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 close Image without a caption Pat Myers Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003 Email Email Bio Bio Follow Follow 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!