Style Conversational Week 1285: Eye LOLs
Jocularity in ocularity — or is it the other way around? Whatever.
Jesse Frankovich was one of several Losers who sent in photos of their
Style Invitational first-prize trophies all googlied up. (The Inker, at
left, is missing, for obvious reasons, its Head Bag of Shame.)
By
Pat Myers
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Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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June 21, 2018 at 2:45 p.m. EDT
/“Eye LOLs” was a non-inking headline suggestion by Chris Doyle./
Writing poetry featuring arcane spelling-bee words has its place — and
that place would be The Style Invitational. But as the results of Week
1281 show this week, the Invite also has room
for the more directly funny — especially since the Loser Community
inevitably works wordplay into the mix.
We hadn’t done a photo contest since 2011,
when the Invite lived in the tabloid-size Sunday Style section. And our
last one on a broadsheet (full-size) page was all the way back in 2007
.
But I did want to do a visual contest that didn’t require major craft
skills, significant cost or huge amounts of time, and when someone
shared a photo of, I think, a googly-eyed mailbox in the Style
Invitational Devotees Facebook group, I jumped
at the idea. Well, I didn’t exactly jump, because I then had to petition
the Powers That Be to be given a whole page — a color page — in the Arts
& Style section, rather than our usual left half of a black-and-white
page. This required months of scheduling.
I think the PTB will get more than a few laughs.
I got about 400 entries overall, patiently sent in one at a time to
ensure that The Post’s online submission system would cooperate. (I also
accepted photos sent by email; those took longer to go through, but only
about 10 people emailed me and so it wasn't a major problem.) Most
people used the commercial googly eyes available in packs at dollar
stores, etc., but some people made paper versions. (Jeff Shirley’s giant
eyes on the street
,
with leaf-lips, worked especially well.) After I chose the winners — 20
online, 14 in print — I added the title or caption, plus the Loser’s
credit, to the photo for the online version; in print the text appears
as captions outside the photos.
Since I don’t see the entrants’ names while I judge contests, I had /no
/ idea who’d sent which inking entry — except for the “Eyes of the
Bee-Holder”
photo, which featured an adorable little girl who — even with googly
eyes instead of her own — was obviously the Mini-Me of 297-time Loser
Danielle Nowlin.
And I guessed correctly that it was Chris Doyle who did the “Ears
Looking at Euclid”
pun, perhaps because Chris got ink long ago with “Here’s looking at
Euclid” in a very different contest.
Hildy Zampella’s photo of the spooning sporks,
with its hilariously sly, make-you-figure-it-out-for-a -second
“dialogue,” was this week’s clear winner. Which makes it the sixth win
for Hildy, even though she didn’t start playing the Invite till Week
1140. But it’s the very first ink for this week’s second-place finisher,
Nancy Summers. Nancy’s sated onion
was
just the funniest of several entries she submitted, and so I’m hoping to
see lots more from her. Nancy gets a Fir Stink
for
her first ink, as well as the pack of headbands
from
which spring writable word balloons.
Kevin Dopart, who blotted up lots of ink in our previous photo contests
(as well as every other kind), gets a runner-up and multiple ink today;
he let me know just this afternoon that he actually collaborated with
his daughter Alethea, as he did with his winning entry
in
our edible-news contest (an ocean of purple burritos for the
burial-at-sea of Osama bin Laden). And the peripatetic David Friedman,
whom we’ve credited over the years as being from Virginia, Maryland,
Massachusetts and California, now resurfaces in the Losers’ Circle from
Indianapolis. (Fortunately, David doesn’t keep changing his email address.)
Haven’t had enough of these? The Losers have already begun posting their
“noinks” on the Devotees page. And I’ll surely feature a photo each day
for a while as a Style Invitational Ink of the Day .
*DO US WRONG: THIS WEEK’S CONTEST, WEEK 1285*
This week’s contest
should
appeal to trivia buffs, much as our numerous false-facts contests do.
(Hmm, who has a good fictoid topic we haven’t done yet? See the Week
1268 Convo for links to earlier ones.) It’ll
be a bit of a challenge to turn a trivia question and a wrong answer
into a clever joke, but suggester Duncan Stevens’s examples show it can
be done. ( I’m optimistic that the Loser Community is trivial enough to
enjoy this one. Since you get to make up the question as well as the
answer, you’ll be able to tailor the wording to produce the best
punchline, but: If your question sounds odd and contrived, not like a
real trivia question, it’s not going to work for this contest. (I owe
Duncan at least two ice cream cones for recent contest suggestions.)
*LOSERLY SUMMER EVENTS: A BRUNCH AND AN AUGUST LOSERFEST*
The next Loser brunch is at noon on Sunday, July 15, at the practically
historic Mrs. K’s Toll House (est. 1930) in close-in Silver Spring, Md.
At $38, the brunch buffet is certainly at the high end of the
Loser-outing continuum, but it’s said to be very good. I had dinner
there once many years ago and it was delicious.
And just off his gig as Flushies emcee Loserfest Pope Kyle Hendrickson
is working up a lively slate of activities to choose from in his home
base of truly historic Frederick, Md., over the weekend of Aug. 12-13.
It’s close to most of us for a day trip, but it’s also fun to stay the
weekend. Check out Loserfest.org to see what
Kyle’s thinking about. Well, not /that/ thing he’s thinking about, but
about Loserfest. I’m not sure I can make the July brunch — I may be
becoming a grandmother around that time — but the Royal Consort and I do
plan to Loserfester at least one of the days.