Style Conversational Week 1397: Desert isle discoveries The Empress ruminates all over (eww) this week’s Style Invitational contest and results The Lose Cannon -- inspired by a Trump tweet about Hillary Clinton -- has been The Style Invitational's first prize since 2017. If the incumbent loses in November, we'll need a different, but just as cheap, new trophy. On the same bases made for us by Loser Larry Gray. Suggestions welcome! The Lose Cannon -- inspired by a Trump tweet about Hillary Clinton -- has been The Style Invitational's first prize since 2017. If the incumbent loses in November, we'll need a different, but just as cheap, new trophy. On the same bases made for us by Loser Larry Gray. Suggestions welcome! (TWP) By Pat Myers August 13, 2020 at 5:21 p.m. EDT Just five weeks after our last Bob Staake cartoon contest — and a week after the results ran — we’re back with another one. This is a different animal, though: I got the idea after seeing David Sipress’s “Hey! You’re in the bike lane!” cartoon in a recent New Yorker. As I mention in the introduction to this week’s Style Invitational, Week 1397, I suggested to Bob that he draw up a Man in the Desert, Man on an Island, etc., and have the Loser Community try its collective, whole-lotta-fingered hand at the genre. And Bob came back with: How about if the Loser has the option of using someone else instead of Man? And so we have the four options of cartoon tropes this week, and you can populate each of the scenes as you wish (but not delete the bartender or psychiatrist). I’m not forbidding you to write the caption as a descriptive sentence, but such cartoons are always written as quotations or dialogue; you’d have to come up with something especially clever and funny for a non-quote to work. (But hey, Especially Clever and Funny are y’all’s middle names, or would be if your parents had been weird baby-namers. Go ahead and prove me wrong.) Note that this time I’m asking you to begin each entry with the LETTER of the cartoon: Not “Picture A,” just A:, with a colon. Then when I push Sort, I’ll get to squirm with delighted anticipation as Mister Word groups your caption for A: with all the other captions for A: AD Unless it’s essential to conveying the joke, you don’t need to explain that so-and-so is on the left, what the person is wearing, etc. When Bob Staake draws the winner (or, in the remote possibility that the winner is incredibly brilliant but not good for drawing, a runner-up), he’ll work that out himself. The caption isn’t required to be super-short, as the New Yorker would do it, but neither should it run for dozens of words. I’m looking forward to see what you come up with by Monday night, Aug. 24. REHASH PAT’S … TRASH HEAPS:* The results of Week 1393 *Non-inking headline by Kevin Dopart To avoid too much duplication and to allow for more creativity, many Style Invitational contests have two main elements: first, a new term for something; and second, a description of the term. Because we’re a humor contest, it’s often that second element that turns some clever wordplay into a funny joke; it essentially becomes the punchline. When I judge such contests, I often see some oh-wow neologisms whose definitions don’t quite measure up to them; I’ll mark them “BD,” for “needs better definition.” AD Our Week 1388 contest was an especially strong case in point, because the first part of the entry required so much cleverness in itself: The hard-to-explain challenge was to name a fictional business or product that was a self-anagram: All the letters in the first half of the name had to be rearranged to make the second half. I was blown away by the number and cleverness — and funniness — of the anagrams I received. And there were lots of spot-on descriptions as well, so many that the results of Week 1388 ran to 37 entries and still robbed perhaps dozens of other worthies of ink. But there were also all these anagrams that were so funny in themselves that they cried out to me, “Somebody out there has the perfect description for this.” And so, a week after the results ran, I rounded up dozens of the BDs for Week 1393 and offered them up to the Loser Community. And 156 Losers stepped up with lots of inspired ideas: This week’s results number 38 entries by almost as many different people, some of them incorporating their own self-anagrams into the definitions. Some of the anagrams ended up not yielding any more jokes — RICH MATTRESSES CHRISTMAS TREES was just too weird, I think — but most of them, including some that didn’t quite make the ink cut this week, showed that there can be benefits of humor by committee. Today in this column I was going to run the original definitions, but after I compiled the list I changed my mind; the only point in doing so would be to argue that they were improved on. Instead, below I’m going to credit the writers of those clever anagrams, something I didn’t do when I offered them up for Week 1393. No magnets or anything — not even chopped liver, as in the “asset decline delicatessen” — but a little shout-out, anyway. AD ADVERTISING First, a big shout-out to this week’s Lose Cannon winner, Edmund Conti, who at somewhere north of age 90 is surely the yeariest Loser ever to win first place in the Invite; Bill Bradford got ink right up to his final days at age 95, but he never won the whole contest. Edmund (loser anagram: NOT DIM DUNCE) has done it four times among his 109 blots of Invite ink, though it’s his first Lose Cannon. BY THE WAY: Note the caption at the top of today’s Conversational: Since “Lose Cannon” is based on Trump’s hapless name-calling tweet of Hillary Clinton, we’ll be in need of a new idea for a trophy if we get a different president next January, to follow in the tradition started by the Inker (half a pair of bookends, no longer made in the cheap version I used to buy) and followed by the Inkin’ Memorial bobblehead, also out of manufacture and, since 2017, the Lose Cannon. The cannon will be hard to top: It’s assembled by the Royal Consort from a little metal pencil-sharpener cannon that I get from a school supply company, attached to a fancy wooden base handcrafted by Loser Larry Gray in the barn on his 10-acre spread up in Middle of Nowhere, Md. Anyway, I welcome ideas for a replacement trophy, especially one that can use the dozens of extra bases we’d have in November. So not only does it have to fit on a 3-by-5-inch base, but it should also not cost more than about $6 in materials — the tangible value, if you’re anal enough to itemize your Loser swag. And of course, it should be funny. Ed Conti, I hope you’ll score one of those, too. AD ---- Now, back to this week’s results. The rest of this week’s Loser Circle is populated by other Invite regulars, none more so than Art Grinath, who scores his 69th ink “above the fold” among the more than 400 blots he’s amassed since his debut way back in the Invitational’s toddlerhood, 1995. Kathy El-Assal, who gets the second-place booby prize of Flying Pig Eau de Toilette spray — well, we don’t know, maybe it’ll be lovely — gets her seventh big-deal ink and a total of 61, while Almost a Rookie Steve Smith passes the 50-ink mark with his sixth winner or runner-up. What pleased Ponch: Ace Copy Editor Ponch Garcia, still filling in for Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood, chose his favorites from this week’s honorable mentions: Stephen Dudzik’s “po’ boy” at the Asset Decline Delicatessen; Eric Nelkin and Jon Gearhart’s “side of flies” with Grub Masher Hamburgers; the Karen joke for Irate Face Cafeteria (Lee Graham, Bob Kruger) [I wonder if people reading the archives 10 years from now, or even five, will get the reference]; “McVichyssoise” as a soup made from cold french fries by First Offender Jeff Bryant; and Mike Ostapiej’s imagining of Cruelty Cutlery as what the Empress uses to trim the entry list. AD And if you got ink this week, here are the people to thank for inspiring your entry: Anal Gas Lasagna: Laura Clairmont, Frank Mullen III Asset Decline Delicatessen: Rick Haynes Atrophied Aphrodite: Sue Lin Chong “Can’t Act on Us” Accountants: Chris Damm Credit Naggers Greeting Cards: Steve Offutt Crooner Coroner: Bill Dorner Cruelty Cutlery: Bill Dorner Dead-or-Not Deodorant: Lil Tompkins Do-Not-Dare Deodorant: Beverley Sharp Emu Brains Submarine: David Garratt Evil Stone Novelties: Raymond Gallucci Grub Masher Hamburgers: Jon Gearhart . Happiest Epitaphs: Gary Crockett I’m-a-Stud Stadium: George Smith, George Thompson Ill Strides Distillers: Drew Bennett Insatiable Banalities: Hannah Seidel Irate Face Cafeteria: Jonathan Jensen, Jon Ketzner Larcenist Clarinets: Tim Kloth Liberal Braille: Bill Dorner AD Master Puker Supermarket: Mark Raffman Monster Mentors: Raymond Gallucci My Amusing Gymnasium: Stephen Dudzik, Jonathan Jensen Nice Chefs Ruin French Cuisine: Diane Lucitt One Ratty Attorney: Drew Bennett “Paint Bull Crap for Me” Republican Platform: Frank Mann Pedant Term Department: Jesse Frankovich Pudgier Raccoon Organic Produce: Byron Miller Real Idiot Editorial: Ellen Raphaeli Sweaty Anal Tort Attorneys at Law (also Anal Sweaty Tort): Jonathan Jensen, Rick Haynes Am Aghast MAGA Hats: Bill Dorner Auctioned Education: Gary Crockett, Rob Huffman “Be Sharp, Bro” Barbershop: Sarah Walsh, Bill Hilton Blaring Lard Bar and Grill: Beverley Sharp, Jon Gearhart Cheapo Arty Apothecary: Jon Ketzner Danger Garden: Seven people Decimal Medical: John McCooey, Noah Meyerson, Drew Bennett Face Cafe: George Smith, Erika Ettin AD Her Foul Amen Funeral Home: Mark Raffman Hip One iPhone: Frank Mann “I Bleed Humor” Home Builder: Chris Damm Order Guts Drugstore: Beverley Sharp Plasmoid Diplomas: Raymond Gallucci Rich Mattresses Christmas Trees: Chris Damm “Slime Our Arrogance” Marriage Counselor: Ward Kay Smart Shape Hamster Spa: Byron Miller Supersonic Percussion: John McCooey Tartan User Restaurant: Pete Morelewicz Tech Lover Chevrolet: Ray Gallucci Thousand Handouts: Gary Crockett Very Idle Delivery: Drew Bennett Western Wonk News Network: Steve Smith