Style Conversational Week 1457: If the Q fits ... The Empress of The Style Invitational on this week’s Ask Backwards contest and book-subtitle results One of our 39 previous Ask Backwards contests, featuring Bob Staake's oft-reused Alex Trebek. The week's winner, by Sanford Horn: A: Paris, Zurich, and Certain Parts of West Virginia. Q: Where is it not permissible to marry one's sister? By Pat Myers October 7, 2021 at 5:35 p.m. EDT Yay, Ken’s still game. Though the past year has vaulted him even to A-er-List celebrity, professional know-it-all (I assume that’s what he writes on his 1040 form) Ken Jennings returns to The Style Invitational to choose his favorite entries in this week’s contest, Week 1457. In about three weeks, I’ll send him a shortlist of entries to several of this week’s “answers”: Ken Jennings; Zen Jennings; Spinal Jeopardy; and Not a Future “Jeopardy!” Category. And if he responds as he did last year, he’ll choose a couple of favorites along with some gracious and good-natured comments, and get back to co-hosting “Jeopardy!” with Mayim Bialik at least through the end of the year. Still, my Empress tiara remains firmly molly-bolted into my head, and so I’ll name the official winners and give out our coveted prizes. But in my experience — for one thing, I’m a devotee of his and John Roderick’s odd-topics podcast, Omnibus (today’s episode: merkins) — Ken’s sense of humor, appreciation of puns, etc., are pretty much in line with mine. ADVERTISING Last October, in Week 1404, I had two “Jeopardy!”-adjacent “answers” — (a) Alex Tribeca and (b) Ken Jennings and Kylie Jenner — along with 16 others. Those two categories didn’t turn out to be the most fruitful, but there were a few inkworthies that I passed along to Ken. And four weeks later, in second place for the week: A. Ken Jennings and Kylie Jenner. Q. Who are Mr. Trivia and Ms. Trivial? (Rob Huffman; this was Ken’s favorite in this category as well) As Ken put it: “The Mr. Trivia and Ms. Trivial is a pretty easy joke, but I laughed. Hard to beat that one.” He singled out two others: A. Ken Jennings and Kylie Jenner. Q. Who are a man who did thunderously win, and a woman who is wondrously thin? (Mark Calandra; Ken Jennings: “A stretch but it’s such a nice spoonerism! I’m such a sucker for those.”) A. Ken Jennings and Kylie Jenner. Q. Whose SAT answers did Aunt Becky think she was buying, and whose did she actually buy? (Ivars Kuskevics, Takoma Park; Ken: “I also liked this one, but I had the biggest crush on Lori Loughlin as a kid.”) I also gave ink to this one that Ken failed to appreciate: A. Ken Jennings and Kylie Jenner. Q. Whose careers got a big boost from “Jeopardy!” and a celebrity family feud? (Steve Smith) The Alex Tribeca category didn’t really pan out; this is why I usually post more categories than I’d likely have room for in the results. But we had a few. A. Alex Tribeca. Q. Who replaced Art Flushing? (Kevin Dopart, Washington; Frank Mann; this was Ken’s “Alex Tribeca” choice, though “too bad there’s not a MANHATTAN neighborhood that sounds like ‘Fleming’ ”) [Face it: this was the work of people doing their best with very little to work with] A. Alex Tribeca. Q. To whom do you say, “I’ll take one-bedroom apartments for $6,000 a month, Alex”? (Gary Crockett; Dan Helming, Trenton, N.J.; Ken’s second choice) I threw in one more: A. Alex Tribeca. Q. Who can be found in a Lower Manhattan bar ordering his daily double? (Beverley Sharp, Montgomery, Ala.) The other top winners for Week 1404: Fourth place: A. @UnrealAbrahamLincoln. Q. Who tweeted: “Great speech yesterday in Gettysburg! Union widows LOVE their President (ME)!”? Frank Mann) Third place: A. Shut Up Man. Q. Who is Florida Man’s attorney? (Jeff Hazle; Pia Palamidessi) And the winner of the Lose Cannon: A. The Republic Forwhichistan. Q. Where can you find One Asian Undergod — except he’s invisible? (Gary Crockett) So this time we have four Jeopocentric categories. Especially if you’re one of the numerous “Jeopardy!” veterans in the Loser Community, or of Ken’s other quiz show, “The Chase,” here’s your chance to rub shoulders (in the sense that word-to-eyeball = shoulder-to-shoulder) with the GOAT. (FYI: The category of “Curry Spice” was suggested by my predecessor, Gene Weingarten. So you’re good to go.) Meanwhile, I’m so grateful that most of you have been formatting your entries the way I’ve been begging you to: one entry per line (i.e., no Enter or other line-breaker within the entry). This way I can sort all the entries out by the first letter of the entry. So for Ask Backwards, as I show on this week’s entry form, please do it this very way: A. Zen Jennings [or whichever “answer” you’re doing]. Q. What [some wildly clever and hilarious question]? NOT: A. Zen Jennings Q. [Your question] NOT: 2. A. Zen Jennings. … NOT: Q. [Your questions] A. Zen Jennings … Thank you, sweeties! Mwah. *The headline “If the Q Fits” got ink for Jesse Frankovich in 2019. Fudging the books*: The results of Week 1453 *Non-inking headline by Jon Gearhart Clearly, some of you out there read books, or have read a book, or have seen a book cover. But to judge from a lot of entries to Week 1453, whose results run today, a bunch of you haven’t. Well, that or dozens of you (or some of you writing many dozens of entries) didn’t bother to look at the instructions for Week 1453, which asked: “Choose any book title listed on Amazon and misinterpret it by adding a subtitle, as in Jon’s examples above.” The examples: One Hundred Years of Solitude: The Covid Hoax Continues The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: Spice Up Your Love Life With Costumes Small Vices: The Best Tools for Making Doll House Furniture Or maybe you didn’t know, or gather from the examples, that a book subtitle is a second title further explaining the subject of the book. It’s not a newspaper headline, with the elliptical, article-dropping style that news headlines traditionally have. Nor it is a plot synopsis. Yes, we’ve had lots of contests over the years that asked for either of those things, but clearly not this time. So what’s with: Mutiny on the Bounty: Disgruntled Shoppers Rise Up Against Manager When Store Runs Out of Paper Towels The Girl on the Train: Bridesmaid Accidentally Destroys Gown Old Yeller: 98-year-old wins hog calling contest. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: In this Wizard of Oz sequel, Glenda and the no-longer-cowardly lion teach Dorothy about the powers inherent in her other clothing items. Okay, sorry to vent. It doesn’t really matter, since I had far more funny 'n’ clever material than I could use among the 2,200 entries from the week’s 240-plus entrants; I finally stopped at 44 inking entries, all of which appear in both the print and online versions of this week’s Invite. And this wasn’t one of those weeks in which a few people each blot up big pools of ink; by my count, it was brushed lightly upon 41 Losers, including four First Offenders (yay!). Then there were the overly obvious ones that were submitted repeatedly, including: Where the Wild Things Are: A Complete Guide to the World’s Zoos Gone With the Wind: Ending Flatulence through Diet and Exercise Lord of the Flies: The Joe DiMaggio (or Willie Mays) Story Oh, The Places You’ll Go! - A Guide to the Public Bathrooms of Europe The Catcher in the Rye: Yogi Berra’s Alcoholic Years Pride and Prejudice: A History of the Trump Administration A Brief History of Time: How a Weekly Magazine Changed the World A Confederacy of Dunces: A Guide to the GOP A Tale of Two Cities: The Story of Minneapolis and St. Paul The Fault in Our Stars: Famous Celebrity Scandals The Sound and the Fury: Conflict Management in Apartments with Thin Walls Lord of the Flies: The Inventor of the Zipper When you’ve seen 15 entries about the Venus de Milo, how fun it is to get the one from First Offender Melissa Muckenhirn: A Farewell to Arms: How to Fit More Chairs at the Dining Table.” It’s the second Clowning Achievement — and the seventh Invite win and almost 400th ink all-time — for Dave Prevar, who transformed imminent ecological disaster into a household one with “Silent Spring: The Year I Forgot About Valentine’s Day.” After lying low for a while, Dave has been entering the Invite more often; perhaps he’s seeing the gates of the 500-ink Hall of Fame glittering on the horizon. Seth Tucker gets his eighth ink “above the fold” with the gut-laugher Left Behind: Thirty Days to a Better Butt (Vol. 1); Hall of Famer Frank Osen does Faulkner one better with As I Lay Dying: Memoirs of America’s Worst Standups; and with his first entry ever, Bill Kullman wins his choice of Loser Mug or Whole Fools Grossery Bag, along with the Fir Stink for his first ink, for One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Jewish Mother Waits for Her Son’s Weekly Visit. What Doug Dug: Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood especially liked all four of this week’s Loser’s Circle entries, and he also singled these out from the honorable mentions: Catch-22: An Analysis of Last Season’s 601 Washington Football Team Passing Attempts (Jesse Rifkin) Dial “M” for Murder: How Automated Messages Have Slowed Down 911 (Jon Gearhart, getting ink in the contest he suggested — something that doesn’t always happen) It Ends With Us: 1001 Latin Singular Nouns (Mark Raffman) Mark Twain: A Maryland Commuter’s Daily Nightmare, by E. Fudd (Steve Glomb) The Tempest: My One-Hour Career With Kelly Services (First Offender David Terry) And the topical So Big: Nicki Minaj’s Cousin’s Friend’s Covid Vaccine Memoir (First Offender Marty Gold) (Hey, Guy Who Wrote to Me Last Week Because He Hadn’t Got Ink — see all these new people? Could be you one day.)