Style Conversational Week 1353: Here’s to the Record-breakers
The Empress of The Style Invitational on this week’s new contest and
results
This ubiquitous line in congressional proceedings became a wry Style
section headline in July to lament Robert Mueller's disappointing
performance during his greatly anticipated hearing. Jesse Frankovich and
Jeff Contompasis took a different tack in this week's results. (The
Washington Post)
This ubiquitous line in congressional proceedings became a wry Style
section headline in July to lament Robert Mueller's disappointing
performance during his greatly anticipated hearing. Jesse Frankovich and
Jeff Contompasis took a different tack in this week's results. (The
Washington Post)
By
Pat Myers
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Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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Oct. 10, 2019 at 3:53 p.m. EDT
Invite-Addled Loser Duncan Stevens is a great student of the Master
Contest List
on
the Losers’ website, NRARS.org, and I knew that he’d already perused the
MOV sub-list — already up to /forty-five/ contests — to be sure there
wasn’t one in which you use the opposite of a word in the title to
create a new movie. Plus he sent a set of good examples. So it’s yet one
more Potbelly (getting to be an apt name in my case) prize milkshake for
Duncan for bringing usWeek 1353 .
But I did remember at least one contest whose results could overlap with
this one. But even it was from almost a decade ago. So for inspiration —
and so you won’t send in the same entries — here are the results of Week
851 (January 2010), complete with some entries that lacked funny
descriptions. (I was going to say that you /could /use those titles if
you had an absolutely fabulous description, but I don’t think any would
count as an “opposite”; well, I guess I’d take “The Meh Santini.”)
*Report from Week 851*, in which we asked you to “shrink” the title of a
book, play or movie and describe the new plot. We got lots of funny
titles whose descriptions didn’t really enhance them, including “Less
Miserables,” “Mildly Annoyed Max,” “Post-it Notes From the Underground,”
“Physician Assistant Zhivago,” “The Discount of Monte Cristo,”
“Intestine of Darkness,” “The Meh Santini,” “Lost Verizon,” “Policy
Disagreement on the Bounty,” “Malcolm PG-13” and “Nicoderm Road.”
The winner of the Inker:*The Fifth Sense: *“I smell dead people.” (Adam
and Russell Beland, Fairfax)
2. the winner of the unflattering Eleanor Roosevelt doll: *The Mediocre
Gatsby:* The biography of Tareq Salahi. (Ira Allen, Bethesda) [Salahi’s
12 seconds of fame involved crashing a White House state dinner.]
*3. Slaughterhouse $4.99:* A family gets to choose among beef, chicken
and pork with all the trimmings — only at Denny’s! (Greg Arnold, Herndon)
*4. Three Days of the Condom:* Love on a shoestring. (Edmund Conti, Raleigh)
*Missed the Marquee: Honorable Mentions*
*Guess Who’s Coming To:* A guy passes out. Then he wakes up. (Judy
Blanchard, Novi, Mich.)
*Casablank: *Rick can’t really recall meeting Ilsa before, but he plays
along because, what the heck, she looks like Ingrid Bergman. (Larry
Yungk, Arlington)
*The Least of the Mohicans:* A young Indian in New York scalps his
theater tickets. (Roy Ashley, Washington)
*The Manchurian Media Darling Who Won't Say He's Running and Won't Say
He Isn't:* A Chinese plot to get Americans to give up on democracy once
and for all. (Tom Kreitzberg, Silver Spring)
*Perturbed Bull:* “Did you read off-color poetry to my wife?” (Bruce
Alter, Fairfax Station)
*Halve-atar:* See it in 1.5-D! (Jim Deutsch, Washington)
*75 Days of Summer:* A guy lives in Minnesota. (Josh Borken, Minneapolis)
*One Hundred Minutes of Solitude:* A teenager gets after-school
detention. (Tom Witte, Montgomery Village)
*Apollo 12: *Three U.S. astronauts blast off for the moon, where they
plant a flag, gather rocks and drink Tang, then return to Earth without
incident. (Bob Dalton, Arlington)
*20,000 Millimeters Under the Sea: *The story of the Chesapeake Bay
Bridge-Tunnel. (Jon Graft, Centreville)
*The Satanic Doggerel: *The Koran in limerick form. “There once was a
Prophet from Mecca …” (Chris Doyle, Ponder, Tex.)
*Oh. Calcutta: *Teens are disappointed after sneaking into a play about
… Calcutta. (Kyle Hendrickson, Frederick)
*Eat, Pay, Love:* Eliot Spitzer’s soul-stirring memoir of self-discovery
on a brief business trip to Washington. (Gordon Barnes, Alexandria)
*The Hitchhikers CliffsNotes to the Galaxy:* 42. (Kyle Hendrickson)
*Naked Breakfast:* Embarrassing dad forgets to close his robe while
cooking, finally learns lesson from bacon splatter. (Randy Lee, Burke)
*The Pelican Briefs: *Travelers with oversize underwear arouse suspicion
at airport security checkpoints. (Jeff Loren, Manassas)
*The Man Who Would Be Deputy Assistant Secretary:* The stark truth about
civil service. (John Shea, Lansdowne, Pa.)
*Reasonable Expectations:* Orphaned Pip realizes that his life in the
mid-19th century is going to stink no matter what. (Jeff Contompasis,
Ashburn)
*Gone in 60 Minutes:* Man starts the car while his wife finishes getting
ready to leave. (David Friedman, Boston)
*Gone in 30 Seconds:* Fast-paced film about a mom who brings home pizza
for three teenage boys. (Drew Bennett, West Plains, Mo.)
*Around the Mall in 80 Minutes:* NOBODY has those cute boots! (Jean
Berard, Arnold, Md., a First Offender)
*Mr. Smith Goes to Scaggsville: *Near the end of his trip to the
nation’s capital, a traffic jam on I-95 forces him off the road south of
Baltimore. (Beverley Sharp, Washington)
*Lightly Soiled Harry:* “What you have to ask yourself is ‘Do I feel
yucky?' " (Russell Beland)
*The Hunchback of South Bend Community College:* Walk-on lineman doesn’t
let his disability deter him in the big game against Iowa Normal School.
(Edmund Conti)
*The Da Vinci Code Ring:* Robert Langdon unearths a monstrous conspiracy
hidden in a box of Cracker Jack. (Ben Frey, Frederick, a First Offender)
Droll call*: The Congressional Record ‘questions’ of Week 1349
/*Submitted as a headline by five or six people /
I’d predicted four weeks ago in this column
that I wouldn’t get a whole lot of entrants to Week 1349, a version of
our recurring Questionable Journalism contest in which people had to dig
around the Congressional Record website and write funny questions that
quotes from the Record could answer. “But I’m also confident that some
people out there will see this challenge as lots of fun — and will send
me lots of inkworthy questions.”
All of this proved true, and despite the relatively small entry pool I
still had to trim entries for this week’s results
.
Along with the sort of thing I was envisioning with this contest —
reinterpretations of such Congress-speak as “morning business” and
“yield the balance of my time” and of course “member” — enterprising
Losers managed to turn up some classic inanities by our elected
officials from both parties, whom I don’t at all feel bad about calling
out by name, since the legislators are free to go back and fix up their
quotes “for the record.” And the champ among these — Rep. Carolyn B.
Maloney illustrating the gender wage gap by noting that half of the
workers who earn the minimum wage are women — earned Sam Mertens a Lose
Cannon.
I’m always delighted to see new Losers get ink — and thrilled when they
dive right in and start inking up the joint. And rookie Sam certainly
seems to Get It: Starting with his debut in Week 1323, the software
engineer from Maryland’s outer suburbs had blotted up ink in 19 Invite
contests, for 23 blots of ink including a runner-up. Now this week that
ink total jumps to 26 — including first and second place. The stated
rule of the Invitational is one prize per week, something Sam seemed to
know, since he just wrote me to opt for the Lose Cannon rather than the
second-prize Poop Hoop head-basketball game. But I’m not going to
deprive Sam of the chance to get poop emoji balls thrown at his head;
I’ll magnanimously send him both invaluable (i.e., not valuable) prizes.
Though I hope he’ll send a photo of himself wearing the Poop Hoop.
Come to think of it, it’s an all-Montgomery County Losers’ Circle this
week: Gary Crockett, of Chevy Chase, is there for the millionth time,
but in fourth place it’s another rookie, Sarah Walsh of Rockville, who
doubles her previous ink total with two blots today.
As is usually true for our contests that play on quoted matter, the
humor works best when the reader grasps the context of what the quote’s
actually about. And indeed, except for pointing out that “Empress” is a
casino (in Joliet, Ill.), I didn’t feel a need to explain the original
statements. But in the early part of the judging, I wasn’t sure about
that, and was writing up explainers for appealing entries such as these,
which ended up not getting ink:
A. “Mr. Speaker, I suggest that these Chinese berets be made into
suppositories and be used on Pentagon brass.”
Q. We haven’t passed anything weird this morning — anyone got something?
(Frank Osen) The quote was part of a 2001 rant by the colorful Rep. Jim
Traficant (D-Ohio), who was angry that the Defense Department had
ordered 600,000 berets from China for U.S. service members. They were
eventually shelved after such outcries.
A. Mr. Speaker, I rise, as doth the golden orb pulled across the sky
each day by the chariot of Apollo, to decry an ignominy perpetuated on
this Body by the captious Sunlight Foundation.
Q. What’s wrong with a foundation that advocates for plain-speaking in
government? (Oh, it’s also Frank Osen — I’m just looking these up now.)
Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.), jokingly decrying the foundation’s 2012
report that the discourse in Congress had dropped by a full grade level
in the past decade. Afterward, the foundation rated Quigley’s speech not
that high either.
A. I am just looking for one that is particularly bad in violating the
Constitution and his oath of office, yes.
Q. What did the president say about the search for his next Cabinet
pick? (Sam Mertens) Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) in 1998, on compiling a list
of “activist” judges who he thought should be impeached.
*What Doug dug: *Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood is back from a three-week
staycation (though we wish he’d sent a picture postcard from
Hyattsville) and is back to offering his faves of the week. This time he
agreed with me about the Lose Cannon winner and also singled out Frank
Osen’s “morning business” (my favorite of several entries playing on
that phrase) and also Frank’s ba-da-bing “bicameral” joke; Chris Doyle’s
“words fail me,” and the play on the recurring line “The time of the
gentleman has expired,” from both Jesse Frankovich and Jeff Contompasis.
*What’s with the bare-bones Staake? *A last-minute emergency prevented
cartoonist Bob Staake from finishing this week’s cartoon. So we went
with his pencil sketch instead.
It’s not too late to advance on Gettysburg: Loser brunch and
battlefield tour
Just about every year, a contingent of Losers takes advantage of Loser
Roger Dalrymple’s tour guide expertise, driving up to Gettysburg, Pa.,
for lunch in a local pub followed by a drive to various sites where the
1863 Battle of Gettysburg transpired, and perhaps a stroll around the
historic town. I can’t make it this year, but it’s always fascinating
and fun. (Except the time I got sick …) And Roger just got ink this
week, so he should be in an extra-nice mood. Lunch is at Appalachian
Brewing Co., a nice pub. Because Keeper of the Brunches Elden Carnahan
is on vacation, it’s best to RSVP to Roger directly at rogerandpam [at]
comcast [dot] net.
I /will, /however, be at the November 10 brunch at Paradiso on Franconia
Road just outside the Beltway. And if you can make it downtown for lunch
sometime between Monday and Wednesday, Nov. 18-20, we’re trying to have
a Dorkness at Noon lunch so we can greet Nonstop Loser Jesse Frankovich,
who’ll be in town from Michigan at a convention. (He doesn’t yet know
his daily schedule, so stay tuned for the details.)