Style Conversational Week 1286: A site for more eyes Some of the ‘noink’ googly-eyes photos from Style Invitational Week 1281 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 June 28, 2018 at 2:02 p.m. EDT I don’t know about y’all, but even though it’s a spectacularly gorgeous morning in the shade here at Mount Vermin, the Empress’s mildly decaying estate, I feel the same pit in my stomach that I felt the morning of November 9, 2016. So hey, how about some more silly photos of things with googly eyes pasted on them? The photo gallery above contains seven more entries from Style Invitational Week 1281, the photo contest whose results ran last week. (See those 20 photos here. ) *YOU BET YOUR B/P: ANOTHER NEOLOGISM CONTEST* The “name change” from IHOP to IHOB last month did its job, I suppose, to remind the world for a few days that the pancake chain also sells burgers. But what’s more important to Western Civilization is that the stunt gave us yet one more angle for a neologism contest (thanks to the suggestion of 12-time Loser Loser John Folse). There’s one eensy mini-hitch: The Invite actually /did/ this contest, sorta: In Week 1165, in celebration of Brendan Beary’s 1,000th ink, Brendan got the chance to judge — and choose — a Style Invitational contest: Mr. B.B. asked the Loser Community to to add one or more B’s to an existing word, or substitute one or more B’s for another letter. It’s that second part that creates a mite of overlap this week; there were indeed some entriesin the results that replaced a B with a P, like: Borsche: A souped-up Eastern European sports car. (Christopher Lamora; Lela Martin) Philanthrobby: Giving till it hurts. (Rick Haynes) Bumpkin pie: A popular backwoods dish consisting of . . . um, don’t ask. (Kimberly Baer) And though I’m not going to search methodically through the literally thousands of neologisms we’ve printed over the last 25-plus years, surely there are a few in which a P was replaced with another letter (note that this week’s contest lets you use letters other than B as well, so that we won’t get so much duplication). But on the other hand, it’s now — courtesy of Grandpa of All Losers Elden Carnahan — super-easy to check whether a particular neologism has appeared in the Invite before: You just search on the New and Imporved All Invitational Text file that Elden has compiled on the Losers’ website, NRARS.org, and continues to refine. Because it’s plain text, it loads quickly and searches instantly. Has your name ever appeared in the Invite? Go find it! (If it’s spelled correctly, that is. I keep discovering names that aren’t.) *ART DEPRECIATION*: THE RESULTS OF WEEK 1282* /*Honorable-mentions subhead from some earlier contest by Chris Doyle; I don’t want to use a new one here, because then you couldn’t use it for the next caption contest / As I write this, this week’s Style Invitational results have been posted for almost two hours, and I’m a bit surprised that I haven’t been barraged with emails saying, “Hey, /I / wrote a caption about Scott Pruitt/high-diving into the bathtub/tofu/bird looks like watermelon/open windshield/airbags, too!” Inevitably, when you have 200 people writing captions for any (or often all) of four pictures, there’s going to be a lot of duplication. But actually, a sizable fraction of this week’s cartoon captions were unique ideas among the 1,000-plus entries for Week 1282. I got lots of entries like “You’re right, the iPhone X /doesn’t / float,” for the cartoon with the kids looking down into the bathtub, as bubbles waft upward. But Rick Haynes took a more imaginative, funnier tack with his self-centered child, scoring his fifth Invite win and his 148th blot of ink. Second-place finisher Kevin Dopart wins his umpteen-zillionth piece of crap with an entry that beat out a very similar one that was just a smidge more wordy (I never looked up who wrote the bad-luck one). And J. Larry Schott gets his ninth ink “above the fold,” out of 67 inks in all, with his “tweet” joke, one of the few inking entries this week that aren’t worded as quotes. And then there’s the amazing record of our No. 3 guy, Frank Bruno: This week Frank scores just his fifth blot of Invite ink — but three of those have been runners-up. Freakily impressive. *What Doug Dug: * Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood agreed with my choice for the winner, and also singled out Kenny Moore’s “Mom fell off again” for the car/mattress picture, as well as Warren Tanabe’s “I thought you were taking a /mistress” / (by the way, the “your mistress sent me” captions for the “stork” in Picture A pretty much canceled one another out); the doubly credited “Breaking Bad” allusion to the famously grisly bathtub scene; Dave Zarrow’s man saying to the dog, “I followed you home. Can you keep me?” and Hildy Zampella’s about the dog and the Ferragamo shoes. And Doug also gave shout-outs to Jesse Frankovich’s headline for this week’s results, “Maim That Toon” — “classic” — as well as Jesse’s honorable-mentions subhead, “The Weak in Pictures.” --- So have a happy Fourth of July, folks, while you still can. And hey, there’s a good chance that by next Thursday, I’ll be a grandma! Must go polish that super-soft Infant Tiara.