Style Conversational Week 1410: Bzzzz! You’re out! The fly that took a close-up seat for the Pence-Harris debate on Oct. 7 has inspired all sorts of snarky buzz. But there's a limit on the nasty that The Post will print about the vice president, as the Empress found out while preparing the results of the Week 1406 acrostic-poem contest. The fly that took a close-up seat for the Pence-Harris debate on Oct. 7 has inspired all sorts of snarky buzz. But there's a limit on the nasty that The Post will print about the vice president, as the Empress found out while preparing the results of the Week 1406 acrostic-poem contest. (Patrick Semansky/AP) By Pat Myers November 12, 2020 at 4:31 p.m. EST Add to list Hi, everyone! I’m back after I skipped Conversating last week because of some household excitement — the Royal Consort is doing very well, considering, after suffering a mild stroke and getting to ride in the cool medevac helicopter. He’s now back home here at Mount Vermin and is dealing only with a loss of peripheral vision in one eye. He wasn’t even confused by any of last week’s inking grandfoal names, which can definitely put a cog in your cognition. Thanks enormously for so many kind words from the Loser Community. (A few words farther down about last week’s results.) In the spell of poetry: The acrostic verse of Week 1406 Inspired by Mike Mesterton-Gibbons’s sonnet “A Hard-to-Swat Fly” — a true story about a guy who ended up blowing up his house in pursuit of the elusive pest — I used it as the example for Week 1406, a contest for acrostic poems on the news, ones that spell out the subject in the first letter of each line. I knew, of course, that our Loserbards would quickly fill the Style Invitational page with devilishly clever verse — see the results for yourself. But I’d forgotten that there was front-page news about another fly: the merry muscid that perched blithely atop Vice President Pence’s whitecapped head for several minutes during his debate with Sen. Kamala Harris. And sure enough, I received this poem from Style Invitational Hall of Famer Duncan Stevens: AD Ode to Musca domestica Perched on Pence’s pate of snow, Earned acclaim and stole the show. Now we’ll all (if you’ll allow us) Celebrate your daring prowess: Enterprisingly, demurely, Found your way there, though you surely Lacked a guide; nearby no map is. You knew where the pile of crap is. Admiring its flawless construction, natural syntax and clever rhyme (allow us/prowess) and of course its punchline at the very end, I chose it as an honorable mention for this week’s results. But the poem’s elegant mechanics disabled my taste meter; calling the vice president of the United States a heap of excrement isn’t what The Washington Post wants to do. “It’s the definition of ad hominem,” argued Managing Editor Cameron Barr, and with that the fly was swatted. One could argue that the “pile” in question was what the Veep was saying, rather than his being. But Cameron has been exceedingly lenient when asked to rule on previous taste questions (“eh — it’s The Style Invitational”) and this was not the battle I thought worth picking. (Also, I learned later that Stephen Colbert made the same joke — “He’s so full of crap he’s attracting flies” — though with much less wit.) AD So poor Duncan will have to content himself with a mere ninety-seven blots of ink since Loser Year 28 began in March — an average of 3.6 printed entries per week. And you, dear reader, still are treated to two acrostic musings on the manual multitasking of Jeffrey Toobin. What Doug Dug: Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood was especially partial this week to Gary Crockett’s double dactyl on MASKLESS, and to Mark Calandra’s tale of the report to the police of a homeless man who turned out to be a bronze statue of a sleeping Jesus. 'Tis one more season: This week’s contest, fall fictoids for Week 1410 Unlike our contest for fake trivia about summer, whose results ran at the end of September, Week 1410 will cough up our latest compendium of misinformation several weeks before the end of autumn. After tossing a bunch of entries last time, I made it explicitly clear in the instructions this week that when you lie that some event happened during the season, the event still has to relate to autumn somehow. So not like this entry for the Week 1399 summer fictoid contest: “The first office happy hour took place in Princeton, N.J., at 2 p.m. on June 8, 1934, when Einstein proved to his lab assistants that it had to be 5 o’clock somewhere.” Nope, not relating to the season, other relativity notwithstanding. AD In addition to this week’s examples, which came from fictoid contests about sports, food and clothing (ideas for new subjects welcome!), you can take guidance for Week 1410 from the results of the three previous season-themed ones, with a couple of examples from each (click on the link for full results): Week 1360 (winter) Snow in the Southern Hemisphere forms on the ground and “falls” upward, which explains why penguins are white on the bottom. (Andrew Wells-Dang) The inn that turned away Mary and Joseph is now a Marriott Bonvoy property. (Frank Mann) If the temperature drops below 10 degrees, the Washington Monument retracts a few feet underground. (Bruce Reynolds) Week 1381 (spring) Plants can repel breeze-borne pollen by swaying to the left, or accept it by swaying right. (Sam Mertens) During pollen season in Poland, a jag of uncontrolled sneezing is known as a zyrtec. (Jeff Shirley) AD Thousands of drivers descend on San Juan Capistrano, Calif., every March for the annual Opening of the Carwashes. (Bird Waring) Week 1399 (summer), just seven weeks ago: Virtually all “cotton candy” in the United States is now made of polyester. (Jeff Rackow) The planned Summer of Haight in San Francisco was a dud until the event got new promoters. (Mike Gips) The Inuit now have 38 ways to say, “Hot enough for ya?” (Frank Osen) Last legs: The grandfoals of Week 1405 Given that it was the unprecedented fourth of our horse name “breeding” contests in a single year, Week 1405′s challenge to breed any two inking names from Week 1400 brought in a remarkably healthy 2,000 entries (plus about 200 headline/subhead suggestions) from 203 Losers. The grandfoals are always more of a challenge because most of the names you’re working with are already puns, and there are just too many possible elements to incorporate all of them into your name. But as always, in Week 1405 the Losers came through with funny puns-on-puns (how can you not laugh at “Droolie Andrews”?), both the Invite veterans and two First Offenders, both horse-contest specialists and the enter-every-weekers (the four top winners this week are all spattered with lots of ink from a variety of Invite contests). AD One of the First Offenders this week may be a familiar name to Washington Post readers: Vinnie Perrone was The Post’s horse racing reporter for many years in the 1980s and ’90s, working alongside handicapper Andrew Beyer, before a decline in the sport’s popularity led the paper to slash its coverage. And I know Vinnie from even farther back; the Royal Consort and I worked with him on the University of Maryland daily paper, the Diamondback, in the late 1970s, where he was everyone’s favorite sweet guy (and co-sportswriter Norman Chad was everyone’s favorite not-as-sweet guy). I haven’t been in touch with Vinnie for decades, so I was positively thrilled to discover his name when I checked who’d written the entries I’d chosen; I didn’t even know he read the Invitational. What Doug Dug, grandfoals department: Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood cited Kathy El-Assal’s first-place You Never Kohler (Hello, Mother x House of Flusher) and Steve Smith’s “Twerquemada” (Arraign in Spain x Cardi O) as his faves among the top winners. Doug also cited numerous honorable mentions: * *een on TV x Mad Don and Child = ***es Seen on TV (Mark Raffman) AD Amen Coroner x Art Corrector = More Titian (Chris Doyle) Blame the Dog x Avoid = Fartful Dodger (Lawrence McGuire, Jeff Contompasis) Darth Wader x Fire at Will = I Am Your Fodder (Rob Wolf) Drool Runnings x Expialidocious = Droolie Andrews (Greg Dobbins) KnowWellKnowWell x Bone Spurious = KnowWell Coward (John Winant, Scott Straub) By the way: If you won a magnet or First Ink in Week 1405, you may be one of the five or six people who will receive a line of garble right in the middle of the prize letter; evidently my Paste key was up to mischief when I wasn’t looking. Hey, it’s a collector’s item.