Style Conversational Week 1281: Cast your eyes upon ... almost anything
Except a picture like this. The Style Invitational Empress on this
week’s googly contest.
Bob Staake’s first idea for this week’s art, immediately rejected by the
Empress. He followed it up with something worse, just to be funny,
before making his Cyclops. (Made on makemegoogly.com)
By
Pat Myers
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Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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May 24, 2018 at 3:30 p.m. EDT
How ’bout that nifty cartoon from Bob Staake
atop this week’s Style Invitational? “It only
took us 25 years to realize that we could animate one of mycartoons for
the online edition of The Style Invitational — further proof of what
slow learners we are,” Bob notes. (That would, of course, include the
years beginning in 1993 when the Invite wasn’t online yet, and however
long after that before we had the capability. Still, though, we’re a
little late to the party.)
“That said,” continues Bob, “the single eye of a Cyclops is always funny
in and of itself, so swapping it out with a static googly eye wouldn’t
be quite right. There’s only one Cyclops I could channel: Ray
Harryhausen’s infamous, jerky, stop-motion one from the 1958 classic
‘The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad’ — and thanks to the miracle of circa-1994
gif animation, we were able to properly ‘googlify’ the eyeball.”
The Cyclops wasn’t the /first / thing that sprang to Bob’s mind, though.
First, he emailed me a link to the GIF version of the Stevie Wonder joke
above, correctly predicting, “You’ll probably nix it, but . . .”
But that just got Bob rolling. Before settling down with the single
googly Cyclopean eye, he sent me one more idea, one that I didn’t even
want to include visibly in The Style Conversational. So don’t complain
to me if you click on this link
and don’t like what you see.
As often happens with contests that we do for the first time, some
questions and issues may well arise as the Loser Community — including,
I’m hoping, lots of people who have just discovered the Invite — begins
to work on the Week 1281 contest. I’ve tried to anticipate various
issues, but I might have to rule on some questions during this extended
entry period: I’ve extended the window a full week, to June 11. If you
have a question that’s not addressed in this week’s instructions:
— Best would be to post it in the comments thread of my post of the
Invite
at
the top of the Style Invitational Devotees page on Facebook. (Sign up
here, and I or co-admin Alex Blackwood will
wave you in, and the Devotees will anagram your name in more ways that
you can shake an eyeball at.) This will let everyone see my response.
— If you won’t join the Devotees, you can email me at
pat.myers@washpost.com. Put something like “Question about Week 1281” in
the subject line. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
Okay, here’s one thing I’ll clarify: Bob created the googly eyes on his
cartoon by using the tools on the website MakeMeGoogly.com
. Do /not /create your Week 1281 entry with
such tools. Also, don’t turn your entry into a GIF; an all-photo set of
results will be challenging enough to produce online, and of course a
GIF won’t work in our June 24 print edition (which should be in color).
In addition to the link to Buzzfeed’s compilation that I share in this
week’s introduction, here’s another good collection of googly-eyes
photos
, from
a guy in Sweden who eyed up various things in his neighborhood..
*BUZZ WORDS*: THE ‘SPELLING BEE’ NEOLOGISMS OF WEEK 1277 *
/*Non-inking headline by Jesse Frankovich/
I have a feeling that a lot of entrants toWeek 1277
didn’t get the special parameters of this
contest, inspired by the New York Times’s weekly (and since then, now
daily) word game Spelling Bee: Unlike in our ScrabbleGrams neologism
contests, in this one you could reuse letters from the given
seven-letter set as often as you liked, or not at all. But many, many of
the 1,000-plus entries used all seven letters of one or another of the
15 sets offered. That was certainly permitted — and indeed, the inking
“styfine” (Kathleen DeBold, Ward Kay) did just that. But such a
self-restriction made this contest much harder than it needed to be.
But of course, our readers see only the week’s published entries, not
the “noinks,” as the Losers call them. And those came out just fine,
expanding once again the Invite’s Dictionary of Super-Great Additions to
the English Language if Only People Would Use Them.
This week they’re topped by Jeff Hazle’s “Krapatoa” to mean a
presidential Twitter eruption, which works even better this week while
everyone’s talking about volcanoes. It’s the fourth win and the 92nd
blot of ink overall for Jeff, whose transposition of letters from the
norm in “Haz/le”/ is balanced by the ending of his first name: Jeffery
Hazle, Bane of Copy Editors.
Duncan Stevens wins that cute crab beanie
for
his two adorable little kids with “FU-ton,” the uncomfortable couch.
Whether he wants to explain to them the joke that won it, well, that’s
Duncan’s call. Kathleen DeBold had a three-ink day, catapulting her ink
total to 30, topped by her runner-up of “Oxanne” as someone who might
not want to turn on the red light, or any light. Kathleen gets her
choice of runner-up Loser Mug or Grossery Bag. And given that she’s a
local who’s never been to a Loser brunch or other event, it’d be great
if we could meet her at the June 9 Flushies award potluck/ schmoozefest.
*(Didn’t get the Evite to the Flushies? Got it and forgot to tell us?
Here’s a link to it again. *) It’d also be
nice to see Tom Witte, who has been getting Invite ink ever since Week 7
in 1993, but who hasn’t (dis)graced us with his presence in more than a
decade. With his runner-up this Week plus his joint credit on the
headline “Beelogisms,” Tom hits Ink Blot No. 1,488 — 134 of them “above
the fold.”
Almost getting ink until Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood made the save:
*“Googlgoof:* Mistakenly searching for dicks.com instead of
dickssportinggoods.com.” (Bill Dorner). It turns out that typing
“dicks.com” takes you to ... dickssportinggoods.com. So Doug might not
be getting called into the HR office after all for his fact-checking.
Among the entries that didn’t get ink: The humor of many of them would
have been enhanced by funny examples of their use; a list of three-word
definitions gets pretty tedious. For example, someone sent in “crudo” as
“a statement of inappropriate beliefs”; that’s a great word and idea
that might have gotten ink had it cited some humorously uninspirational
principle to live by. Maybe “When you’re a star they let you do it. You
can do anything,” or, better, something we’ve quoted less.
*What Doug Dug: * Once again, Doug also favored us with his own picks of
the week. While he fortunately denied ink to the Googlegoof entry, Doug
did single out Bill Dorner’s “were-ewe,” with its definition of “sheep
in wolf’s clothing”; “yentanet,” by First Offender Sue Tanbenkibel; Rob
Cohen’s “sinfinity”; Frank Osen’s “gall gene”; and Jon Gearhart’s risque
“erectricity.” (That one and Michael Rolfe’s “balge” would never have
made it into print just a few years ago, but I can almost guarantee you
that no one will write to complain about our crudity.)
Have a happy and googly holiday weekend! Come to the Flushies on June 9!