Style Conversational Week 1274: Give us this week our yearly bred
Another sure-to-be-happy time around the track for the Style
Invitational horse contest
The Empress said she wanted a cartoon depicting either "horse romance"
or "horse parenting" to illustrate this year's "foal" contest. Bob
offered this as Option A. She titles this one "Fire Me Now." (Bob Staake
for The Washington Post (maybe not really))
By
Pat Myers
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Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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April 5, 2018 at 2:34 p.m. EDT
Horse racing’s Triple Crown — a trio of especially long and grueling
races spread over five weeks — is open only to 3-year-old horses
(racehorse birthdays are arbitrarily set at Jan. 1). Which means that we
have a different field of 100 nominated horses every April for The Style
Invitational’s “breeding” contest, as in this year’s Week 1274
.
But the rules, the strategy and the humor in general have remained
virtually the same, at least in recent years of the Invite’s 24 times
around the track, not counting the “grandfoal” contest you’ll see four
weeks from now. So why reinvent the horseshoe? Especially if you’re new
to this contest, please read my Style Conversational column from last
April, bit.ly/conv1222 , which in turn links to
previous columns. They’re full of clarifications and ruminations and
various other -ations, along with classic examples from past horse
contests.
Also, last year’s column mentions a hilarious story about a South
African racehorse named (before 2016) President Trump.
If you’ve come to the Conversational directly from the print Invite in
The Post’s Arts & Style section, you’ll have missed the extra directions
I included in the online version. I’ll post them right here as well,
along with some extra commentary:
Do the Empress — and yourself — a favor and . . .
●*Don’t “breed” two names and use a third name from the list for the
“foal.”* People do this every year and never get ink because it’s just
too easy to do. And just two horses at a time, please. (We’re just
romantic that way.)
●*Don’t number your list of entries. *Numbers at the beginning of a line
will give fits to our name-sorting system. You’ll have to count to 25 on
your 25 fingers. I trust you not to give me 26 names.
●*Type each entry on a single line.* This is essential. If you have the
parents’ name on one line and the foal on another, little Junior is
going to get lost from Mom and Dad when we do The Big Sort. Remember,
use this format: *Horse A x Horse B = Foal Name. *
For several years running, I’ve been aided immeasurably by Loser
Jonathan Hardis, a scientist at the National Institute of Standards and
Technology, who volunteered to take my gigantic file of amalgamated
anonymous entries — along with the other material that ends up in the
file when the entries are lifted from the submission website and
combined (The Post’s Sub Platform, which was intended for letters to the
editor, signing up for events, etc., just isn’t designed for the
Invite’s more complex needs) — and sort out just the entries, grouped
handily as Horse 1 x Horse 2, Horse 1 x Horse 3 ... Horse 1 x Horse 99,
etc.
Before Jonathan began doing this huge favor, I would use my computer’s
search and look first for all the entries with Horse 1, then select the
ones I liked; then with Horse 2. Sometimes there are 100 or more entries
for a particular horse. And because it took too long to mark the ones I
/didn’t / want to save, I ended up looking at most of the Horse 1
entries a second time when I was checking Horse 2, 3, 4, etc.
But the sorting is by single line. So if you do this:
Horse 1 x Horse 2 =
Foal
you will get an orphaned foal. And that will be very sad. It will remind
me of “Lonesome Little Colt”
by C.W. Anderson, an easy-reader book that I read approximately 8,427
times when I was 5 years old.
Even worse:
Horse 1
x Horse 2 = Foal
x Horse 3 = Foal
If we can easily figure out an entry in the wrong format, I won’t throw
it out, but I’m not going to go to heroic measures to track it down.
●*Observe the 18-character limit, including spaces and punctuation
marks.* In other Invite contests, the Empress has occasionally given ink
to an entry that didn’t technically fit the rules, if it was especially
clever or funny. But there’s no give on the letter limit on horse names
— it’s part of the challenge.
--
Last year I provided a link to a Word document that I’d posted on
Scribd.com that had the list in a handy one-page, three-column format,
and I did the same this year. But for some reason I can’t figure out,
when anyone but me clicked on it today, it says, “This document has been
removed.”
I set the privacy settings to totally public, so I’m just mystified. So
I’m afraid you’ll have to copy the online list to your own computer if
you want a multi-column printout.
When I saw the print list last night — and that one /is /in three
columns — I realized that the bold sans serif font made it hard to tell
whether the first horse on the list was Ali or All. So this year’s print
list will be in our serif body type. I also replaced an especially long
name on the list with a shorter one because it wouldn’t fit on a single
line. (To emphasize: Each line contains one full name.)
Here are last year’s winner and runners-up:
4. MarchToTheMusic x It’s Your Nickel = The Half-Dime Show (Chris Doyle,
Denton, Tex.)
3. Irap x Rapid Dial = I Like Big Buttons
(Laurie Brink, Cleveland, Mo.)
2. Confederate x Factorial = Jeb! Stuart (Jonathan Hardis, Gaithersburg,
Md.)
1. Midnight Pleasure x Archimedes = Lover & Lever (Jon Gearhart, Des Moines)
(The rest of the results are here.
)
Usually, 300 to 400 people enter the foal contest, and perhaps 10
percent of those people get ink. That’s a higher percentage than in most
Invitational contests, because I can fit so many entries onto the page.
And it’s not unusual to have a half-dozen First Offenders among the
horse breeders. So even if you’ve never entered the Invitational before,
go for it — you could very well Lose.
*HARPY AnniVERSEry*: THE 5x5 POEMS OF WEEK 1270*
/*A non-inking headline by Jon Gearhart/
Kevin Dopart’s contest suggestion for the Invitational’s 25th
anniversary last month provided a rewarding showcase for our resident
Loserbards — entrants who tend to ink up the joint in our various poetry
contests — as well as a First Offender. The choice of three five-line
formats — five syllables, five words or five iambs — provided a range of
terse to leisurely, with lots of zing throughout.
Some people ignored the rules and wrote limericks of any number of words
or syllables — unlike Jesse Frankovich’s excellent 5x5-worder. Someone
else wrote a sweet ode about the Invitational itself, but it was in
iambic tetrameter, with just four ba-BUMPs per line.
It was the full iambic pentameter that won the Lose Cannon , plus two
honorable mentions, for Frank Osen, who gets his /sixteenth/ Invite win,
but his first cannon, since he hadn’t won since we started giving away
our newest trophy.
Frank has more than 300 blots of ink in all, from practically every type
of Invitational contest, but his poetry is consistently outstanding,
even when he slums in non-Invitational verse, including an award-winning
collection
(yeah, but did it get him a cannon with a BNAG flag sticking out of the
barrel?). Runners-up Chris Doyle, Beverley Sharp (who’s currently
touring Uzbekistan but already checked this morning to see if she got
ink) and Nan Reiner offered their trademark wit, and Beverley showed
that you /can / succeed in the Invite without discussing /that / person
(and she wrote about dogs without mentioning poop!).
*What Doug Dug:* Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood enjoyed all four of the
“above-the-fold” entries, and also singled out Dave Airozo’s jab at
those who gripe about “overpaid teachers,” Frank Osen’s “you’re Trump’s
attorney” rejoinder, and First Offender Connie Dobbins Akers’s
“Mid-Atlantic” Redskins — which reminded me of winner of Style
Invitational Week 1, to come up with a new name for the team: “The
Baltimore Redskins: Don’t move the team, just change the name. Let
Baltimore worry about it.” Connie, though, got in a last-line twist-dig
at our city in the space of 25 words.
*NOT IF WE WANT TO FINISH YEAR 26: THE UNPRINTABLES *
I think we have to award this week’s Scarlet Letter to Bob Staake, who
offered me the sketch at the top of this page when I asked for a cartoon
featuring either horse romance or horse parenting. Good thing nobody at
The Post reads this column. But we also have these Loser-generated gems:
What’s lurking in that dossier
That Donald keeps hidden away?
Is it simply general meanness,
His currency’s fresh-laundered greenness,
Or photos of his micropenis? (Nan Reiner)
President Trump is
A floater that keeps
Bobbing up despite
Flushing again and
Again and again. (Kate Turney)