Style Conversational Week 1253: Just a few more questions ...
Some ‘noinks’ from the Ask Backwards contest
Another of Bob Staake's proposed cartoons for Week 1253: "The thong,
when worn through the armpits and across the head, was originally used
to flatten the nose and reduce snoring." (Bob Staake for The Washington
Post )
By Pat Myers
Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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November 9, 2017
The results that run in this week’s Style Invitational
are of our 36th Ask Backwards contest, and at
least the 14th I’ve judged. And since it’s hard to predict which
“answers” we offer in search of matching questions will bear fruit, I
tend to add a few extra categories as insurance. This week’s results,
though, reminded me that I ought to keep the list to 12 items we used to
do; there’s just more good stuff than there’s room to print.
Whew, I’m going to be mailing out a slew of prize letters next week:
Thirty-three Losers (including First Offender Susan Kaplan) got ink in
Week 1249, with a total of 44 inking entries. But I used only 12 of the
15 categories. Here are some “noinks,” as they say in theStyle
Invitational Devotees Facebook group, from the
other three.
*Despacheeto, * which was a play on the current hit song “Despacito”
(“Slowly”), whosevideo
was made in Puerto
Rico, and of course was going to be read by many as an allusion to You
Know Who (though others were reminded of the 1970s Eagles song
“Desperado”):
What blockbuster hit contains the chorus “In a storm he’ll be your
beacon/ Long as you’re not Puerto Rican”? (Frank Osen)
What leaves behind a greasy orange residue that is hard to remove even
with paper towels? (Jesse Frankovich)
I can see why she didn't make it say "Invitational": This week's second
prize in progress. (Design, knitting and photo by Catharine Mefford)
Whose touch turns Gold Stars a sad, rusty orange? (Kevin Dopart)
Besides “Lady Marmalade,”
are there any songs
with foreign lyrics about orange foods? (Hildy Zampella)
What is NSA’s code-word acronym for the classified report “Documentary
Evidence Shows Putin Asked: Could Hillary’s Emails Elect The Orangeman”?
(Chris Doyle)
*There’s still no app for THAT:*
Hey, now that I have an iPhone X, am I not now cool and popular? (Edward
Gordon)
Alexa, will you please take out the trash? (Bill Dorner)
How can we get the Empress a sense of humor? (Steve Glomb)
And then there were a few who used the other sense of the word, like:
Wings, nachos, tater skins . . . I don’t know, what would get /you/
hungry for an Applebee’s dinner? (Steve McClemons)
*Blecchsit*
What do you call it when a bad batch of fish and chips works its way
back out? (John Hutchins)
What does one do from a British restaurant serving only haggis, black &
white pudding, and jellied eels? (Bill Dorner)
What happens when you realize you were wrong to put the English muffin,
Belgian waffle and French toast all in the same place at the same time?
(Danielle Nowlin)
How do some women now refer to the apparently common practice of running
out of Harvey Weinstein’s hotel room? (Andy Promisel)
What is the name of the movement to have Belgium, Luxembourg, Estonia,
Croatia, Cyprus, and Hungary leave the European Union? (Aron Trombka)
And if your best entry didn’t get ink and then was doubly robbed by not
being mentioned here? Remember that each December, we have a
retrospective in which you get to enter any of the past year’s contests.
And you’re allowed to resubmit earlier entries; who knows, maybe the
Empress will finally get that sense of humor.
Meanwhile, it’s the first contest win, and the 11th blot of ink, for Deb
Stewart, who got her first ink way back in Week 320. Losers on the
Devotees page were commiserating over the difficulty of producing a
zingy connection among the fidget spinner, the infinity scarf and Cher —
besides the one that everyone did, “go on forever” — but Deb aced it
with cool/warm/hot for three generations. The rest of the Losers’ Circle
is populated with three Usual Suspect runners-up; I read Ward Kay’s “280
characters” joke right after I’d seen a Facebook post by a friend, a
high school theater director, about a parent who demanded to know why
her kid wasn’t in the front row in a dance number.
By the way: If you said that what they don’t have at Whole Foods was a
Slim Jim smoothie, get in line. It won’t be the express line.
*Guest Copy Editor Weigh-In — the Feeney Funny: * Ace Copy Editor Doug
Norwood was off this week, and so my onetime Style copy desk colleague
Mary Feeney was stuck with given the great honor of reading the
Invitational. Actually, Mary is a longtime Invite fan, and she readily
agreed to cite her favorites:
“They were all pretty funny. These are the ones that made me laugh out
loud.” Mary then singled out :
Frank Osen’s Slim Jim Smoothie as the nickname Trump discarded as not
demeaning enough for James Comey?;
Bill Dorner’s “bag of frozen GMO batter-dipped manatee nuggets” as what
I don’t think they have at Whole Foods;
Three for “Wynken, Blynken & Stynken”: Mark Raffman’s eye
surgery/hemorrhoid practice; Mark Calandra’s play on the poem “Wynken,
Blynken and Nod” as “sailed off in a wooden loo”; and Steve McClemons’s
“Syngles Night at Ben’s Chili Bowl”;
Steve Glomb saying that “the comma before the storm” was Italian for
“momentary truce”;
And two for “nose hair extensions”: Jeff Shirley saying that’s what
“made the prince suddenly retch when he finally reached Rapunzel’s
window” and what Mark Raffman said were part of his son’s “Dad”
Halloween costume.
*FASHTOIDS: THIS WEEK’S CONTEST*
Honestly, my first plan for a contest this week was to play off the “280
characters” in this week’s results, but didn’t figure out a good one. In
case you haven’t heard, Twitter is experimenting with permitting tweets
of up to 280 characters, double the current maximum. I personally think
it’s a great idea — there are few Invite jokes that I can fit in a tweet
if I also want to link to the contest — though many inveterate tweeters
consider it a horrible invitation to verbosity (some snarky 280s here
).
I was planning to have some sort of poetry contest but we just ran
onethree weeks ago . Still, I’d like to do a
280-contest; feel free to email me with suggestions. Remember, if you’re
in town and I use your idea, I’ll take you out for ice cream; if you’re
out of town, I’ll buy two cones and mail you one.
So instead we have yet another false-facts contest — a category for
which I’m also open to new suggestions, because these contests always
yield great jokes. Our fictoid contests — we’ve done movies, sports,
history, medicine, word origins and several more — are basically spoofs
on lists of “fun facts” trivia lists. As far as I know, however, nobody
has perpetuated our bogus trivia across social media, claiming either
that these things are real or that The Washington Post is lying lying
lying. But there’s still hope!
As I do most weeks when we redo a contest, I sent our cartoonist, Bob
Staake, a choice of earlier entries to illustrate. But Bob instead came
back with a list of ideas of his own, including the upside-down dunce
cap I chose for this week’s example. It was a hard choice, though,
between that one and the cartoon that appears at the top of this column,
the thong as a nose flattener/snoring cure. The final determinant: I
felt that the guy sitting up in bed didn’t quite convey “snoring,” not
to mention that it looked a bit BDSM for a Sunday cartoon. Anyway, I
loved the dunce cap joke — and found it nifty how Bob solved the problem
of having to use a sharply horizontal space to depicting a person
wearing a dunce cap.
And how about that beautiful knit cap created and donated by Devotee
Catharine Mefford — it’s even nicer than it looks in the photo. The
burgundy and gold, Cat tells me, happened to be what she had on hand,
and were not intended to echo the colors of the Washington football
team. Four weeks from now, I’m going to make sure that the second-place
Loser really wants it; if not, I’ll send that person another prize and
make sure that the hat goes to someone who’ll appreciate Cat’s work
(it’s an adult size Large, she estimates).
*SUNDAY: PIG OUT WITH THE LOSERS IN ANNAPOLIS*
You can find me atBuddy’s Crabs and Ribs
in Annapolis, Md.,
this Sunday, trotting to and from the buffet line at this month’s Loser
Brunch (No. 202!). Join me and a dozen or so other Losers at noon. It’s
at noon, with both breakfast and lunch stuff available for gobbling.
RSVP to Elden Carnahanhere so
we’ll have a head count.