Style Conversational Week 1426: Head games The Empress of The Style Invitational on this week’s bank headline contest and winning puns Image without a caption Bob Staake's sketch for another bank head example, one that I ended up not using. Headline: Ban on foam food containers is approved / Bank: Foam food can just sit out, duh, council rules By Pat Myers March 4, 2021 at 4:57 p.m. EST Add to list First of all, just a quick memory of almost exactly one year ago, when we last ran a “Mess With Our Heads” contest: Style Conversational, March 12, 2020: “Hello from the Empress’s domicile, Mount Vermin! Hooray for remote publishing! Actually, I almost always publish The Style Invitational from home on Thursdays; I usually go downtown to the Washington Post newsroom only on Tuesdays to mail prizes, make printouts, etc. But everyone at The Post who doesn’t require special equipment has been asked to stay home for the rest of March.” I went on to explain that prize deliveries would be delayed a few weeks until we were back in the office. Current projections: No earlier than June 2021, probably later. But I did receive a questionnaire sent out to Posties to ask us which changes to the newsroom would make us more comfortable: daily thermometer readings, more space between workers, banning unvaccinated people, etc. So maybe plans are afoot. (Since then, I’ve gotten special permission to visit the Post newsroom once a month, most recently last Sunday, to mail out several weeks of prize packages, use the laser printers, etc. The magnets, and other things that fit in envelopes, I mail from home.) AD Anyway, back to this week’s Mess With Our Heads contest, Week 1426. To those who are new to The Style Invitational, below is the FAQ that I ran in a Conversational column a year ago, which itself linked to earlier and earlier Messes. And for the guidance, inspiration and entertainment of all, I’ll follow the FAQ with some of last year’s winners — so many of them were about that strange new time of hand-washing and toilet paper panic-buying — as well as random classics from earlier MWOH contests. What counts as a headline? In a nutshell, it’s anything above the text of an article or ad, as well as a one-line link to another article, as on the paper’s homepage. You may also use a bank head itself as your headline. [The “chair” example this week was a bank head.] Do I have to use every word in the headline? No, but the section you do use can’t mean something hugely different on its own (“City Passes Out Supplies to Residents” can’t become “City Passes Out”), and you can’t string together unconnected parts of the headline. [This is why this year’s entry form asks you to show me the whole headline if you’re just using part; I’ll make the call.] AD ADVERTISING Can I change the punctuation or capitalization in the headline? You can’t change the punctuation. You may change capitalization in the following case: If the headline, like The Post’s current heads, is “downstyle” (capitalized like a sentence rather than a title) and there’s a proper name in the head that you’d like to reinterpret as a plain ol’ common noun, or vice versa — say you want “lab” to refer to a Labrador retriever; or it’s about a Lab and you want to mean it’s a laboratory — then you can write the whole head as upstyle, as in a book title. If the head is upstyle to begin with, just leave it that way. Can I use the headings that appear in other online stuff besides newspapers? You can if it has a date on it and it falls within the required window, March 4-15, 2021. Very helpful to me: Copy the URL (website address) and put it underneath your entry (or at the bottom of the whole submission). DO NOT EMBED IT into the headline itself; I’ll see a bunch of garble. (If that URL disappears, don’t worry: see below.) AD One more thing: Sometimes online headlines are ephemeral, especially on a publication’s homepage; if it no longer exists, I’ll rely on your honor. But come on, don’t rewrite headlines to make them work for your joke; remember: honor. I can’t check every last headline. I’m tired of reading your edicts. Can’t I read some jokes? Here are highlights from last year’s ink (Week 1375), of course reflecting that new, stuck-at-home life we had begun for what most of us that would be a few weird weeks while we nervously started rationing the toilet paper. Runners-up: Major Universities Stop Lab Research ‘Who’s a good dog?’ to remain a mystery (Jeff Shirley) My Co-worker Burps Loudly and Engages in Self-Talk Title set for tell-all book by Pence (John Hutchins) Amid outbreak, Meals on Wheels is changing the way food is delivered AD Frustrated, dizzy customers long to return to Meals on Tables (Alex Steelsmith) And the winner of the Lose Cannon: Queen's message of solidarity to the nation ‘Fat-bottomed girls make the rockin’ world go round’ inspires Britons in time of need (Michelle Christophorou) Selected honorable mentions (Ad for kitchen cabinet remodeling) Don’t Replace — Reface! Plastic surgery helping more couples avoid expensive divorces (Marli Melton) What’s still open in D.C. Hole in presidential face continues to spout misinformation (Lawrence McGuire) U-Haul offers 30-day storage free for college students Parents must retrieve offspring from lockers by May 1 (Jesse Aronson) ‘We’ll improvise and make it work’ Copies of next week’s Post to have perforations, cardboard tube (Howard Ausden) Living in the present Woman given isolation cottage by husband (Dan Helming) AD Broadway to dim lights for a month ‘Maybe virus won’t see us’ strategy questioned (Duncan Stevens) Coronavirus slowdown seen from space Extreme social distancing proves effective (Alex Steelsmith) Crocs to close all North American stores through end of month CDC sics carnivorous reptiles on nonessential businesses (Frank Osen) Kitchen trends for 2020 Faucet that plays “Happy Birthday” twice tops the list (Bill Dorner) House, Senate leaders start to make changes to congressional routines Lobbyists must now leave bags of cash in designated touch-free drop zones (Allen Haywood) Many who died had health problems Captain Obvious releases annual report (Frank Mann) This is the biggest blunder in presidential history At least until tomorrow (Drew Bennett) How to cook if cooped up with the kids Hansel & Gretel witch starts ‘Coven Oven’ blog (Steve Honley) AD My Co-worker Burps Loudly and Engages in Self-Talk Royal Consort chafes at sharing home office space with Empress (Drew Bennett) And some gems from the past: Week 634, 2005: From Prodigy to Promising Virtuoso Even with 947 volumes, the most massive encyclopedia project ever hasn’t reached the Q’s (Russell Beland). Week 834, 2009: Neighborhood Watch Recession Forces Bethesda Residents to Share a Single Rolex (Christopher Lamora; Cy Gardner) Week 1047, 2013: Court: Family must return ancient tablet to Germany First aspirin manufactured by Bayer family to be sent home (Bruce Alter) Week 1077, 2014: State parks get creative in search of funding Officials predict ‘Don’t Throw Coins in Lake’ signs will bring huge influx of coins to lake (Danielle Nowlin) Fauxlaborations*: The results of Week 1422 *Non-inking headline by Danielle Nowlin AD As I noted in the intro to this week’s results, Week 1422 basically asked: Give us a pun on a movie, book, song, etc. And the format was to show it as a result of a “collaboration” between the creator of the original and someone whose involvement would create the pun. Compared with Invitational contests that ask for poems, songs or comedy dialogue, it was an easy, short-form challenge to produce some wordplay, which explains the 2,000 entries that came in from about 200 entrants, many of them new names — we have five First Offenders this week. I tried to avoid famously hoary puns like “Tequila Mockingbird” or “My Corona,” though I didn’t insist that some joke had never been made before by anyone ever. Hopefully it’s at least in a fresh context. Congratulations first of all to Daniel Fleisher, who suggested this contest to the Empress; he even got ink for “Everything Licked This Way Comes” (Ray Bradbury + Ben & Jerry), his sixth blot of ink ever. (Dan’s official anagram on the Loser Stats page: SAD, I FELL IN HERE.) AD It’s the first Style Invitational win, but the 69th (and 70th and 71st) blot of ink for Harold Mantle, who got his very first ink in Week 5. Hal gets our new Clowning Achievement trophy for “The Poison-Good Bible,” Kingsolver x Putin. One of the runner-up entries, for Marie Kondo x Lindsey Graham’s “The Fine Art of Toadying Up,” was sent almost identically by Invite veteran Frank Mullen and total newbie John Butman. Each gets his choice of Loser Mug or Grossery Bag, and John also scores the Fir Stink for his first ink. It’s always fun to discover new names among the entries I’ve chosen, once I look them up — and especially to find that they’re responsible for several inkworthies. This week’s phenom is Megan Barnett of Crozet, Va., near Charlottesville, who ended up with three honorable mentions in her debut … followed closely by her husband, Hil, who got two. Hil left a note with his entry: “This is how my wife and I spent our whole Valentine’s weekend. Um, thanks, Empress.” Awww, and now they’ll have that pair of Fir Stinks. What Doug Dug … was not The Style Invitational this week, because Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood elected instead to have a heart attack last Friday. I’m happy and relieved to report that three stents later, he’s home from the hospital and feeling way better. But can you believe that he didn’t take me up on my offer of “some diverting reading material”? Fortunately, warmed up in the bullpen was Other Ace Copy Editor Ponch Garcia, who reports that What Pleased Ponch most was a joke that might confuse readers five years hence: Megan Barnett’s “All I Want for Christmas Is Glue,” featuring the woman who sprayed her head with aerosol Gorilla Glue, then posted a video on social media asking for advice. Ponch also especially liked Duncan Stevens’s Tarantino version of “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?”: "Having read “Brown Bear” to my boys scads of times when they were growing up, that one made me think “$@%# YEAH!” Do kids dress up as YOU for Famous Americans Day? Bob Staake posted on his Facebook page yesterday an adorable photo of a young boy. A parent had sent it to him along with this note: "Today’s theme for spirit week was “dress like a famous American” and Ezra chose his favorite author/illustrator Bob Staake!! Ezra was SO excited for today and wanted to make sure everyone knew who he was and what his favorite book is.” If you can’t see the photo in the link, the smiling Ezra — currently missing an incisor or two — is wearing Bob’s usual T-shirt/flannel shirt/ball cap get-up, complete with pencil in the shirt pocket. And he’s showing the camera Bob’s popular picture book “The Donut Chef.” But you don’t have to dress like Bob to have a Staake of your own: You can get a piece of his Invite art, either a pencil sketch or the final pen-and-ink drawing, at bobstaake.com/SI. Tell him what you’re looking for — write to me first if you need help in figuring out the date, details of the cartoon, etc. — and he’ll check to see if he still has it. Meanwhile, those Staake cartoons in the Week 1425 contest still await your captions: Deadline is Monday night, March 8. Lay 'em on me.