Style Conversational Week 1387: Selected shorter subjects
The Empress of The Style Invitational on this week’s contest and results.
“Fifty arms, no brain at all”: Loser Chris Doyle repurposed this description of a starfish in Style Invitational Week 1383 to refer to the participants in an “American Patriot Rally” who tried to storm the Michigan State Capitol on April 30 to demand the right to expose their possibly diseased mouths in supermarkets. 
“Fifty arms, no brain at all”: Loser Chris Doyle repurposed this description of a starfish in Style Invitational Week 1383 to refer to the participants in an “American Patriot Rally” who tried to storm the Michigan State Capitol on April 30 to demand the right to expose their possibly diseased mouths in supermarkets. (Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty Images)
By 
Pat Myers 
June 4, 2020 at 5:20 p.m. EDT
I still haven’t finished adding to my mailing list the dozens of new entrants to Week 1385, the Style Invitational contest posted two weeks ago that asked readers to change a place name slightly, then define the new place. Usually a contest brings me eight or 10 new people (or people who last entered so long ago that I don’t have a record of it), so I’m of course thrilled that the Invite continues to find new readers and new members of the Loser Community.

Why so many newbies — and so many more entrants in total — for that contest rather than, say, Week 1383, Questionable Journalism, whose results run today? I’ll posit that it’s simply easier to do: A glance at a map can give you fodder for dozens of geographical puns; you don’t have to diligently page through the newspaper or website to look for a good sentence to cleverly misinterpret into a joke.

And I’m predicting another gusher of entries with this week’s contest, Week 1387, suggested by Invite on the Brain Duncan Stevens along with several fine examples. Duncan reminded the Empress that a year ago, Week 1323 asked readers to trim the beginning and/or end of a movie title. Now, he said, how about if we excise the middle? (Since the Invite was posted this morning, I’ve already been asked to clarify: May the letters be omitted from the beginning or end, or just the middle? To clarify: The middle. By which I mean somewhere after the first letter and somewhere before the last one, not necessarily the dead center. People!) I noted atop the hilarious results of last year’s contest that I’d received “thousands of entries — the Empress might have set a new coffee consumption record.” Feel free to lay them on me again, folks — I love coffee.

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This week’s contest should complement Week 1323, to yang its li’l yin, and shouldn’t cause much duplication of entries between them. But I did run a contest back in 2010 for which there could be a slight overlap. Week 871 (full results here in plain text) — which was such a bonanza that I ran more results two weeks later — asked the Losers to change a movie title by one letter: to add a letter, to substitute a different letter, to switch two letters’ places … or to delete a letter. So don’t send in these inking entries from 2010:

Third place: The Blair Itch Project: Amateur filmmakers realize that before shooting in the woods, they should have learned what poison ivy looks like. (Deborah Gilbert, in her only blot of Invite ink ever)

Bob & Carol & Ted & Lice: Swinging suburbanites get more than they bargained for from sleeping around with the neighbors. (Michael Duffy)

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The Bother From Another Planet: ALF, the Movie. (Todd Carton)

Moonstuck: An impudent teenager meets his match when he tangles with an automatic car window. (Beverley Sharp)

10 Dalmatians: Cruella wins. (Craig Dykstra)

Note that the above results don’t show the letters which letter was omitted, as opposed to this week’s examples, which have them in brackets. In the results I linked to the originals; maybe I’ll do that again. But it’s possible that titles with a big block of letters missing might just be too confusing; the ones above were missing just one character.

Since I originally posted the Invite this morning, I added a clarification in the directions that you may change spacing or capitalization.

And: Action!

Deform of a Question*: The results of Week 1383
*The headline for my first Questionable Journalism contest, in 2004; I don’t want to use a non-inking entry here that could get ink next time.

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I’ve never been disappointed with the results of our Questionable Journalism contest, and those from Week 1383 were the typical hoot. Though well under 200 Losers entered, many of them sent long lists of entries, and my shortlist ran 12 closely spaced pages. Though I allowed any publication dating from the entry window, most of the entries were from The Washington Post, and so there was a bit of duplication among the entries; “Fifty arms, no brain at all” brought multiple efforts, for instance. But since readers could look through 12 days’ worth of papers and Web pages, the duplication was more thematic: several zombie jokes, several jokes playing on “numbers” as anesthesiologists; much toilet paper humor. I tended to favor more concise and conversational writing over long discursions.

It's the third win and 93rd blot of ink for Lose Cannoneer Ellen Raphaeli: A. The District will open 20 voting centers from May 22 to June 2 so voters can stagger the days they go to the polls. Q. What's being done to encourage drunks to vote?” I'd met Ellen a couple of times at long-ago Loser brunches but health issues have kept her away from Loser events in recent years; I'm glad that she's sharing her wit again and — When All This Is Past Us — hope she'll be able to join us at our next wild shindig. The runners-up — Invite legends Kevin Dopart and Tom Witte, and legend-in-training Sam Mertens — are all in their element in contests like this.

This week’s Exciting New Discovery has to be First Offender Hannah Seidel, who gets to leap right over that One-Hit Wonders list with two blots of ink today:

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A. At the moment, social distancing is the only effective countermeasure. Q. How do I get my parents to stop asking me when I’m going to give them grandchildren?

A. Harrison has been offering free group challenges each month that are open to anyone; the goal is to accrue as many points as possible. Q. Why was nutritionist Rhonda Harrison fired from her job at Weight Watchers?

It’s rare but not astonishing when a First Offender gets two blots of ink. The thing about Hannah, though, was that I discovered, when looking up her entries to see who’d written them, that four more of her entries were on my shortlist, and just as she’d written them, no tweakage. Welcome to Loserdom, Hannah, and send more!

What Doug Dug: Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood was with me with all four top winners, and also singled out Hannah Seidel’s pestering-for-grandchilden, Duncan Stevens picking up on the wackiness of “playing hockey on the trampoline; Kevin Dopart’s elevation of the “movement” poop joke with a play on the president’s often self-touted gut instinct; Tom Panther’s long “he dumped me” quote working perfectly as a line from umpteen White House Dumpee memoirs; and John Hutchins’s play on “reproducibility.”

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Don't even ask: The unprintables:

There weren't too many really risque entries for Week 1383 — renowned Shocker of the Empress Tom Witte didn't even send any — but there were a few that couldn't run in the Invite, or were asked by their authors to be hidden down here.

A. “For a while, they were erected in the polo field at West Potomac Park.” Q. What briefly replaced the “P Street Beach” as Washington’s favorite gay cruising spot? (Steve Honley)

A. In-and-out is better with an indoor environment. Q. What’s on the sex-ed curriculum regarding indecent exposure laws? (Duncan Stevens)

A. We’re cleaning the balls after every workout. Q. Mr. Gym Manager, is it true that you’re now insisting on spot-bathing each of your male clients? (Duncan Stevens)

And Bill Dorner found some against-Post-rules unbleeped language from readers of Tom Boswell’s online sports chat: A. “I am a selfish A[unbleeped] and my No Mask status proves it.” Q. How did Mike Pence explain his maskless visit to the Mayo Clinic?

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Okay, guys — I have had a nasty case of Bad Technology all day; even the IT people couldn’t save this column from disappearing three times. I’ll try to catch up with typos and other mistakes once it’s safely online. Stay safe and sane, everyone — and in the midst of this nightmare, take a little break with The Style Invitational. Laugh at a poop joke.