Style Conversational Week 1230: More BNAG for the buck — our new trophy
The Style Invitational Empress on this week’s new contest and results
Loser Larry Gray -- who gets his 100th ink this very week -- displays
our next first-place trophy. Larry crafted 53 bases of cherry wood, and
designed and made the flags as well. He and the Royal Consort assembled
14 of the trophies this week. (Mark Holt)
By Pat Myers
Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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June 1, 2017
I’m not yet officially announcing the debut of our new Style
Invitational trophy, because I still have six or seven more Inkin’
Memorial
bobbleheads
to give out; this week’s winner, Chris Doyle,
will decline his Bobble-Linc, given that he could build a retaining wall
with the ones he’s already won along with his almost 2,000 blots of ink
over the years. But since we now have 14 of the new Lose Cannon trophies
assembled, I think it’s right that Chris should get one now.
I thought up the Lose Cannon last year, inspired by a then-candidate’s
tweet about Hillary Clinton
; while I
knew the “covfefe”-type mockery over that tweet would subside quickly, I
figured that the word would continue to work fine for the Loser
community. When I shared my idea on Facebook with the Style Invitational
Devotees group, Loser Larry Gray offered to
help create them. And as you can see, his handsome hardwood bases are
really a bit too nice for a Loser prize, though his “BNAG” flags, made
from sticky labels, are just Loserly enough. The little cannons are
pencil sharpeners that I ordered from a school-supply website; I ordered
50 but I’m still waiting for 23 that weren’t in stock. On Memorial Day,
Larry drove all the way down from Almost-to-Pennsylvania, Md., to the
Empress’s south-of-D.C. palace, Mount Vermin, and he and Royal Consort
Mark Holt put together the first 14 Lose Cannons after trying various
methods.
Too bad Larry gets only a magnet this week, rather than one of these —
but at least it’s his milestone Ink No. 100. And he did happen to win
the grandfoal contest last year, with Autocorrect: Nose x Señor Moment =
No Sé .
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In coming weeks, I’ll continue to award the Inkin’ Memorial to
first-place winners who hadn’t won one before; those who already have an
Abe may opt for the cannon. But I really hope that they don’t display
the cannon barrel facing up at the bobblehead.
*ONCE WE DID A CONTEST CALLED ‘WHAT DOES GOD LOOK LIKE?’*
Shown on the cover of a tribute by a fellow Mad Magazine legend, Bob
Staake’s idea of what God must look like.
Week 43, 1994. It was one of the biggest flops ever: As the Czar put it
three weeks later:
“We expected trouble with this one. What we anticipated was a mailbag
full of hilarious, bladder-weakening entries far too tasteless to
publish. The good news is, we got almost nothing that was tasteless. The
bad news is, we also got almost nothing that was funny. Fact is, we got
almost nothing at all, a mere 200 entries, possibly because the premise
of this contest was so insulting that decent human beings gave it a wide
berth. Or possibly we were being punished by God Himself, who —
mandibles flailing and blowhole snorting — bollixed up the responses.
Possibly this contest was simply an idiotic idea.”
After filling space with other stuff, the Czar finally printedthis much.
But for this week’s contest, Week 1230, Bob
Staake knew exactly how he wanted to depict the Creator: as the late
William M. Gaines, the publisher of Mad magazine, for which Bob remains
one of “the usual gang of idiots.” “We always joked that he resembled
our impression of what God would look like,” Bob says.
I’m optimistic that this week’s contest — in which some Creator ponders
some creation — will fare much better. While you could argue that the
sample tweets derive some of their humor or at least hipness from the
lowercase, minimally punctuated, flat-affect presentation, I think
they’ll come off better Invite-wise in standard structure. (One or two,
kinda cute; 25 in a row, they start to grate on me.) Also, duh, we’re
not going to run language like what’s in this one about whales.
And: As
always, you have to use your own name that people call you in daily
life, not a Twitter handle. The entries don’t have to be of tweet
length, but they shouldn’t be huge paragraphs either. Brevity is
definitely part of the charm.
Here’s the BuzzFeed listicle compilation from 2016, headlined“24
Hilarious Tweets About God Creating Animals.”
Not all of them provoked my personal hilarity. I did like, in addition
to the three examples I used:
[god creating snakes]
how about a sock that’s angry all the time (Horny Rae Jepsen)
Most days on Facebook, I post an Ink of the Day; most aren’t this
graphically fancy, though. (Thanks to Valerie Holt, the Empress’s Thing
Two.) Click “like” at bit.ly/inkofday to see them regularly. (Design by
Valerie Holt)
[God creating platypuses]
God: This is my best work. Yes, Karen I am high, but that has nothing to
do with it. This is perfect. Send it out. (Jom)
[God, creating pigeons]
Make them pace back and forth like a lawyer. (Viktor Winetrout)
*HORSE DO-OVEURES*: THE GRANDFOALS OF WEEK 1226*
/*Non-inking headline by Jon Gearhart/
As in many of the past dozen years, the entry pool for the Week 1226
“grandfoals” spinoff contest — to “breed” any
two of the “foal” names that had been derived from any pair of Triple
Crown nominees on a list we showed in Week 1222
— was only half the size of the original. BUT
that meant more than 1,900 entries, which as always gave me lots of
clever wordplay to choose from. I won’t have the least trouble finding a
couple dozen more to publish (along with more foal names) on one of the
two Thursdays in July when the Empress will be on vacation. (It’s the
first time ever that the E will skip two consecutive contests,
preventing her from even being able to judge entries in the hotel room
and river cruise ship. Royal Consort: “Good.”)
Combining (mostly) puns with puns didn’t deter the Loser breeders from
producing some great punpun puns. Some inkworthies were submitted by too
many people to get individual credit: among them, Man Asses x Help a
Thief! = Buns of Steal; Shall I Comp Thee? x Hive Got Rhythm = FreeBee;
Love Hertz x Fish Shtick = Rent-a-Carp. Occasionally I chose one
grandfoal name over an identical one because it was from a better cross
of “parents.”
It was during a horse names contest that I first became conscious of
this extraordinary Chris Doyle person; in 2001 I was filling in as
“Auxiliary Czar” for a couple of months, and was overwhelmed with
entries; there was not yet a 25-entry limit; some people would send in
literally hundreds. And while I remember rejecting whole pages of some
printouts with a swipe of my pen, I remember getting to the exactly 100
entries from this Chris Doyle, and going ✔✔✔✔✔✔✔✔✔, on and on down the
page and the next. That year, my solution was to run a huge supplement
of honorable mentions online (a fairly new platform), with a total of
more than 200 entries. (I had to develop discipline over the years.)
Chris got 17 blots of ink, all honorable mentions. Russell Beland got
even more, but he’d sent 422 entries.
This year, percentagewise, Chris did even better: five blots of ink —
including the win — out of 25 entries. His breeding of Too-Loose Lautrec
with Eric Clap to make Tool-Ooze Lautrec combines ingenious wordplay
with laugh-out-loud off-color gross-out humor — pretty much the
definition of What The Style Invitational Does. This is Chris’s
FIFTY-SIXTH Invite win.
The rest of the Losers’ Circle — newcomer Elliott Shevin, recent phenom
Jesse Frankovich, longtime but dabbling Loser Dave Letizia — showed a
variety of approaches: Dave with You Reeka, a pun similar to Chris’s;
Jesse and Elliott with topical humor; and Jesse’s “No, Mr. President!,”
one of the few non-pun grandfoal names.
*What Doug Dug:* The faves of Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood this week: “I
liked the winner and runners-up, Plus LookAwayLookAway [Rob Huffman],
Peri-pathetic [Mary McNamara], Plunder&Whitening [May Jampathom,
returning after a long absence], My Vast Duchess [Week 1222 runner-up
Laurie Brink], Sheikh Yerbuti [Mark Raffman] and IPA Lot [May Jampathom
again].
*THERE’S STILL TIME TO FLUSH: THE FLUSHIES, JUNE 17*
** We’re currently up to 53 yeses (including a number of kids) for the
Flushies, the Loser Community’s annual award “banquet,” which for the
second year is a potluck lunch and schmoozefest at the home/farm of
Loser Robin Diallo and husband Khalil in Lothian, Md., south of
Annapolis. Here’s the Evite; if you’ve read
this far down this column, you’re invited.