all 5,000 people who’ve gotten ink in The Style Invitational are given Loser Anagrams, a.k.a. Granola Smears, in the stats maintained by Ur-Loser Elden Carnahan. ) Gorey went on to create more than 100 books of his own, including the 1963 abecedarian “Gashlycrumb Tinies,” which we play off in this week’s contest. (According to Wikipedia, “he did not associate with children much and had no particular fondness for them.” Maybe this is why he could so gleefully rhyme about “C is for Clara who wasted away,” or “I is for Ida who drowned in a lake.”) And he lent his signature style to many stage and TV works as well — most famously the animated introduction to the long-running PBS series “Mystery!” Gorey eventually moved to Chatham, Mass., on Cape Cod — which happens to be the current home of Our Own Bob Staake! But. As Bob emailed me yesterday: “I was looking forward to finally having the chance to meet one of my literary heroes once I bought a house on Cape Cod, but as soon as I did, he did a very Gorey thing — he died. In 2005 I wrote and illustrated a very stark black-and-white story called ‘The Orb of Chatham.’ One of Gorey’s best friends saw the book and told me , ‘Oh, Ed would have /loved/ you.’ So I’m heartened that I can at least take that to the grave with me — though hopefully not anytime soon.” Bob regularly so discusses his artistic and literary approaches on his Facebook page. Here’s what he posted this morning as he shared this week’s Invite art (as well as a link to the contest — thanks, Bob!): “Every now and then I have to ‘ape’ some famous (usually dead) artist’s work in an illustration. Sometimes it’s Al Hirschfeld, sometimes it’s Dr. Seuss, on occasion it’s Charles Schulz or Bill Watterson, and I have even done Robert Crumb (well, not “done” per se, but you know what I mean). Yet the one artist I seem to have to imitate most often over the years is Edward Gorey. “Each time I’m forced to parody his work I realize once again what a terrific draftsman he was — and at the same time find it difficult to understand why with all that insane, anal-retentive crosshatching the guy didn’t go bats[---] crazy by the age of 35. To crosshatch beautifully is a technique mastered by very few — and Gorey was indeed a master of it. Me, I get in there with my pen and ink and after a hundred 45-degree strokes to the right and a hundred 45-degree strokes to the left, I’m ready to fake it as best I can on the other 5,000+ strokes and call it a day ... exhausted, humbled and even more appreciative of his adroit pen-and-ink work.” *FAQ’S ON THE ABC’S: ENTERING WEEK 1229 * This week’s contest echoes “The Gashlycrumb Tinies” in its form of alphabetical couplets, but its scope and form are much wider than in Gorey’s little masterpiece. Here are the top winners from our two previous contests, along with links to the rest of the results. In those contests, I presented a list of my faves among all 13 letter pairs (noting which were the top four winners), then followed with the remaining honorable mentions. I’ll probably do that again. *From Week 757 (March 2008),* which ran right after New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer was forced to resign in a prostitution scandal : 4. *C’s Callipygian *, my favorite form. *D is for Droopy *-- alas, that’s the norm. (Tom Witte) 3. *S for Spitzer *squanders sums for sordid sex: sore luck. *T is for Testosterone*: turns titan into schmuck. (Ellen Raphaeli) 2. *G’s the ex-Guv *of the state of New Yawk. *H is the Hooker *he’d hoped wouldn’t tawk. (Christopher Lamora) And the winner of the Inker: *W is for Writer’s block,* thinking “What next?” *X is for . . . ??? *(Beth Baniszewski, winner of the Inker) See the rest of the 2008 results here (scroll past that week’s new contest). *From Week 1024 (2013) ,* when the headlines were about Gov. Schwarzenegger’s housekeeper/mistress, and controversy over the name of Washington’s football team: 4. *E is for Enema,* cleaning you out; *F, your Financial plan:* same thing, no doubt. (J. Calvin Smith) 3. *S is Scalia,* harrumphing and hefty. *T is the Talmud,* which he’d find too lefty. (Brendan Beary) 2. *A is for Arnold,* who diddled his aide; *B’s for the Bed *she then dutifully made. (Danielle Nowlin) And the winner of the Inkin’ Memorial: *M is for Money,* which hardens a man; *N is for Name change *— eventually, Dan. (Jennifer Gittins-Harfst) See the rest of the 2013 results here. *Q.* *Can I do my rhyme with a B-word and a C-word? * *A.* *Don’t you dare. * They must be A-B, C-D, etc. As I say above, I will probably print a full set of the 13 best pairs. *Q.* *Do I have to start the line with the letter in question?* *A. *Yes. *Q. * *All the lines in “Gashlycrumb Tinies” are triple dactyls (OOM-pah-pah) with a strongly accented syllable at the end; does my entry have to be in that same meter?* Note the eight “above-the-fold” winners above. Note that /one / of those eight does not use that meter. Note that, while it’s clever (enough to win a T-shirt in 2008), that entry seems clunky and sort of confusing juxtaposed against all the Triple-Dactyl-BOOMs. So while I won’t /require/ the TDB, I can virtually promise that such an entry won’t make it into that first set of 13. *Q. * *If I win, can I get the Gorey poster?* *A. * Nope! It’s the second prize. This is how we remind you that even Style Invitational winners are Losers. *WINNERS OF OUR DISCONTENT*: THE WEEK 1225 PROTEST SLOGANS* /(*Non-inking, great but way too long alternative headline by Jon Gearhart) / Yes, someone — at/least /some-/one/ — actually sent in “Visualize Whirled Peas.” Which is not only an ancient joke, of course, but also a lame, contrived pun — because the only time peas are “whirled” is for lame-pun purposes. Today’s inking entries show much better how slogan-punning is done. It’s the — oh, brother — 12th win for Gary Crockett, whose career in the tech world no doubt inspired his “Middle Managers March” slogan “If It Were Up to Me, I’d Say Yes.” Gary has long since passed on any further Style Invitational prizes, which means that there are still six more Inkin’ Memorial bobbleheads to be awarded before we switch to our new first-place trophy — one that Loser Larry Gray and I will be making this very weekend here at Mount Vermin, the Empress’s suburban palace. Ira Allen, a longtime news journalist, usually goes for withering political humor, so I was surprised to discover that he was the author of the cute, sunny “Cat Lives Matter, Matter, Matter, Matter, Matter, Matter, Matter, Matter, Matter.” Definitely deserving of an elephant crafted of glued-together peach pits that was originally given to Elden Carnahan in 1993 for suggesting a contest. Newbie Dave Matuskey (The Luddite March: Stop Thinking About Tomorrow!) is swiftly becoming an Invite household name, while Oldbie Tom Witte (March to Support Team Sports: We Are the 110 Percent!) has been one since Year 1 in 1993. But with 23 inks, Dave can catch up to Tom (if Tom suddenly stops getting any more entries printed) with a mere 1,414 blots. *What Doug Dug: * In addition to Gary’s winning Million Managers March, Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood “loved” (a term he doesn’t usually use) Sarah Jacobs’s three-sign Parents’ March, Jesse Frankovich’s triple-poop-joke Rally for Regularity, and the two jokes about D.C.’s woeful Metrorail system, credited to Mark Raffman, Perry Beider and out-of-towner Bird Waring — who nevertheless does a spot-on transcription of the subway’s in-car PA system, down to the bing-bong.