Style Conversational Week 1448: Standing atop the odium The Style Invitational Empress on the sports name winners and new limerick contest Badminton stars Apriyani Rahayu and Greysia Polii of Indonesia exult after winning the gold medal in women's doubles Aug. 2. The world's fastest racket sport — a smash has been clocked at 304 mph — brought out our equally quick-witted punsters; this week's inking entries for new sports include Worstminton, Bandminton, Badmitten and Vladminton. (Leonhard Foeger/Reuters) By Pat Myers August 5, 2021 at 5:03 p.m. EDT 0 Dang, ESPN should have gotten in touch with The Style Invitational! Inspired by the fictional sports channel in the sports movie spoof “Dodgeball,” once a year — and this year, it’s Friday, Aug. 6 — ESPN2 becomes ESPN8, the Ocho, and features nonstop programming of “some fringe sports that are nonetheless highly entertaining.” This year’s lineup includes the Franklin Rock River Stone Skipping Tournament, the World Championship Rototiller Races, the Corgi Races at Emerald Downs, and the World Championship Cow Chip Throwing Contest. But only if the Ochoistas had seen today’s results of Week 1444, our contest to slightly change the name of a sport or sports-related term and create a new one! Then we could have had an antennis tournament — as Mark Raffman describes the challenge in his honorable-mention entry, “It’s really hard to hit a ball with a racket strapped to your head.” Or, on the track, the 100x4-meter relay: “It’s all about the baton pass,” explains John Klayman. Or, for that matter, Pam Sweeney’s 2x4x100 relay: “Long pieces of lumber ensure socially distanced handoffs. Just watch for splinters.” Or any of almost 50 inspired, if sometimes inspiredly silly, puns this week drawn from an Olympic-size pool of 1,800 entries, from Anarchery (shoot anywhere!) to Vladminton (best strategy: let him win). While some in the Loser Community scored with political analogies — among them, the poll vault (a high legislative bar to voting) and the Duper Bowl (the GOP primary) — we eased up quite a bit on the Big Issues digs this week, instead offering an array of humor that was less cerebral but “nonetheless highly entertaining.” As Loser Frank Mann observed after the Invite went up online this morning, “I can totally see this sports contest as a two-page spread in MAD.” True dat — think of the Brett Dimaio’s slam donk, bouncing the ball off a defender’s head and into the basket. Couldn’t you imagine that as a Don Martin cartoon in Mad Magazine? Not to mention Frank’s lagrosse itself (score by vomiting into the goal). But not so much, actually, for this week’s top winners (except for Robert Schechter’s runner-up worstminton: played with a grenade). I hereby confer Instant Classic Aphorism status on Melissa Balmain’s Marrython: The only endurance sport where you try not to reach the finish line. It gives Melissa her 180th blot of Invite ink, including her 14th victory, but it’s her first Clowning Achievement, the trophy we started giving out since December. Also too grown up for Mad: Hannah Seidel’s American Ninja Worrier, which nailed the “anxious parents” (her own?) quotes: “A series of extreme obstacles, from the devilishly sensible “He’ll probably text us in the morning” to the terrifyingly reasonable “She’s an adult; she can make her own choices.” And John Hutchins, who’s back Inviting after an unexcused absence, is back in the Losers’ Circle with offencing, a competition between the most vile talk show hosts; “the winner gets a prime-time spot on cable so they can complain every night about being ‘censored.’” [Despite my decades of “fixing” it as a copy editor, I’m on board with the singular “they” in cases like these, when the pronoun applies to any gender.] What Doug Dug: Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood just ate up the column this week, offering a long list of faves: all the winners, plus, from the honorable mentions: Pam Sweeney’s Moderna pentathlon, culminating in the “Two-Days-Later Sore-Armed Sports Bra Removal”; Diana Oertel’s poll vault (my favorite of 12 “poll vault” entries this week); the aforementioned 100x4 and 2x4x100 relays and Brian Collins’s anarchery, as well as Mike Gips’s and Drew Bennett’s idea for a Super William Tell archerry contest; John Kammer’s plan to combine hoops shooting with the other kind in baskeetball; Craig Schopmeyer’s clickit, Russian and Chinese teams trying to get naive Americans to open email attachments; and especially Tom Witte’s subhead above the list of honorable mentions: They gave only 109 percent. And! Annabeth’s Best Bets: Giving the second read on the copy desk today was Annabeth Carlson, who was partial to Eric Nelkin’s Microsoftball (“Every few innings the umpire updates the rule book, often requiring the game to restart”) and Duncan Stevens’s NASCARA, a car race in which the drivers do their eye makeup in the rearview mirror at 200 mph. Less successful: In the instructions for Week 1444, I asked readers to change the name of the sport slightly: not necessarily just one letter, but enough so that the original was obvious. But sometimes, just a one-letter change made that difficult: one was “bikini,” an alteration of “biking.” especially because the description also wasn’t about bikes. [In this section, I haven’t checked the authorship of any of the entries mentioned.] Also, as always, there were the screedy, in entries so bitter that the humor doesn’t have a chance. Like: “De-Fencing: Mask-wearing participants take down a useless, ugly, yet very expensive wall erected by an idiot to placate his raging ego.” Or: “ICE Skating: Immigration & Customs Employees being acquitted in cross-border shootings, etc.” And then there were what seemed like an inordinate number of entries that were insensitive and what one might charitably call tone-deaf in our current age: “Blackstroke: The first racially designated Olympic event.” “Bitch Volleyball: The perfect game for mean girls.” “Tramp Eileen: Contestants compete to see who can satisfy that slut, Eileen. Eileen often changes her mind, so this event does have its ups and downs.” “Peach volleyball: Georgia debutantes in bikinis. Need I say more?” “Poleo: Your horse must have one leg shorter than the others.” I mean, come on. This isn’t the same as risque; those are nasty. (Well, “blackstroke” would be just dumb were it not for the history of African Americans being banned from swimming pools.) Meanwhile, these are just unprintably funny: Bowl vault: Competitors attempt to accurately drop a load while jumping over the toilet. (Jesse Frankovich) Crow team: Eight big boastful rowers and their tiny cox. (Jeff Contompasis) Hey! Do you know how to write a limerick? Yay, it’s Limerixicon week! I love our annual visit with the limerick dictionary OEDILF.com because I know I’ll always receive lots of great material: Not only does the Loser Community include some of the world’s great limerick writers, but I always discover some new talents as well. And when I announce the contest each August, I have a chance to look through the Invite archives for an earlier limerick to use as an example, one that happens to feature a word that starts with the year’s pertinent letters — this year, for Style Invitational Week 1448, we’re up to the he- words, having skipped ahead from last year’s ha- words. Every year, alas, I also get lots of entries that don’t qualify as limericks. To that end, with each limerick contest I also publish “Get Your 'Rick Rolling,” my handy-dandy guide to what I’m looking for, and how to figure out if that’s what you wrote. I also spell it out more briefly right in the contest instructions. And for guidance and inspiration, pleeze look at any of our earlier results, happily compiled on the “LIM” page of Loser Elden Carnahan’s Master Contest List. On the right column of the row listing each contest is a link to that week’s results — to all 17 previous Limerixicons plus assorted other limerick contests, including the one just seven weeks ago to sum up or tell about a song. But if you’re new to limericks, before you check out the guide, bear with me for a minute as I show you my Hickory-Dickory-Dock/ Dickory-Dock test on this week’s example by Beverley Sharp, from Week 887. 1. Does Line 1 include a strong “HICK-or-y DICK-or-y DOCK”? Though she sang with a voice operatic, though she SANG-with-a VOIC-op-er AT-ic — YES. (It’s okay, even good, to have those unaccented syllables before and after._ 2. Does Line 2 also have “HICK-or-y DICK-or-y DOCK”? She ate marshmallows like a fanatic. she ate MARSH-mal-lows LIKE-a-fa NAT-ic — Ding ding, YES. Exactly the same as Line 1. 3. Now Lines 3 and 4: Do they have “HICK-or-y DOCK”? But then it got tricky — but THEN-it-got TRICK-y DICK-or-y DOCK! 4. And Line 4 ... Her tonsils got sticky; her TON-sils-got STICK-y DICK-or-y DOCK! 5. And just like Lines 1 and 2: Now all we can hear is s’more static. now ALL-we-can HEAR-is-s’more STAT-ic. Yup! HICK-or-y-DICK-or-y DOCK! 6. Now, the rhymes! Lines 1, 2 and 5 all need to rhyme with one another. Operatic, fanatic, static — yes, perfect rhymes: The accented syllables all rhyme: RAT, NAT, STAT. And what’s following them, the unaccented “-ic,” is the same. Ratic, Natic, Static. That’s called a perfect rhyme and that’s what we want. (What do you think a lot of people will send me when we get to the “hi-” words?) So you have till Monday night, Aug. 16, for Week 1448. And meanwhile, don’t forget Week 1447, in which you pick something from an article or ad and translate it wryly into “plain English.” Deadline for that is Monday, Aug. 9. Coming Sunday: Mystery podcast guest! “I’ll be recording another podcast tomorrow, with a mystery guest.” Deadline for that is Monday, Aug. 9. “You’re Invited” host Mike Gips gave me that teaser today, and I didn’t push for more information; I’m looking forward to finding out myself on Sunday, Aug. 8. So look for Season 2, Episode 3, at bit.ly/invite-podcast (and most podcast platforms). I’ve thoroughly enjoyed all 14 half-hour episodes so far — and so why wouldn’t I want to hear Jeff Bezos, or maybe Joe Biden, dish on his favorite entries of the week?