Style Conversational Week 1393: Crowdsourced? Ow, scored crud?
The Empress of The Style Invitational on this week’s re-anagram contest and TankaWanka results
Given this week's list of anagram businesses, Bob Staake offered two sketches. This one for “Face Cafe” lost out to his zany but less creepy “Irate Face Cafeteria.”  
Given this week's list of anagram businesses, Bob Staake offered two sketches. This one for “Face Cafe” lost out to his zany but less creepy “Irate Face Cafeteria.”
By 
Pat Myers
July 16, 2020 at 4:45 p.m. EDT
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To be a Loser is to deal with the injustice of life. Witness this week’s Style Invitational contest, Week 1393. This week’s contest builds on Week 1388, which required the Loser Community to (a) coin a funny business or product name that comprised an anagram of itself: the second half of the name had to contain all the letters in the first half; and (b) give a clever description of it.

The results of Week 1388, which ran last week, are an instant classic: dozens of elegant anagrams paired with equally clever descriptions. BOREDOM BEDROOM: The worst little whorehouse in Texas. (Gary Crockett) BURLY DREAM LUMBERYARD: Shop here, ladies, and you’ll never need a stud finder. (Jonathan Jensen) And those were honorable mentions!

But for all those, and for the dozens of inkworthy others that made my shortlist but missed the final cut, I also kept finding clever, funny phrases that came up short only in a description that didn’t do them justice; I’d think: “Wow, this is great but there must be some really good thing to say about it.” (This happens when I judge neologism contests as well.) And I’d mark it “BD” for “needs a better definition.”

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When I sorted the entries out for my shortlist, there were 50 of them.

So the injustice? The writers of this week’s anagrams — whose names I never did look up — get no ink, no credit for them. Yet whoever takes their creations and says some cute thing about it may well get the unfabulous prize. Yup, no fair. All I can say is: Yes, you’re more than welcome to try again with your own anagram. In past “reologism” contests, some Losers did indeed up their game and score the second time around.

And what about those who had the good clever anagrams + definitions that didn’t get ink last week, the ones that aren’t included in this week’s list, because their description was strong, not likely to be improved on? If they’re not too topical, hold on to them for our annual retrospective contest in December. (I’m not going to show my shortlist, but yeah, I do think you were on it, with that entry you were so proud of.)

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While I didn’t research the provenance of this week’s 50 anagrams, I did look up the names of the Losers who’d submitted the anagrams that Bob Staake chose to draw this week: Jonathan Jensen and Jon Ketzner each sent me one for IRATE FACE CAFETERIA, which became the illustration for this week’s Invite, while both Erika Ettin and George Smith both submitted FACE CAFE, with which Bob immediately grossed me out (me after looking for 0.05 seconds: “I think we’d better go with the cafeteria”). By the way, did you know you can buy the original sketch ($80) or pen-and-ink art ($125) for these or hundreds of others of Bob’s Invite cartoons? He has a special link for Invite readers: www.bobstaake.com/si. If you’re trying to recall one from years ago and need some help figuring out when it ran, you can write to me and between Bob and me we can probably track it down.

Reuters block*: The TankaWanka on the news from Week 1389
*Non-inking headline by Jon Gearhart

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I swear, I wasn’t in a sour mood — well, no sourer than my usual RBF self — when I read through the approximately 1,000 entries for Week 1389, our fourth TankaWanka challenge for five-line poems on the news. But I got the sense that with the exceptions published today, plus a few more, our regular and occasional Loserbards were struggling to find the funny in Our Crazy World and Our Um Remarkable Leader, at least when it came to distributing 31 syllables over five lines and throwing a rhyme in for good measure.

The most notable exception would be Lose Cannoneer Mark Raffman, who accounted for four of the 16 poems that ran today. But in what’s been an inexplicable trend lately, the rest of the Losers’ Circle — the three runners-up — are all Invite rookies (or close) from the D.C. area who’ve made a big cannonball splash in the past few weeks. In second place we present Hannah Seidel, who got her first blot of ink six weeks ago and has made it “above the fold” twice along with several honorable mentions. Taking third place we have Wendy Shang, who got her first ink in Week 1384, five weeks ago, and now has three. And in fourth place is George Thompson, the veteran of the group, who debuted in Week 1319 and today scores his fifth blot (and sixth, with the last poem in today’s lineup). But this is George’s second straight week in the Losers’ Circle; last week he scored the second-prize Lay’s Potato Chips Bag Motif Socks with his anagram BAD TO YOU AUTO BODY. When wrote to George to tell him that the socks were still on a slow boat from China, I asked how he’d gotten got to know the Invite; “I can tell you exactly,” he remembered. It was the column that reported the results of Week 1239, a movie title mashup contest. The results “were so doggone laugh-out-loud funny. Made me aspire to the creation of something clever and enjoyable like that. It took me another year and a half before I finally got around to trying my hand at it, though.” Glad he did.

What Doug Dug: Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood is back from seeing the sights on his week of staycation, which are suspiciously like the sights at his workspace since March, but without the sights of last week’s Invite. Anyway, Doug’s faves this week were Mark Raffman’s winner; Sam Mertens’s about Trump’s less than ecstatic reaction to his Tulsa turnout; Duncan Stevens on the ill-fated Bible-waving photo op; and George Thompson’s self-diagnosis of a deficiency of Invite ink.

Monthly, month on month on month …
Posties got an email from Publisher Fred Ryan this week telling us not to get ready to come back to the office around Labor Day, as announced a couple of months ago. Now we’re told that the offices most likely won’t open up again until 2021. So for now, management is letting me come downtown one Sunday each month to mail prizes, use the printer, etc., and I’ll continue that practice for a while. But I might end up turning my woodland palace, Mount Vermin, into more of a shipping center, which means that I’ll take things to the post office more regularly. Meanwhile, the new Loser magnets just arrived yesterday. I’ll start sending them out to the honorably mentioned of Week 1390, the compare/contrast contest, whose results run next Thursday.

Feeling a little sketchy? Don’t forget the caption contest!
You have till midnight (wherever you are, and I don’t know where you are) Monday, July 21, to write a caption, or 25, for any of the Bob Staake creations in Week 1392. Bob has no idea what he’s drawn, so help him out here.