Style Conversational Week 1250: Ode on a Broken Mug, Part II To eulogize a Loser prize: Once again, the Loserbards spring into action James Yanovitch, 14, may be in the doghouse after breaking his mom's Loser Mug. But he proved to be a literary inspiration. (Amanda Yanovitch) By Pat Myers Pat Myers Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003 Email // Bio // Follow // October 19, 2017 A mere three weeks ago, The Style Conversational shared the sad story of Melissa Balmain’s broken Loser mug — and the happy consequence of fellow Loser Brendan Beary’s commemoration of it in a brilliant parody of “Ozymandias” in the Style Invitational Devotees Facebook group. (That poem appears farther down this page.) I swear: I do /not/ coat the surface of our runner-up prize with a thin but dangerous application of olive oil. Nevertheless, just two weeks later, 53-time Loser Amanda Yanovitch posted the photo above to her fellow Devotees. Amanda, a writing teacher at Tyler Community College near Richmond, Va., is the mom of three extraordinarily active young sons; I see her Facebook posts of her kids excelling in baseball, swimming and especially gymnastics. So maybe it’s more impressive that Amanda’s “This Is Your Brain on Mugs” Mug — the first of four designs we’ve issued — lasted several years before 14-year-old James prompted Amanda to play off the old dog-shaming meme with some good-natured offspring-shaming. “My kid just dropped my loser mug,” Amanda lamented. “Yesterday he dropped the lid of the butter dish we got when we got married. I was bummed. But THIS!” Brendan Beary — himself the dad of two youths — mused: “I don’t doubt that you'll earn another mug, but remarrying to get a replacement butter dish will take some explaining.” Then added: “And BTW, if you're expecting another broken-mug poem of the sort I did for Melissa Balmain, you're out of luck. First come, first served.” So Melissa — /also /the mom of two teens, as well as a writing instructor at the University of Rochester and the editor of the poetry journalLight — couldn’t let Amanda be wounded doubly, so she offered this limerick: /“Who destroyed this?” growled Mom, the accuser, But her kiddo was quick to defuse her. “Me, me, me!” he replied, His small chest puffed with pride. “Now I'm just like you, Mommy — a loser!” / *Then: Brendan: * (sigh) Okay. You know I never could say no to you. /By the shores of Whatsit Tooya In the tranquil Old Dominion, Stood Amanda, tribe of Waltman (Now a Yanovitch by marriage), With a heart packed full of grieving O'er a Loser mug, now shattered. She who, only separated By a single sunset’s passing From the similar destruction Of another prized memento -- That, a butter-holding relic Of the day that she was wedded, She, who knew that these destructions Were not brought upon her household By the evil Megissogwon Nor some other dreaded shaman But the progeny she raised there In that home in Old Virginny, She took in these grievous burdens, And did channel then the spirit And the words of every mother Through the countless generations As she spake unto her children, "This is why we can’t have nice things!"/ However much you care for “Hiawatha,” I hereby declare Brendan’s poem a Higher Watha. Brendan’s idea in the Devotees thread: Whoever breaks a Loser mug next, it’ll be Amanda’s turn to write the mugular thanatopsis. Meanwhile, here’s Brendan’s definitely-worth-repeating parody of “Ozymandias” for Melissa’s mug: /I met a Loser from upstate New York/ /Who said: The rubble of a well-earned mug/ /Lay strewn here on my floor. I’m such a dork;/ /My absent-minded swatting at a bug/ /Unleashed this fine ceramic to its fate./ /Upon its lip my lipstick glints, and then/ /I all alone beweep my outcast state,/ /To know that it and I won’t kiss again./ /Caffeine and great encouragement it lent,/ /And thus urged on, no obstacle I saw — / /Declaring, for each entry that I sent,/ /“Look on my works, ye Empress, and guffaw!”/ /Nothing beside remains. From the parquet,/ /The lone and level shards, swept all away./ *AND NOW, BACK TO THE INVITE POEMS* I’m so excited about this week’s Style Invitational contest, Week 1250 — for one thing, even in the couple of hours since I published the Invite this afternoon, the @StyleInvite Twitter account has been dinging off the hook with likes and retweets. That’s thanks to Merriam-Webster, which spread the word about the contest, in which you use M-W’s Time Travel tool as a prompt for a poem. Surely, the wordies who follow a dictionary’s Twitter feed are as good a cohort as any to become Invite fans. It turns out that there’s no link to Time Traveler directly from the M-W home page; instead, you have to go to a definition of some word, which now included its “first known use” year, and a link to others from that same year. But m-w.com/time-traveler will take you there as well. Meghan Lunghi, M-W’s marketing person (thank her for the tote bag donation), emphasizes that the word might not have made it into the dictionary in the listed year, only that it was found in some published writing for the first time. I think the rules are pretty clear for this contest, but I’ll emphasize (or reemphasize) a few things: — A clever, zingy, readable poem with just three of the year-words will be more likely to get ink than one that’s impressive only for how it got so many words in. Quality, people. — New Losers, take note: Our typical light-verse length is four to eight lines. If you write a sonnet, it had better be both brilliant and funny. — PLEASE write your year-words in ALL CAPITALS. I don’t want to have to track them down, and that ‘s the only way they’ll be apparent to me. Our entry form doesn’t read boldface. — You may use a slightly different form of the word: plural, past tense, adverb, etc. — There’s no rule that the poem has to rhyme. But in my experience of judging Style Invitational poetry contests, which has involved literally tens of thousands of entries, poems that have perfect rhyme and strong meter tend to be more clever and end up getting the vast majority of ink. Remember, we’re a humor contest; I’m not ruling on what is the Greatest Art. — Haiku? Fine with me if you can make it interesting. I like to mix up longer and shorter poems, so there’s a decent chance that I’ll run at least one haiku. — Song parody? I won’t say no. — Should the poem relate somehow to the words’ year? It doesn’t have to. But I could see how that might make a very clever entry. — New people, please note that you can write as many as 25 entries, all from one year or 25 different ones; it doesn’t matter to me. And there is absolutely no advantage in sending them in before the Oct. 30 deadline. I read them in one big list, and I won’t see your name during the judging. My thanks to Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood, who suggested I add the first-known-use date of “duh” — 1943 — in my instructions. *Q CARDS*: THE RESULTS OF WEEK 1246* /(I’d actually made that my headline winner this week, until I was alerted by Jesse Frankovich that we’d already done that headline — even though it was Jesse’s own entry)/ I’d be happy to do our Questionable Journalism contest every few weeks if it didn’t require so much work for the entrants; there’s never a shortage of fresh source material — that week’s paper — and never a shortage of laughs. But as you might guess from this week’s results , which drew ink for only 16 Losers, not many people wanted to look all over their Post (or other paper) for suitable material; fewer than 100 people entered, a number that would frighten the blank out of me had I not be confident that I could fill the page with the work of five or six of the True Obsessives. And indeed, just about everyone who got ink this week, most of them more than once, is a household name in Loserland. But I was shocked to discover — just this moment, it turns out, as I check theLoser Stats — that it’s the first win ever, out of 73 blots of ink, for Steve Honley. This bumps Steve off the Cantinkerous list of people who get the most ink without ever having won a contest. (Kyle Hendrickson, who once again came close last week with two honorable mentions, still stands atop Mount Cantinkerous with 89 always-a-bridesmaid blots.) But runners-up Mark Raffman, John Hutchins and Jesse Frankovich are soaking in ink so deeply that I’m not going to dirty my typing fingers by discussing them further. I decided that linking to all the original sentence to show them in their original habitat wasn’t worth it; I hope you sense that Steve Honley’s “don’t care for brown and reds together” was about interior decorating, for example. , or that “dropping shoes” meant that Mueller was talking about “letting the other shoe drop” with some revelation. *What Doug Dug:* It’s been a while since Doug agreed with me on the winners, but he liked all the “above the fold” entries this week, also singling out Mary Kappus’s 300-square-foot studio for 1-percenters; Kevin Dopart’s yoga pants joke (“pants” is a great joke word); and Frank Osen’s “dunked in soy sauce.’ *Unquestionable: The unprintables of Week 1246:* A lot of stuff this week that clearly couldn’t see the light of the Invite: A. We’ve been going down, and everything has just gotten more and more depressing. Q. How have things been at the Thomas Hardy Memorial Brothel? (Duncan Stevens) A: “You’ve got to come right now.” Q: What is a typical direction while filming a porn movie on a strict budget? (Tom Witte) A: He’s jumping up and down, saying, ‘Nana! Nana! Nana!’” Q: What is one line in the script for “Grandma Likes her Incest Rough?” (Witte again. Sheez.) A: It didn’t matter if you were a good player or you sucked., Q: Did oral sex used to help one’s career as a professional athlete? (Guess who.) A. “This is what you’re going to reach for when your kids spill cereal in the morning.” Q. What is a belt? (Steve Honley) Yuck.