Style Conversational Week 1369: The bones mots of Style Invitational obit poems You'd be grumpy, too: Although several Losers wrote elegies to Grumpy Cat, the Internet sensation who finished her ninth life this past May, the Empress didn't give any of them ink in this week's Style Invitational. (Richard Vogel, File) By Pat Myers Jan. 30, 2020 at 4:37 p.m. EST How do you write in a humorous way about someone who recently died without being either treacly or cruel? It’s the challenge that our Loserbards — entrants who get lots of ink in Style Invitational light-verse contests — have mastered over the past 16 years of annual contests for people who died the previous year. And this week’s results for Week 1365 continue the tradition smashingly. One way to do that is to look for offbeat subjects, rather than the celebrities who get the applause on the In Memoriam reel. Today’s inking entries include the guy who popularized paint-by-number kits; the guy who came up with the “Paul is dead” conspiracy theory; the guy who insisted that he was the sailor kissing the nurse in the famous V-J Day photo. Not to mention the last surviving snail of its species. But there were also odes to more boldface names, some with a fair amount of scorn. Someone as odious on the air as “Imus in the Morning” host Don Imus was — he called the Rutgers University women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos,” and even dissed The Style Invitational — deserves the two jabs that ran today by Duncan Stevens (“for Imus not in mourning”) and Ken Kaufman (“gone to take his eternal nappy”). Just missed getting ink: Jesse Frankovich calling him a “crappy-headed host.” AD ADVERTISING Chris Doyle showed once again how he got to be by far the highest-scoring Invitational Loser of all time, with his elegantly funny verse about engineer George Laurer, who chose not to follow his bosses’ directives at IBM, and decided that a rectangle would work better than a target-style circle as a Universal Product Code. Chris doesn’t really talk about Laurer himself — and his punchline is about checkout lines in general — but that didn’t matter to me. I had said that one of our general Invite rules is not to wish or predict that the decedent will go to hell. Runner-up Bill Dorner said only the most laudatory things about the late Rep. John Dingell, but he did slip in, discreetly and plausibly deniably enough for me, a little nasty about the congressman’s most conspicuous and crass critic. For that, Bill wins a toy monster that surprise-pops out of your shirt pocket. Meanwhile, Melissa Balmain and Frank Osen supplemented the already monumental Invite Obit Anthologies with gobs of ink — three poems by Melissa, four for Frank, and each was still robbed of ink for poems that didn’t make the final cut. (Frank’s so good at obit poems that last year, one of his five blots of ink was for Southwest Airlines chief Herb Kelleher, who hadn’t even died in 2018, but on Jan. 3, 2019; Herb gets to be just dead two years in a row courtesy of a couplet this time around by Loser Dean Alterman. Continuing the tradition, someone submitted a poem about Qasem Soleimani, who died Jan. 3, 2020.) AD What Doug Dug: Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood liked all this week’s top winners, and also especially, from this week’s honorable mentions, Chris Doyle’s amalgam of weird deaths, Ken Kaufman’s “eternal nappy” and Mike Gips’s self-effacing tribute to his father, Philip, creator of some of the most memorable movie posters of the last 50 years — although, it turns out, it was Mike’s mother who came up with the classic “Alien” tagline: “In space, no one can hear you scream.” (“Bones Mots” in today’s headline was submitted as a headline for Week 1365 and would have gotten ink for Tom Witte had it not already run in Week 1180, when it got ink for Tom Witte. The almost 100 percent complete “All Invitational Text” file, in searchable plain text, is added to each week by Keeper of the Stats Elden Carnahan at the Losers’ website, NRARS.org.) Our typo humor: The Week 1369 contest I was totally strung along by the joke at the top of this week’s Invitational, shared in a more violent form by Loser Michelle Stupak in the Style Invitational Devotees group on Facebook. Whether similar jokes work as well one after another, well, we’ll see. I’m expecting to be pretty wide-ranging in what counts as a “typo” and in which forms of humor will fit the theme. It may very well be the variety of forms that keep the results from reading like one joke told 25 times. The constant reminder: Don’t tell me the best joke you ever heard; keep it to the best joke you’ve ever thought of. AD Next Loser sighting: Ozzie’s Good Eats, Fairfax, Va., Feb. 16 This month’s Loser brunch was moved across the street from the Plan A restaurant Coastal Flats for a reason I forget. In any case, this one is a similar dependable national chain, featuring your typical American and Italian brunch/ lunch fare. As usual, the Loser brunch it’s on a Sunday at noon; RSVP to Elden Carnahan at NRARS.org (click on “Our Social Engorgements” to reply and to see a tentative calendar for the rest of the year). I had to miss the December brunch, so will try to make this one, especially to meet people who are new to the Loser Community. Let me know if you’re coming. Good news on the newsletter front: Though two weeks from now, The Post will be discontinuing the weekly email I send out every Thursday afternoon that includes a link to the new Invitational and Conversational, I’ve found a way to easily send you the same thing on my own, to up to 5,000 subscribers. (The Post is trimming back its operation from about 60 to 40 newsletters for administrative reasons; the Invitational’s is one of the smaller ones, and readers tend it click on it less often than most of the other newsletters.) So all you have to do is sign up at tinyletter.com/TheEmpress, and you’ll get virtually the same email as before. And you can unsubscribe just as easily, if you’d like to hurt my feelings. AD Though this new newsletter won’t start for two more weeks, it wouldn’t hoit if you signed up now, since not everybody on the old list can fit on the new one. (I don’t foresee a problem, to be honest, because most people on the current list aren’t opening their emails anyway, but think of the enveloping peace of mind it would grant you.) The signup asks you only for your email address, not your name. Also: You’ll have to click on a verification email after you sign up to be fully entered, so if you don’t see one promptly, check your spam filter. Just as with the current email, the links to the Invite and Convo work only for Post subscribers. The Post is currently offering a really good online subscription promotion — $50 for a year — that truly is an enormous value for what The Post brings you 24 hours a day. Subscribe here. And then you can read the Invite over and over! Also, I understand that it covers various events that happen around the world.