Style Conversational Week 1269: Taking it to the bank, once again
The Style Invitational Empress on this week’s headline contest and
song parody results
From the Nov. 11, 2004, Style Invitational; illustration by Bob Staake
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
March 1, 2018 at 3:39 p.m. EST
Bob Staake’s illustration and the sample headline/bank head above
accompanied our first so-named Mess With Our Heads contest, back in
November 2004, in my first year as Empress. The original headline was
about a developer joining forces with an Indian tribe. We’d actually
done the same contest three years earlier, with the odd head “Spinning
Out of Control,” (as in turning the story in a new direction?) but our
PDFs go back only to 2002.
Anyway, we’ve done this contest at least 15 times since then, and we
always get hilarious material from mind-warped flexibly thinking Losers
who comb the paper — and now their choice of papers and websites — for
headlines they could read a different way. And over the years, a set of
ground rules for this contest has developed. Since I handy-dandily
discussed these in The Style Conversational a year ago, for Week 1218
— and that column tweaked and linked to the
discussion from just six months before that. I don’t see any reason to
change the Week 1218 rules for this week, Week 1269
, Except for the dates, duh.
If you’re not going to click on that previous column, at least read the
following condensation.
*What counts as a headline? * In a nutshell, anything above the text of
an article or ad, as well as, on home pages and such, one-line links to
other articles.
*Do I have to use every word in the headline?* No, but the part of the
hed (journalists use stupid jargo-spellings for everything) you do use
can’t mean something hugely different on its own, and you can’t string
together unconnect parts of the headline.
*Can I change the capitalization or punctuation in the headline?* No on
punctuation. For capitalization, yes in this particular case: If the
headline, like The Post’s current heds, is “downstyle” (capitalized like
a sentence) and there’s a proper name in the hed that you’d like to
reinterpret as a plain ol’ common noun (say “Accord” as an agreement
rather than a Honda), then you can write the whole hed as upstyle, as in
a book title. If the hed is upstyle to begin with — as the in the
illustration above, which uses The Post’s old format — then just leave
it that way, and you can treat “Ally” either as a partner or as a
paper-thin lawyer who finally makes partner.
*Can I use headings on other online stuff besides newspapers? *You can
if it has a date on it and it falls within the required window, March
1-12. Very helpful to me: *Copy the URL (website address) and put it
underneath your entry. DO NOT EMBED IT into the headline itself; I’ll
see a bunch of garble. *
*One more thing: *Sometimes online headlines are ephemeral, especially
on a publication’s home page; if it no longer exists, I’ll rely on your
honor. But don’t rewrite headlines to make them work for your joke;
remember: honor. I can’t check every last headline.
*HA SCHOOL MUSICAL: THE EDUCATION PARODIES OF WEEK 1265*
/*Headline by Jesse Frankovich that lost out to Dave Matuskey’s “Ha for
Teacher” /
Eet is with deepest pride and greatest pleasure
that we welcome you to
Loserland with what has become a running gag in our song parody
contests: The song “Be Our Guest” from “Beauty and the Beast,” sung in
the 1991 animated movie by Jerry Orbach as a hospitable candlestick, has
proved astonishingly successful in blotting up ink for Invite parodists
in recent years, most notably for Almost Hall of Famer Mark Raffman.
Inthis week’s results
of our education-parody contest (coincidentally suggested by Mark
himself), Mark gets “Guest” ink, as he usually does, but several other
Loserbards did as well. In fact, I received 10 parodies of the song,
four of which got ink today and a couple of which deserved it but got
robbed. Mark’s, however, turned out to be the only one of them that
didn’t use it for “test.” Here’s the (possibly incomplete) Raffman
Guest-list:
— A review-in-song of the puerile movie “Porky’s”: *“See a chest ...”*
— Obama on Netanyahu: *“He’s a pest ...” *
— Candidate Trump in 2015: *“He’s obsessed ...”*
— For songs about animals, mice living in Trump’s hairdo: *“He’s our
nest!” *
— For political songs, the Republican establishment lamenting the
sure-to-lose Trump (June 2016): *“We’re depressed ...” *
— Post-election songs of hope: *“Be not stressed ...” *
— For songs about science, drug patent riches: *“We invest ...” *
And now, with this week’s runner-up about old Home Ec classes for girls
only:
*“Make a dress ....” *
Mark wasn’t the only person to write parodies that rivaled the
cleverness of Howard Ashman’s original lyrics: Back in Week 876, Dion
Black wrote about the BP oil spill (*“See our mess”*), and in 2016
Duncan Stevens’s “song of hope” was hopeful only that “*There’ll be
mess,”* so much so that “there’ll be no time for plund’ring when there’s
so much blund’ring.” But this week we have four Guests at the party,
with second place going to Marcus Bales’s excoriation of
testing-obsessed schools*(“Beat the test”)* and honorable mentions for
Duncan on the Educational Testing Service business (*“ETS! ETS!”)* and
for Jesse Frankovich’s method for multiple-choice exams, *“I just
guessed ...”*
We are beyond delighted to see the return of Nan Reiner to the Invite in
such fine form. Nan had moved to South Florida from the D.C. area, and
more than a year ago, she started having a series of health woes that
kept her from her usual emcee roles at the Losers’ Post-Holiday Party
and Flushies awards and, more recently, from entering the Invite at all.
Nan’s Lose Cannon-winning take on the recent scandal about pressure to
graduate D.C. students who didn’t even show up to class half the year
(also addressed by honorably mentioned Dave Airozo) is her 17th Invite
win as she — I assume she’s back now — marches toward the 400-ink mark.
Marcus Bales’s second-place parody is longer than we usually run “above
the fold,” since the narrow columns of the print page don’t lend
themselves to lengthy songs; in fact, it wasn’t the whole thing: Marcus
also parodied a spoken section of the original:
/Tell your future from the I Ching
Since a teacher who is teaching
To the test is obsessed with school board rules.
Ah, those good old days when we were useful -
But now we’re Key Performance Index fools.
Be a citizen and neighbor?
No, the kids are only labor
For the future to make money for their boss.
No one cares for good, or truth, or beauty,
Or even pretty scenery
They just learn to work machinery ... /
As you see, Marcus’s humor tends to be angry, bitter humor, sometimes
too bitter for the Invite. But he’s an amazingly clever, and
astonishingly prolific, poet and parodist. I suggest youfollow him on
Facebook .
And our other runner-up, Chris Doyle, heads ever closer to that 2,000th
blot of Invite ink (unless it’s right now; the Loser stats aren’t quite
up to date, Great Statistician Elden Carnahan having been on vacation
from retirement). Next week is The Style Invitational’s 25th
anniversary, and gee, we have to note that in /some/ way, but Chris’s
achievement will be duly celebrated soon.
I always feel sad not to award inkworthy work that involved a lot of
effort, but there’s only so many songs I can run in one list and expect
any sane person to reach the end. So as usual, I’ll be posting some of
the non-inking parodies (and maybe some that did ink) in the Style
Invitational Devotees group on Facebook. Sign up now
and the Devs will anagram your name in many
inappropriate permutations.
Next week: Bring your party hats to wish the Invite a happy 25th
birthday. The Post won’t be doing anything special for the occasion; its
advice to me was to “tell your people about it, so they can share it on
social media.” So there you go!