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!