Style Conversational Week 1381: Leading from behind Rookie Sam Mertens becomes Loser of the Year by finishing in 9th place This year's Flushies winners probably won't get a chance to receive their plaques at the annual spring/summer potluck, but our fingers are still crossed for fall. This year's Flushies winners probably won't get a chance to receive their plaques at the annual spring/summer potluck, but our fingers are still crossed for fall. (Bob S) By Pat Myers April 23, 2020 at 5:25 p.m. EDT The Style Invitational has a hold on some people. Almost a year ago exactly, the results of Week 1323 — a contest to chop the beginning and/or end from a movie title — included this honorable mention: [T]ANGLED: Rapunzel is trapped in the Leaning Tower of Pisa. (Sam Mertens, Silver Spring, Md., a First Offender) Four weeks later, there were two bank headlines: On Capitol Hill, some Trump officials are testifying for an audience of one/ ‘Typical ratings for us,’ says C-Span Evans says he will stop outside consulting, legal work/ Council member to switch to trusted insiders, illegal activities And then, over the next year, Sam Mertens’s name appeared more often than not in The Style Invitational’s weekly results, which are lovingly logged and analyzed each week since 1993 by Ur-Loser Elden Carnahan in the Loser Stats: 34 different weeks, for an impressive total of 49 blots of ink — far and away the Rookie of the Year. AD But that wasn’t all. Sam’s 49 inks also qualified him for what amounts to the biggest deal in Loserdom: Loser of the Year for Year 27. But only because the name of the award is especially apt: Since Elden enacted a one-and-out rule a full 12 years ago, the Loser of the Year has only once been the year’s highest-scoring entrant, and that was a tie. And that’s because, to my eternal delight, so many of the Invite’s high-scorers keep high-scoring, year after year, crafting up to 25 Invitational entries virtually every week in wildly differing humor genres. And so this year, Sam is the top-scoring Loser for Year 27 except for, oh, Jesse Frankovich, Duncan Stevens, Chris Doyle, Mark Raffman, Frank Osen, Kevin Dopart, Jeff Contompasis and Gary Crockett. (And among them, only Chris and Kevin were the top-scoring entrants the years they won.) And given his current performance — seven inks in the past three weeks — it’s totally likely that he’ll be outscoring the Year 28 winner next March. Sam, who works on the technical side of a D.C.-based media organization, describes himself as “a fairly boring family guy who tries to dote on his kids, both the one who likes publicity and the one who runs screaming from it. We’re relatively recent transplants to this rural community, the Spencerville area of Montgomery County, Md., still trying to figure out what to do with the 6 acres we happened upon, but recent events have given us some ideas. AD “I had been an off-and-on follower of the Style Invite for years, but only submitted something once, I think in 2012, which went nowhere. That put me on the mailing list, however, and I’d finally had enough of reading weekly results and thinking “I could do this,” so one week I sent in a bunch of submissions for truncated movie titles. One made HM. After that, the OCD kicked in. I figure it’s safer than a crack pipe or a gambling addiction, so, what the heck.” Were we in the usual world, Elden and I would be presenting Sam with a laminated foam-board plaque with a Bob Staake cartoon on it at the 25th annual Flushies: the awards shindig presented by the Losers, with a little help from me in recent years to send out the invitations. And we’d be singing a Loser-penned song parody in his honor. This year’s event was slated for mid-June, but the chances for a gathering of 50-some people by then seems nil. We’re still hoping to do something in the fall, but who knows? I’ll keep you posted. Some other honorees and milestones we’d be Flushing: AD Top-Grossing Loser: Jesse Frankovich finished the year with a record-shattering 184 blots of ink. This is Jesse’s third straight year in the top spot. But it was the year before that when he was named Loser of the Year; that’s when he finished behind Chris Doyle. Most Cantinkerous: This plaque goes to the Loser who’s accumulated the most ink over the years without ever winning first place. Once again, extending his lead quite a bit, it’s Kyle Hendrickson, with 110 blots of ink, including 10 runners-up, but never a victory. Really, Kyle, I hope you fall off the list this year — keep trying. Most Imporved: (Intentional typo, in honor of a package of “New and Imporved Smorked Beef Rectum” that was once offered as an Invite prize) Jonathan Jensen zoomed from 8 inks the previous year to 26. These milestones get no plaques; instead, Elden writes each Loser’s name on a roll of toilet paper and tosses at the recipient. We couldn’t spare the TP anyway, so these will be virtual: AD Reaching 50 inks: Ivars Kuskevics, Rob Wolf, Ellen Ryan, Seth Tucker Reaching 100: Frank Mann, Todd DeLap, Steve Honley, Michelle Stupak, Neal Starkman, Ann Martin 200: Jon Gearhart; 400: Gary Crockett; 500: Duncan Stevens (who’d also passed 400 in the same Loser year); 600: Mark Raffman. Jesse Frankovich (who’d also passed 500); 700: Jeffrey Contompasis, Beverley Sharp; 1,500: Kevin Dopart And: 2,200: Chris Doyle, who leads the Invite’s second-highest scorer, Tom Witte (last year’s Loser of the Year), by more than 600 blots. Thank you from my bottom, um the bottom of my heart, all you crazy people. We might as well do spring: This week’s fictoid contest This week’s contest, Week 1381, for fictoids about spring and things that happen (or happened) in spring, is in the tradition of at least 17 false-trivia contests we’ve done over the years: They’re spoofing those lists of Fascinating Facts to Know and Tell that the nerdier among us (MEEEEEE) used to read incessantly and bore our would-be friends with. AD For inspiration, you can see all these contests at once now on the Trivia subset of Elden’s Master Contest List. And in the latest improvement to Elden’s indispensable archive, there’s a link to the results as well, on the same line as the contest. So if you wanted, say, to see the results of the fashion-trivia contest, scroll down to Week 1253, then slide over to the far right of the same line and see the results. They’re all plain-text and PDF copies and won’t hit The Post’s paywall. Speaking of nerdy: Hall of Fame Loser Jeff Contompasis noticed a problem right away this morning with today’s first example: that Australian children hunt eggs from the Easter Platypus. It wasn’t the joke, it was its use in this particular contest: In Australia, Easter isn’t in spring! It’s in autumn! Whoops. It’s a good thing we’re a humor contest and this week’s contest is about being inaccurate, though, because I loved both Royal Consort Mark Holt’s idea and Bob Staake’s cartoon, complete with kangaroo-pouch basket. Sick Degrees of Separation*: The results of Week 1378 *Non-inking headline by Kevin Dopart AD In Week 1378, as we all continued to hunker down in our respective hunker-bunkers, I asked for ideas for games, activities, crafts, artworks, etc., that you could do with stuff lying around the house. I had my fingers crossed for some gallery-quality sculpture made out of toilet paper and Instacart receipts, but I settled for Kevin Dopart’s row of socially distant paper dolls. And Dave Prevar’s weird, scarecrow-like masked “Warning Man.” And Bruce Yanovitch’s Tolkienesque map of the exotic world of his family’s kitchen. But my favorite entries this week were verbal, all reflecting our stultifying/unnerving lives as we stare at the walls, create wide physical spaces around ourselves, get on each other’s nerves yet still wish we could be closer. It’s the fifth win and 184th blot of ink for John O’Byrne of Dublin, who’s a great fan of the U.S. and, until recently, its politics. John, who started entering the Invite back in the 1990s, attended two Flushies lunches on his stateside visits, and we also once took him to the Irish pub Dubliners in Washington. Perhaps when the world turns right side up again we’ll see him once more. AD Dan Helming’s pithy concept of Socially Distant Twister gave me one of my few laugh-out-loud moments this week — what a mental picture! — while the other runners-up, while Kevin Dopart’s scavenger hunt for the WiFi password reminded me how much worse we’d be right now without Internet access, and Sam Mertens’s idea of a warm latex glove as a human-contact substitute was almost poignant. What Doug Dug: Among the faves of Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood this week were Allen Haywood’s “Exercise Challenge” to see how much junk you can consume during one workout video; Duncan Stevens’s hot-potato-type “Budminton” with an increasingly shaken up can of beer; Frank Osen’s home-schooling parent-teacher night; and Kevin Dopart’s fantasy of Mount Flushmore, a TP statue depicting “all the best” presidents (Franklin Pierce and downhill from there). Well, I know what I’ll be doing all weekend … I’ll be reading — and sometimes listening to and watching — the hundreds and hundreds of song parodies (and some originals on video) on Life in the Age of Corona, our Week 1378 contest. I received 231 entry forms — our previous song contest brought in 169 — and I know that some of those forms contain several individual parodies. The bar will obviously be very high, and it’s inevitable that lots of good songs won’t get ink. Maybe we can have a Zoom singalong afterward! AD The deadline for the songs was this past Tuesday, but if you’ve already sent in a song and you’d like more time to make it into a well-edited video (or improve on one you’ve already sent), let me know ASAP (email me) and I can take it as late as Monday, April 27. This is especially true if the video has the lyrics as subtitles, because then I won’t have to block out space to run them in text. And next week … A week from Saturday, May 3, was supposed to be the date of this year’s Kentucky Derby. The race has been postponed to September, but I didn’t want to wait till then for our most heavily entered contest of the year, the “breeding” of horse names. So next week, we’ll be playing the ponies, but not using the usual 100 of this year’s Triple Crown nominees; we’ll do that when the race is actually scheduled. Instead I’ll be using another set of names; I’ve gotten some good suggestions from the Losers on the Style Invitational Devotees page, but don’t want to tell you a week ahead of time.