Style Conversational Week 1450: What fools those mortals be
The Empress of The Style Invitational on this week’s contest and results

Bob Staake's alternative sketch for this week's contest, depicting a real-world Captcha user.
By Pat Myers
August 19, 2021 at 5:26 p.m. EDT



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(Important note about this weekend’s Loser brunch: See the section at the bottom of this column.)

Happy Invite Weekend — and by that I mean from the time The Style Invitational is posted online Thursday morning through that Sunday, when it shows up in the print Post on newsstands, or wherever it is that a nonsubscriber buys a print Post. See, most of the week is Invite Weekend, and so it might as well be a happy one. Unless you didn’t get ink, and then you can have four straight days of unmitigated woe. Sorry!

This week’s contest, Week 1450 — suggested, like so many others of late, by Loser Obsessive Duncan Stevens — is a humor-writing challenge, rather than the Invite’s other stock in trade, wordplay. It’s a classic humor/sci-fi trope — the Outsider Viewing Our Crazy Civilization — but one I don’t remember our doing (though something similar may be squirreled away in the depths of the 1,450+-item Master Contest List). Obviously the humor will come from (a) recognizing the absurdity or potentially confusing nature of some part of our lives and (b) writing about it as your chosen observer — a scientist, space alien, whatever — might explain it, quite possibly with misunderstanding, as in Duncan’s example of the captcha.


Speaking of Actually True Invite-Adjacent Trivia! Ryan Staake, son of Bob, is the designer of the logo of ReCaptcha, the bot-prevention software that shows you a fuzzy word or two from a book and asks you what it is, then uses your answer to help digitize books. Ryan did it as a college student in the 2000s; since then he’s become an award-winning filmmaker and music video producer (have you seen this mesmerizing “Cross Me” with Ed Sheeran and Chance the Rapper?). So when I sent Bob the examples by Duncan Stevens for this week’s contest, he said, “I’ll have to do that one.” (Also Actually True Trivia: Captcha conveniently stands for “Completely Automatic Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” Shades of Invite Week 1443!)

You can also captcha for yourself a Genuine Bob Invite Sketch or Final Drawing; he offers them up to the Loser Community at bobstaake.com/SI. He has them from way back, too.

And speaking of Our Big Star Duncan Stevens! Be sure to get “Inside the Mind of the Reigning Champ Of WaPo’s Weekly Humor Contest” in the latest Northern Virginia Magazine! The big profile of the Vienna, Va., local hero is by Jesse Rifkin, himself a 53-time Loser. Except for The Post’s own stories about the Invitational on its 10th and 20th anniversaries, and Frank Ahrens’s big spoofy story on Invite legend Chuck Smith in 1998, Jesse’s piece is surely the biggest article ever about The Style Invitational and its contestants. Jesse is clearly a sports fan, and along with recalling some of Duncan’s greatest Invite hits, he focuses on the contest as a competition among the Losers, especially between Duncan and fellow Invite Obsessive Jesse Frankovich, a rivalry aided by the complex standings kept meticulously every week on the NRARS.org website by Elden Carnahan. But one of my favorite parts is the photo of Duncan in front of his magnet-plastered refrigerator. (Since he hit the Hall of Fame a year and a half ago, Duncan has forgone further magnets and runner-up swag.)

Lentil acuity*: The results of Week 1446
*Non-inking headline by Kevin Dopart


Nobody will confuse most of them with actual crossword clues — and the cruciverbalist crowd is probably rolling its collective eyes — but the lentil-bedecked filled-in crossword grid that I presented in Week 1446 yielded dozens and dozens of both wry descriptions and brand-new phrases among some 1,200 entries. (There weren’t so many entrants this week, but a lot of Losers sent in the maximum 25 entries.) This week’s results show 49 of them online, 40 in print.

I had placed the lentils on the various squares more or less at random. A few words were totally exposed, while at least one word had only one letter showing. Since it was a big Sunday puzzle, there were more than 100 words to choose from — and of course you could choose your own letters for the covered squares, and so I didn’t have much duplication among the entries (though there were a few nearly identical ones).

As in our previous partial-grid contests, a lot of the fun came from the contest’s long “theme” words and phrases, and in the variety of ways the Losers replaced the covered squares. I had only so much room, and I also wanted to get in those little gems like “WHE > The middle of nowhere” (Chris Doyle) and “IFA > International Fonetic Alphabet” (Steve Honley). And so when I realized that I was going to have to trim big chunks of my list for the print page, I decided to share some of the longer entries en masse below.


But this week’s four top winners were for some of the shortest words. It’s the seventh Invite win, but the first of our latest trophy, the Clowning Achievement, for 451-time Loser Roy Ashley, the next in line for the Invite Hall of Fame. Roy’s own kids are long since grown, but he clearly has a good memory: T- -N > TEEN: I’m working on the definition, OKAY? John Hutchins, who’s been blazing since he returned to regular Inviting a few weeks ago, wins that cool Mao/Obama bag with his dig at Supreme Court nominees with R-E > ROE: "Supreme Court case that Supreme Court nominees may or may not have heard of, have no opinion about, and certainly are not intending to overrule.” And the rest of the Losers’ Circle is filled by two rookie phenoms: Coleman Glenn playing on both David BOWIE and the Bowie knife (though not the D.C. suburb of Bowie, Md.; Coleman’s in the Philadelphia area), and Leif Picoult’s pBAY as the place to get a good urine sample.

What Pleased Ponch: Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood continues his vacation, but Other Ace Copy Editor Ponch Garcia is back, and he weighed in with his faves. Ponch especially agreed with Roy Ashley’s winner, given that he’s the parent of a rising senior; “the winner made me shout ‘YES!’” Ponch also singled out: Steve Glomb’s EEE: The shores the Marines sing about; both Frank Mann’s and Coleman Glenn’s LEMON BROWN; Frank Osen’s BORISTA: “Let’s walk through the flavor profile of Tuvaluan Botarga …”; Jeff Rackow’s ACAI: The kale of berries; Miriam Nadel’s PANTS-ON FINE, what the Norwegian beach handball team has to pay for not wearing bikini bottoms; and Mark Raffman’s And Last: F SI: “Abbreviated form of “No ink again!?” (Mark Raffman)

And here are the Variations on the Themes:


For -EADA-LA-OU-I- (originally READALLABOUTIT):

READ ALL ABOUT ID: Marketing tagline for Freud’s first book (Daniel Galef)

READ ALL ABOUT IT: What subscribers to Computerworld magazine like to do (Coleman Glenn)

LEAD ALL ABOUT IT: Why Superman could not see inside my safe (Robert Schechter)

BE A DALLAS OUTIE: Encouragement to gay Cowboys teammates (Jon Ketzner)

MEAD: ALL ABOUT IT: A manual for DIY honey fermentation. (Sarah Walsh)

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For -AN-SON-I-E (originally PANTSONFIRE):

Three got ink:

PANTS ON FILE: How the fashion police track down repeat offenders (Coleman Glenn)

PANTS ON MICE: One way to control the rodent population (First Offender Lenard King)

PANTS-ON FINE: What the Norwegian beach handball team has to pay for not wearing bikini bottoms (Miriam Nadel)

But there were also:

PANTS ON FINE: Trousers not sagging (Miriam Nadel.)


FANGS ON FIRE: When Dracula bites a Sichuan-food lover (Duncan Stevens)

HANDS ON BIKE: Not quite ready to say “Look, Ma____” (Craig Schopmeyer)

PANTS-ON TIME: Returning to the office (Jesse Frankovich)

RantsOnFire: Donald Trump’s secret Twitter handle. (John Hutchins)

’NANAS ON FIRE: Chiquita’s answer to Cherries Jubilee (Richard Franklin) [Maybe Rick isn’t familiar with Bananas Foster]

RANTS ON TIME: Filibusters (Steve Fahey)

YANKS ON RICE: Southern China down-home cooking dish, heavy on the mayo (Edward Gordon

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THE-AN-SAL-H-RE (originally THEGANGSALLHERE):

THE BANKS ALL HIRE: What MBA students hope will still be true when they graduate (Steve Honley)

THE DANG SALT HERE: What’s making it so hard to drink this gosh darn lake water in Utah (Coleman Glenn)

THE L. A. NASAL CHORE: Rinsing the smog from your sinuses (George Thompson.)


THE RANT SALE HERE: Ad for Donald Trump’s discounted reading of his it-wasn’t-my-riot act. (Lawrence McGuire)

THE TANG’S ALL HERE: Discovery made in Buzz Aldrin’s pantry. (John Hutchins)

THEDA, NASAL WHORE: Netflix drama about a lady of the night, played by Fran Drescher. (Ira Allen) Disturbingly similar: THE L.A. NASAL WHORE: Working title of Fran Drescher’s gritty new drama set in an El Segundo brothel. (John Hutchins)

THE PANT SALE HERE: Store advertisement seen more frequently as in-person meetings resume. (Sarah Walsh)

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LE-O-B-O-N (originally LEROYBROWN):

These got ink:

LEMON BROWN: One of the new “back of the fridge” Crayola colors (Coleman Glenn)

LEMON BROWN: The sourest man in the whole damn town. (Frank Mann)

But there were also:

LEG OF BJORN: As seen in “Hannibal Lecter’s Swedish Vacation” (George Thompson)


LE BOOBOO UN: French for “My first marriage” (Steve Dantzler)

LE BOOBTOWN: New Orleans at Mardi Gras (Ira Allen)

LED ON BY OAN: Why some people believe the Big Lie (Lenard King)

LEMON BROWN: Low-maintenance color scheme for a bathroom (Kevin Dopart)

LeROT BROWN: Guy who smells bad, bad (Duncan Stevens)

LET OMB DOWN: Pass an unbalanced budget (Chris Doyle)

Open-air Loser brunch this very Sunday!
It was originally scheduled for April 2020, so you’re probably pretty hungry by now: There’s still room for some more Losers and their orderlies for this Sunday’s (Aug. 22) potluck brunch out on the spacious front porch of Loser Sam Mertens and wife Laurie on their six-acre spread in outer Silver Spring. It’s noon to 2; I’ll be there (sans Royal Consort but with pie or other fruitish item) and would be delighted to meet you or remeet you. To RSVP and get the address, write to mertenshosting [at] gmail [dot] com, and cc: me as well.

And on a larger — but still covid-conscious — scale, we’re on for the Flushies, the Losers’ annual (once again) awards/ potluck/ songfest, now scheduled for Sunday afternoon, Sept. 19, in the commodious backyard of Loser Steve Leifer. Watch for the Evite, if you’re on my mailing list. (See last week’s Style Conversational for more details.)

Hope to see some of you this Sunday!