Style Conversational Week 1263: Was it the tiny hands?
The Style Invitational Empress on the new contest and results — and
2 Invite icons
Style Invitational Hall of Fame Loser Brendan Beary, left, one-ups the
Google Arts & Culture app by finding his match in a renowned Invite
prize. (Family photo/ Fred Dawson's paintbrush)
By
Pat Myers
close
Image without a caption
Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
Email
Email
Bio
Bio
Follow
Follow
Jan. 18, 2018 at 3:17 p.m. EST
Haha! If you've been on social media in the past week, you've probably
seen people playing addictively with a new app, Google Arts & Culture,
which lets you submit a selfie and then matches it as best it can with a
museum painting in its database. (The Empressbest matched an
18th-century portrait of a man in, perhaps, a wig
.)
This morning, Brendan Beary posted the above diptych on the Style
Invitational Devotees Facebook page: "Okay,
thanks Google," he said "No, really, you've done enough."
Okay, it's not really from Google. Brendan matched himself with "The
Worst Picture Ever Painted," so named by Style Invitational Loser Fred
Dawson — who painted it. Back at the 2005 Loser Holiday Party, Fred came
up to me and asked conspiratorially: "Would you like to see the worst
picture ever painted? It's here in my car." And so Fred's masterpiece
(aka "White-Faced Woman With Vestigial Hands") became the runner-up
prize for Week 672 — and a Style Invitational icon. Name tags at Loser
Brunches bear the woman's visage, and Loser Stephen Dudzik even had them
imprinted on a page of custom postage stamps
(also donated as a prize).
Fred's painting was won four weeks later by longtime Loser Art Grinath,
but a few months later Art sent it back to us, reporting that "frankly,
it frightened my cats." What to do? Ask the Losers, of course — in a
contest. The prize? The painting, duh. And so we ran lots of creative
and funny ideas (hilarious results here).
And the entry that won the painting?
/I should get it because everyone thinks you'll give it to me because
that would be funny, but then people will think you would never resort
to such a cheap and easy laugh, so they'll be sure you won't give it to
me, and that's when you'll fool them. /(Art Grinath, Takoma Park)
But Art graciously let me send Fred's painting to a man named Michael
Canty — who'd actually painted a mirror image (even uglier
)
of Fred's and said he wanted a matched set to hang over his fireplace.
And that's where I hope it still hangs today.
Back in the day, Googling "the worst picture ever painted" would show
you Fred's right at the top of the list , but now it doesn't show up
till the bottom of the fourth page. Alas, fame is fleeting. But thanks
to Brendan, The Lady shines again. And we finally learned who Fred's
model was.
*CONTEST BY COMMITTEE: WEEK 1263*
As I note in the introduction to this week's contest
, this Invite-typey contest also had its
genesis in the Style Invitational Devotees group. It started when Jules
Minton shared a graphic noting that a Sweden-Denmark World Cup game
would say SWE-DEN on the scoreboard — and what's more, the /unused/
parts of those names combined to DEN-MARK. And Cyprus-Russia, CYP-RUS/
RUS-SIA. Very cool, to be sure, but it's not material for a humor
contest. But then Duncan Stevens and Chris Doyle started combining team
abbreviations with funny descriptions of the game between them — and
ding! we have Week 1263, complete with examples. I changed the list of
abbreviations to refer to the Olympics rather than the World Cup, and
took Duncan's cue to add colleges. (And just in the past hour, at the
prompting of Loser Gregory Koch, I created a link to a particular Reddit
list for college scoreboard abbreviations.)
Even though there are a lot of team names, I predict that I'm going to
be receiving many of the same combinations among this week's entries. So
it will probably come down to the cleverness and humor of the descriptions.
*FOUNTAIN OF EUPH*: THE RESULTS OF WEEK 1259*
/*Non-inking headline by Jesse Frankovich /
Even with the sizable pictures of our two new Loser magnets for 2018
(which I'll start sending out after I finish the pile of 50 or so
"Magnum Dopus") I had plenty of room on the print page this week to run
41 nifty euphemisms and dysphemisms.
It wasn't until late Tuesday night, when I'd copied in my
still-uncredited list of winners and then systematically searched my
master list, one by one, for their authors, that I learned about the
crazy dominance of this week's results by the Balmain-FitzPatrick family
of Rochester, N.Y.
As regular readers know, Lose Cannon winner Melissa Balmain, who teaches
writing at the University of Rochester, is an Invite fixture; this is
her 11th contest win, and her 124th (and 125th, 126th and 127th) blot of
ink. But this week, Melissa's skill at not-really-tact was supplemented
with two inks each from her husband, philosophy professor Bill
FitzPatrick, and her son, Princeton freshman Davey (who'd had two inks
already). Melissa told me this afternoon that "Bill, Davey and I all
worked on our entries during a recent trip from Brooklyn to Rochester.
As Bill says, 'The most productive car ride in our family's history.' "
The family that euphemizes together ... hm. Oh, spins. Spins/ wins. But
of course two of them lose.
*What Doug Dug: * While Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood agrees fairly often
with my top choices, this week his faves are all from "below the fold":
Jeff Contompasis's "Shameless: Morally liberated" and "Tim Cook's"
dysphemism "Optimized: slow" (hmm, maybe it should have run as a
euphemism: "Slow: Optimized"? ); Kevin Dopart's "Sociopathy:
Indifferently abled"; Steve Honley's "Dating someone underage:
Mentoring"; Drew Bennett's "Treason: Situational Patriotism"; and, sent
by both Daniel Helming and Randy Lee: "Nuclear button: Micropenis."
*POST-PARTY LOSER DOINGS: NEXT BRUNCH, FEB. 18, COLUMBIA, MD. *
Thanks to all 60 or so of you who joined us at last Saturday's Loser
Post-Holiday party, bringing a sinful array of food and drink, singing
along with the song parodies, and just being convivial without knocking
over lamps. And special thanks to Steve Langer and Allison Fultz, who
offered up their house for the second straight year; to piano
accompanist Steve Honley; to Elden and his 60 folding chairs; and to the
Loserbards who wrote the several odes to Loserdom (plus a crowdsourced
"Major-General's Song" parody about You Know Who). Lyrics are at this
post on the Devotees page
.
The next Loser sighting: That'd be a brunch (No. 205!) at Victoria
Gastro Pub in Columbia, Md., Sunday, Feb. 18, at noon. We've enjoyed
dining there several times; if you live north of the Beltway, this is a
great time to commune, face-stuff, etc. I plan to go especially if I can
carpool with someone. RSVP to Elden at the Losers' website, NRARS,org
; click on "Our Social Engorgements."