Style Conversational Week 1373: Would buy again! The Empress of The Style Invitational discusses this week’s new contest and results Steve Honley always dresses appropriately — in the noodly beanie he won in Week 1180 — when he plays piano at Loser events. This one was the January 2019 Post-Post-Holiday Party. Steve's featured this week in our Meet the Parentheses section below. (Dean Evangelista) By Pat Myers Feb. 27, 2020 at 3:43 p.m. EST Style Invitational Week 1373 is the fifth time around for our contest for funny reviews of products listed on Amazon.com — and we still haven’t been told to knock it off by The Guy Who Signs My Checks (well, ultimately). I love contests like this because we can do them every year or so, and we’re not much likely to exhaust the list of usable products. For inspiration and guidance for what we’re looking for, I include some classic ink right at the top of this week’s column. Here are links to the results to all four previous Amazon contests, with one classic from each: Week 960, 2012 (scroll past the week’s new contest): Morton Iodized Salt, 26oz.: Yum! This tastes just like McDonald’s french fries, but it’s not fried and has no fat at all! (Gregory Koch, then a college student) Week 1098, 2014: AD Pringles: They’re the best rehydrated potato flake, maltodextrin, disodium inosinate, monosodium glutamate, wheat, corn and potato flour, pressed amalgamate chiplike food product on the market! I’d eat them even if they didn’t have “natural flavors.” (Warren Tanabe) Week 1244, 2017: Reynolds Wrap Aluminum Foil: It really works to block UFO thought control! The proof is in the anagram: WALL UP YOUR MIND FROM ALIENS! (Jesse Frankovich) Week 1321, 2019: 12-pack of men’s white cotton handkerchiefs: Who would have guessed that carrying my mucus in my pocket all day could be so stylish? (David Kleinbard) Note that I gave a guideline — not a strict limit — that 75 words would be long for an Invite entry. And I have run some “reviews” at that length; I’ve even run one in the form of a song parody (see Barry Koch’s three-verse ode to his C-O-M-B to the tune of “YMCA” in Week 960). But most of the ink does go to shorter entries. As always, the extra length has to merit the extra space it takes up. AD ADVERTISING To err is humor*: The typo jokes of Week 1369 *A headline that got ink for Jesse Frankovich in Week 1285, and almost got ink for someone else this week (see the section “Subbed heads” below) The results of Week 1369 mark my 833rd (or thereabouts) straight contest as Empress of The Style Invitational. So, so many times I’ve worried that the contest won’t work out — it’s too restrictive, it’s too vague, it’s too screedy, it’s too erudite, it’s too duplicative — and then I’m proved colossally wrong by a hundred classic entries, most of which I can’t even award with ink because there were just too many. Week 1369 was not that contest. The challenge to tell a joke involving a typo or misheard word proved a struggle for almost everyone: Much of the humor either was either painfully obvious, spelled out anticlimactically for the reader, or involved a substituted word that would never have been used or misheard accidentally. AD So I have special admiration for the Losers who avoided those pitfalls and got ink this week. Frank Osen approaches the brink of that 500-ink Hall of Fame mark (the Loser Stats will be updated this weekend, I’m told) with his 22nd Invite win, and our first and last joke playing off Corona beer and coronavirus — you listening, people?; and Hildy Zampella totally deserves the monkey-butt tissue dispenser with the week’s most creative take on the “typo” concept. Once again, Post Managing Editor (newsroom second-in-command) Cameron Barr decreed “it’s fine” when asked to rule on an Invite taste question, this one the anecdote by First Offender Dave Davies on his little nephew who couldn’t pronounce “pushy” clearly. (I was ready to rewrite it coyly, but was glad I didn’t have to.) On the other hand, I decided myself that The Washington Post just shouldn’t “quote” Sen. Lindsey Graham, even “mistakenly,” as wishing the president “his heartiest fellations,” though it was one of the few entries this week that truly made me laugh. Still, that’s an unprintable for Duncan Stevens. AD Meet the Parentheses: (Steve Honley, Washington) We return to our occasional series of Losers More or Less Interviewing Themselves. This time it’s to note the 100-ink mark achieved by Steve Honley, whom local Losers know best as our generous Perennial Loser Party Pianist, and out-of-town Losers don’t know at all, because he’s not, alas, in the Style Invitational Devotees Facebook group. Steve read over some earlier Meet the Parentheses installments and worked up the following “interview.” Age: Old enough to appreciate the wisdom of the David Mamet quote: “Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance.” (For realz: I’ll turn 60 in August.) Official Loser Anagram (a.k.a. Granola Smear): Svelte Honey. Back when the Invitational used my full name, Steven Alan Honley (I wonder how much money The Post has saved over the years by eliminating those five characters), I had an even more flattering Smear, but alas, I haven’t been able to reconstruct it. I know it included “loyal.” AD What brought me to the Invite: Peer pressure. Out of uncharacteristic humility, I didn’t enter any contests for the first decade or so of its existence; the standard of humor was so high that I was honestly intimidated. But several friends kept encouraging me to throw my crap, I mean hat, in the ring, sagely observing that “You gotta play to lose!” And in 2002 I did, and scored my first ink, in Week 447. What’s an example of something that confirms your Loserosity? I’ve taken the “Jeopardy” online test five times, and made it to the audition stage twice, but gotten no further. The fifth time was in January, so my fingers are crossed this one will be the charm. What do you do when you’re not composing Invite entries? After careers as a State Department Foreign Service officer (1985-1997) and editor in chief of The Foreign Service Journal, the American Foreign Service Association’s monthly magazine (2001-2014), I’m now enjoying life as a semiretired musician, editor and writer. I’ve been music director at my church for nearly 26 years, and also sing in or accompany three area choruses. And for more than a decade now, I’ve run the longest-running local LGBTQ book group, Bookmen DC, which started in 1999. When not doing those things, I spend as much time as I can with my amazing partner of 16 years, Joe. AD Besides your 100 blots of ink and your “Jeopardy” non-appearances, what else do you brag about at Loser parties? I visited all seven continents during my diplomatic career, and stood at the South Pole on New Year’s Eve 1988. Some favorite entries: From Week 1151 (snarky notes to “glassbowls”): This one got second place: Dear Constantly Cheery Glassbowl: It’s true that frowning takes more muscles than smiling. But it’s well worth the extra effort. From Week 1246 (Questionable Journalism, one of my very favorite contests), I won my first Lose Cannon with this one: A. “I would say I don’t usually love red and browns together.” Q. What Donald Trump comment got the U.N. Security Council meeting off to a terrible start? And an honorable mention in the same contest: A. “What is your impression of President Xi Jinping?” AD Q. What question strikes terror in the hearts of Chinese comedians? My second Lose Cannon was for my “Year in Preview” prediction in Week 1260: Oct. 12: Columbus, Ohio, renames itself Genocidal European, Ohio. What’s your favorite non-inking entry? I know that the competition for the horse-name contests is fierce, but three years later, I’m still disappointed that this “grandfoal” from Week 1226 didn’t get ink: REMBrandt x Rubenesque Chance = IfItPaintBaroque. (Want to introduce yourself to the Greater Loser Community? If your name has appeared in the Invitational fairly often over the years — or you’re a new person and getting pretty regular ink — drop me a line. If you have lots and lots of ink, you practically owe me one of these.) Subbed heads This week’s headline for the results, Kevin Dopart’s “Blunderachievers,” and honorable-mentions subhead, Jesse Frankovich’s “Oops C’s,” while both very cute, weren’t my initial choices: This morning I first published the head “To Err Is Humor” and the subhead “Typo Negatives,” crediting the latter to three different entrants — until one alert Loser pointed out to me that both headlines had been used in earlier Invite contests. In fact, “Typo Negatives” got ink in both Week 1115 and Week 1297 — both for Roy Ashley. And today Roy almost got it three times running. AD I should have caught this repetition myself, because it’s now much easier to do so, now that Keeper of the Stats Elden Carnahan maintains his Super-Duper “All Invitational Text” file at NRARS.org. You can search for anything throughout the whole document and if your term is there, you’ll see it highlighted in color. There’s just one drawback to it: The file can take a long time to load on a computer; on mine, the text goes blank and needs to be refreshed if I don’t keep working on it. But I just learned from Ultra-Loser Jesse Frankovich that there’s an easy fix, at least if you’re using Chrome (don’t know how this works on other browsers, but I assume it’s similar). He does this all the time, ever since he himself got credit for a previously used headline: If you right-click anywhere on that All Invitational Text file, you can “Save as …” a text file that’s downloaded to your computer. Because it doesn’t have to keep “talking” to the Internet, the loading and search will work much faster, either as a plain-text file (in Notepad) or as a document in Word. This file will be out of date by next week, but it takes so little time and effort to create it — surely less than it takes to think of a list of titles, let alone neologisms and other entries that might have already been done — that it’s worth doing every week. Next Loser sighting: March 15, Mrs. K’s Toll House I won’t be able to make the March 15 Loser Brunch, but I can tell you from our brunch there a year or two ago that the venerable restaurant in close-in Silver Spring is a lovely spot; it’s like a big old Grandma’s house with lush gardens outside. We had our own private room bedecked with antiques. It has a large buffet featuring both breakfast and lunch dishes. RSVP to Elden Carnahan on the Losers’ website, NRARS.org (click on “Our Social Engorgements”).