Style Conversational Week 1264: The foresight saga of ‘The Year in Preview’ Including Dave Barry’s five favorites among this week’s results 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. 25, 2018 at 2:15 p.m. EST As I often do after reading through the week's Style Invitational entries, I showed a "short"-list of about 90 entries for Week 1260's "Year in Preview" contest to my predecessor, the mysterious Czar of The Style Invitational . As he does /not/ often do, the Czar deemed the Empress's list "extraordinarily good results," highlighting 25 of his favorites. He added: "They /really/ got what Dave does." "Dave" would be the Czar's longtime bestie Dave Barry, arguably the funniest person in the whole world as well as at least three of the smaller planets. And one of the many things Dave does is his famed "Year in Review," an annual chronicle that mixes hilarious commentary of actual events with obviously made-up items playing off the real ones. (Here's 2017's. ) Then the Czar, whom I will refer to by the randomly chosen name "Gene," sent the list to Dave, without his own annotations, and asked him to choose his own faves — since the Invite contest clearly is modeled on the made-up part of Dave's pieces. Now, "Gene" happens to be on record saying this about himself: "Gene believes that humor is objective, not subjective, and that he himself is the only infallible judge of humor in America. So he believes his picks are not opinions, but statements of fact." A short time later, Dave replied, noting five favorites "in no particular order": John Hutchins’s second-place entry: “Feb. 2: Punxsutawney Phil predicts an early end to winter. The White House immediately accuses him of ‘promoting a fake global-warming agenda’ and cancels Groundhog Day.” (Punxsutawney Grounhog Club) John Hutchins’s second-place entry: “Feb. 2: Punxsutawney Phil predicts an early end to winter. The White House immediately accuses him of ‘promoting a fake global-warming agenda’ and cancels Groundhog Day.” (Punxsutawney Grounhog Club) — April 28: In the seventh round, the Minnesota Vikings draft an end zone choreographer out of Juilliard. (Howard Walderman) — May 5: For the first time, the Kentucky Derby is won by a self-driving horse. (Jesse Frankovich) — Sept. 19: The Cleveland Browns are mathematically eliminated from playoff contention. (Mark Calandra) — Oct. 12: Columbus, Ohio, renames itself Genocidal European, Ohio. (Steve Honley) — Aug. 2: Disney announces 53 more stand-alone films about Star Wars characters that will culminate with "That Blue Elephant-Looking Thing That Plays the Keyboard in Jabba's Palace: A Star Wars Story." (Kurt Stahl) And Gene's infallibility? Well, three of Dave's choices /didn't even make Gene's list of 25. /(I won't say which, so each of those five Losers can think Gene's dis was of three other entries.) I then sent the same list to Malcolm Fleschner, the 67-time Loser from whom I got the "Year in Preview" idea; Malcolm writes one himself in Culture Shlock, his humor column for the San Jose Mercury News (Here's Malcolm's ). As I continued to narrow my short­list on Tuesday afternoon, starting with Gene's and Dave's picks and adding 18 of my own "oh, we /have / to run . . ." choices, Malcolm chose 18 favorites. And once again, three of Dave's picks — but a different three — weren't on Malcolm's list of all. And only eight of Malcolm's choices made Gene's list of 25. And finally, five of his 18 choices were for entries I'd dropped in my last trim. How much influence did these three certifiably "getting it" humorists have on my final 43 picks for Week 1260? A little: I ended up using 21 of Gene's 25, I used all five of Dave's, and I added back three of Malcolm's picks that I'd trimmed in the last cut. And one of my three final choices for first place — Steve Honley's "Genocidal European, Ohio" — was reinforced when I saw that it was the only entry that made Dave's, Gene's /and / Malcolm's lists. It's the second win and 79th blot of ink overall for Steve, who's a Foreign Service alumnus and currently heads up the music at a D.C. area church (he played the piano to accompany the song parodies at this month's Loser Post-Holiday Party). And the three runners-up are also Invite veterans: Frank Osen (the Navajo renaming the White House shrunken Bears Ears Monument as Trumps Hands Park), John Hutchins (the groundhog joke printed in the caption above left) and Howard Walderman (NFL drafting an end zone choreographer) wallow in almost 600 blots of ink among them. And one more party heard from: It's our weekly weigh-in *What Doug Dug, *the faves of Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood. As he worked on the Invite yesterday, Doug saw only the 43 inking entries, not my shortlist. He liked all four winners this week, and also singled out Bill Dorner's entry on opioids replacing religion as the official opiate of the masses; Jesse Frankovich's Your Mama Tuesday; Jeff Contompasis's joke about 70,000 volunteer firefighters at a pot farm blaze; Ward Kay's pay-inequality joke on the "what's in your wallet" commercials; and Mark Calandra's mathematically not /quite/ possible Cleveland Browns dig. Doug also shouted out Kevin Dopart's headline for the results, "Divined Comedy." Meanwhile, I'm sure that "Gene" still considers himself the infallible, objective determinant of what is funny. *THE WEEK OF 'REVIEW': OUR NEW YELP CONTEST* This week's contest for Yelp-style reviews, Week 1264, will probably generate the same sort of clueless-person humor that brightened our recent contest forAmazon ratings of everyday household products, but of experiences rather than of objects. I didn't specify a maximum length, but paragraphs over about 50 words tend not to work well in the Invitational; readers see a block of type and will often skip to something pithier, especially in the narrow columns of the print edition. There are always exceptions, but lengthy entries always have to be worth the length. See the link to the Amazon ratings to get a feel for what we tend to run. *IS 'SILVER' JUST A EUPHEMISM FOR GRAY?* Jesse Frankovich's honorable-mention entry (added for the online Invite) about the pathetic prize for the 25th-anniversary Style Invitational contest does cite the real date, the March 4 paper (March 1 online): Indeed, the Czar debuted the Invite on Sunday, March 7, 1993, and so on Week 1269 we'll surely observe the quarter-century in some way. I've received a number of suggestions for a silver-anniversary contest but will happily consider others. Write me at pat.myers@washpost.com with something indicative in the subject line. /"The Foresight Saga" was a non-inking headline entry by Beverley Sharp.