Style Conversational Week 1291: Putin On the Parodies
The Style Invitational Empress ruminates all over this week’s new
contest and results
What a pistol: Russian pro-gun activist Maria Butina in 2013. The
alleged spy and her amorous contacts among NRA members inspired numerous
Losers to commemorate her in song. (Associated Press/AP)
By
Pat Myers
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Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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August 2, 2018 at 2:24 p.m. EDT
Honestly, I’d rather you spend your self-allotted Style Invitational
hours reading this week’s song parody results than my yakking about
them. But look at this. I published 21 songs, by 15 people. Three of
them, including the winner, were by Nan Reiner. Here’s one of her 12
other Week 1287 songs, written in a two-week span, that /didn’t/ get ink:
To “Copacabana” by Barry Manilow (Nan sings it here
)
Her name was Stormy; she was a showgirl.
She had Ivanka’s boobs and hair, and a dress just barely there.
She met with “Spanky” for hanky-panky:
He told her she would be a hit; she knew he was full of it,
But still she played along, tweaking the dingbat’s dong,
Till he schlorted her on their bargain, and she sang her song…
His name was Michael; he was a fixer.
And every bimbo Trump would boff, he was sent to pay her off.
He’d buy their silence with threats of violence
And laundered money he’d obtain from “connections” in Ukraine.
He swam in legal murk. A shady sort of jerk,
And though he went to the world’s worst law school, he could still get work.
With the Groper, the crude piranha, with hair colored like a banana.
Interloper Americana!
Pinchin’ and pattin’, L.A. to Manhattan
And Europa… Give him a shove!
Its name is RICO; it is a statute.
Designed to neutralize the Mob; now it’s gonna do its job
On Trumps deceiving, grifting and thieving.
They’ll feel their nether regions squeezed as their assets all get seized,
And they’ll be sent away to digs with bars of gray;
Board and bed at the ol’ Club Fed, ’twill be a long, long stay!
For the Groper, the crude piranha; an ego the size of Montana.
Misanthroper! We’ll shout “Hosanna!”
When they go slumming, ’cause they’ve got it coming.
Like L-dopa, we’ll feel the love… from Up Above…
My point being: There are only so many sets of song lyrics that a reader
can be asked to read through, line by line, preferably at a singing
pace. And we have far more material, from lots of talented, hard-working
Losers, than that limited quantity.
Soooo: As I write this just after the online posting of the results
Thursday morning, I’m already being asked — couldn’t I skip the next
contest and then run another week of parodies instead of those results?
I’ll give it a day or two of thought, but I’m concerned that so much of
the material is so specifically topical that five weeks from now, it’ll
feel old. Another possibility is to run them next week, and instead
delay the results of Week 1288 product disclaimers; Week 1289, animal
fictoids; Week 1290, neologisms; and this week’s movie/play anagrams.
More likely is that, as I often do, I’ll showcase various “noinks” from
Week 1287 each day in the Style Invitational Devotees
group on Facebook (it’s a closed group; the
Russians won’t bother you). And I may well include even some inking
entries that appear lower on the Web page.
*A few great, great lines: * Including from some entries that didn’t get
ink.
— This rhyme to “Gary Indiana” by Nan:
Rudy Giuliani, Rudy Giuliani,*fruity tool,
He hon*estly believes we’ll buy his guff?
— Danielle Nowlin’s *“Let’s Haul the Troll King Off” *
— Phil Frankenfeld’s using “Come Fly With Me” for *“Comply With Me”*
— Barbara Sarshik’s *“The Facts and Our Fears,”* on “The Tracks of My
Tears,” starring Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan:*“Take a good look at my
base...”*
— Also from Nan: “So I installed the Keebler Elf/ To be loyal, not
recuse himself
And eschew my *cagey coup* ...” Only when I sang along did I notice the
subtle but surely intentional echo of “KGB.”
— Speaking of “say it out loud and ...”: Did you see this line in Nan’s
Maria Butina song: “Not a man said to me, “Nix!”*I squeezed some GOP-niks”?*
— And from Mark Raffman: “He loves Assad? I give a nod / ’Cause*my heart
belongs to Vladdy.”*
All four of this week’s top winners have tons of Invitational ink among
them, especially in parodies. As I looked up the names of my choices
(except for people who’d attached videos, I didn’t know during the
judging), I wasn’t surprised to see the Raffman/Stevens/Doyle/Reiner
slate. But I was most excited to see that I’d chosen four brand-new
Losers among the 15 inking entrants: Thomas Vincent, who recently joined
the Devotees and immediately became an active poster; Jonathan Jensen,
another
new Devotee, who plays string bass with the Baltimore Symphony and —
like a number of other Loserbards — is the go-to parody-writer for
office retirement parties and whatnot (Jonathan, save the non-date-yet
in January for the Loser party right now); Jackie Beals, with her clever
“Goldfinger” parody (and other songs); and Sandy Riccardi, who’s an
actual professional parody writer and performer,
with hub Richard. Sandy joined the SI
Devotees some time ago, and we’d seen lots of her political parodies on
YouTube, but we were so sorry to miss the Riccardis’ appearance at a
Baltimore nightclub in June — on the same day as the Flushies, the Loser
Community’s annual awards, in Virginia. Next time you’re in town, Sandy,
we’ll be there. And we do have Loser bureaux in other cities ...
*What Doug dug: * Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood, who read the print
version of the Invite — the four top winners, plus Brian Allgar’s
“Eleanor Rigby,” Gary Crockett’s “Space Force Hymn,” Barbara Sarshik’s
“Into the Woulds” and First Offender Thomas Vincent’s “Donald’s Favorite
Things” — liked every single song. Wouldn’t rank them. (I can seriously
relate.)
*WHAT-EVERRRR*
** *Note: I just discovered that the deadline and publishing dates
listed on the Week 1290 entry form — for the contest for the Bob
Levey-style neologisms — were a week off. * They now correctly give the
deadline as Monday night, Aug. 6, and the publishing dates as Aug. 23
(online) and Aug. 26 (print).
*NO, DON’T CALL IT ‘MILF’: THIS WEEK’S MOVIE ANAGRAM CONTEST*
It’s hard to believe that we’d never combined our perennial contest
themes of anagrams and movie title wordplay, but Loser Duncan Stevens is
known to be an avid scholar of the Style Invitational Master Contest
List,
and he didn’t see anything in the past 1,290 contests that was just like
his suggestion for Week 1291. As I mentioned
in this week’s introduction, there’s an excellent chance that someone
else out there will come up with the very same anagram you did — so it’s
likely to come down to who writes the funniest description.
It should go without saying — but it won’t*: Please include the name of
the original movie! It must be spelled correctly. It does /not / need to
include a subtitle if any, but it may; for example, I’ll take anagrams
of either “Dr. Strangelove” or “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to
Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” For convention, let’s use the spelling
in the movie or play’s Wikipedia entry (contact me if that proves
problematic for some reason).
/(*Because of the numerous song parodies I received for Week 1287 that
did not cite the original song. Most I figured out; some I didn’t.) /
As in most such contests, entries that allude to the original movies are
more likely to be clever, though I’m not forbidding those that don’t.
Using totally obscure works tends not to make as funny a joke as a work
that a reader will have heard of, or can at least understand from the title.
Now go sing along with those parodies. Watch for more on the Devs page
each day; I’ll post them as “Files” so that you can click on that
category and see the whole, growing set.