Style Conversational Week 1462: The switcheroo
The Empress of The Style Invitational on this week’s new contest and results

Jesse Frankovich's (and others') anagram, animated by the ingenious Internet Anagram Server created by Anu Garg at Wordsmith.org/anagram. Jesse got an Invitational runner-up with his description of a "Baking Bread" series: "Walter White finds a better way to make a lot of dough before he dies." (Frank Ockenfels/AMC)
By Pat Myers
November 11, 2021 at 4:32 p.m. EST



Hi, everyone. Before getting to this week’s contest and results, I wanted to catch you up on something that happened right after I finished last week’s Style Conversational: The company that I used to send out my weekly notification email to 1,800 people had disabled my account without warning or explanation.

It took about 24 hours to learn what had gone amiss: I had not properly followed its strict rules requiring a “double opt-in” from each person receiving the email. Instead, I had added the address of each new entrant to the Invitational, a dozen or so new names each week, with directions on how to easily unsubscribe. I figured the newbies would want to be notified when their entries got (or failed to get) ink. But evidently at least one (probably more than one) recipient clicked on “Report Spam,” and kaboom.

Fortunately, I quickly found another platform: Substack, a service that a lot of writers have been using to publish their own work; the historian Heather Cox Richardson has had enormous success in sharing her “Letters From an American” blog. I was able to set up quickly on Substack, and it seems I can send out the newsletter just about the same way as before. And it even let me import my whole mailing list with a click.


But. Substack first asked: All these people opted in the first time around, right?

Um.

So this is why I’d like to hear from everyone who was on my list as of last Thursday. I did upload everyone’s name, just to get the word out to them. And I’m asking all of you to, just this once, send me an email to myerspat (at) gmail (dot) com, expressly saying that you want to keep getting the emails. Thanks to the more than 200 of you who’ve already answered my plea when I finally sent out last week’s newsletter about a day and a half late.

And then, within a few weeks, I’ll remove everyone who didn’t opt in again. Breaks my heart, but I don’t see an alternative. Please tell me you’ll stay!

Meanwhile, to sign up for the first time: So simple! Just go to TheStyleInvitational.substack.com and fill in your email address. I’ll know not to remove you later because I’ll see that you came aboard after Nov. 4.


(Substack offers writers a way to charge for their work, but of course there’s no charge to read my newsletter. The links to the Invitational and Conversational, however, go to Washington Post pages, which are usually blocked to Post nonsubscribers. But the newsletter itself has no restrictions.)

Thank you, lovely crazy people.

Help wanted, Alternative Universe branch: This week’s contest
This week’s contest, Week 1462, is pretty wide open in both form and content: Describe what it would be like if two particular people switched professions (or other roles in life that aren’t exactly professions). The example of Bob Ross/Gordon Ramsay, which is taken from Twitter and itself based on a writing prompt in Reddit, does it in the form of a quote from each guy. But I could see funny descriptions, including wordplay.


Usually, for guidance and inspiration, I’ll show you some examples of a similar earlier Style Invitational from sometime in our past 1,461 weeks, but if we’ve done one, I can’t think of it. The closest thing I have is Week 423, which asked readers what would happen if a character from one movie were put into another one. The top winners:

Fourth Runner-Up: If Ben Kingsley’s Gandhi had played Darth Vader, the Empire wouldn’t have struck back. (Joseph Romm)

Third Runner-Up: If Renton from “Trainspotting” had played Mary Poppins, it would have taken a spoon, a lighter, a belt and a syringe to make the medicine go down. (Jessica Henig)

Second Runner-Up: If Phil from “Groundhog Day” had played Scarlett O’Hara, tomorrow wouldn’t have been another day. (Chris Doyle)

First Runner-Up: If Marlee Matlin’s character in “Children of a Lesser God” had played Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver,” it would have made a lot more sense for her to keep wondering, “Are you talking to me?” (Mike Edens)


And the winner of the can of South Carolina Potted Possum: If Flipper, from “Flipper,” had starred in “Jaws,” then after eating people he could have scooted through the water backward on his tail balancing their heads on his nose. Cool. (Russell Beland)

The Style Invitational > T H E S Y L I N V A O N > Holy Insane TV!* The results of Week 1458
*Non-inking headline (no space for anything like this) by Kevin Dopart

When I present a new contest, I’m always concerned about its parameters: Is it so specific and difficult that it won’t get enough funny and varied entries, meanwhile denying the opportunity for lots of good jokes? Or is it so broad that there’s not enough structure to prompt interesting entries — or that the result will just prompt a “So what?”

I vacillated between these concerns after posting Style Invitational Week 1458; Loser Sarah Walsh had suggested a contest based on the anagrams of TV show names, and I decided to expand the challenge to allow contestants to repeat any of the letters of the title, as long as they used each letter at least once.


Looking back on this week’s results, I think I made the right choice. Granted, it’s definitely cooler when you can rearrange the letters of the TV show into another one that uses the same letters — especially when you can make it into an animated graphic like the one at the top of this page.

But as you can see in the results, most of the time I got more of a laugh from entries that weren’t exact anagrams. (The validation program devised by Hall of Fame Loser Gary Crockett, which he ran on the titles in a list of semifinalists that I sent him, flagged the anagrams along with any illegal letters.) Despite their coolness factor, many of the anagrams seemed contrived and difficult to read. And some were just bested by non-anagrams with funnier ideas in the descriptions. I ended up using nine anagrams and 32 anagram-pluses (better names welcome!).

It’s the first Clowning Achievement for rookie Coleman Glenn, but I had to look that up — the man has become an Invite household name since his debut a mere 19 weeks ago. Since Week 1439, the chaplain and religion professor at Bryn Athyn College outside Philadelphia has been a runner-up five times, and now has 28 blots of ink in all. Coleman writes a lot of poetry, and heard of us through the journal Light, but he’s proved to be clever, funny and current in all manner (or unmanner) of humor that we’ve thrown out to him. And I think I’ve remembered each time that there’s a D in the name of his town, Huntingdon Valley, Pa. Coleman, who’s in his 30s, was deprived of experiencing “Gilligan’s Island” in its original broadcast incarnation, but is clearly well versed in the monuments of television posterity; “Ding-a-lings in Sand” is the perfect synopsis for every single episode.

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Eleven people anagrammed “Breaking Bad” into “Baking Bread” — showing why Invite contests usually ask for an extra element to the joke. But Hall of Famer Jesse Frankovich nailed the cleverest description: “Walter White finds a better way to make a lot of dough before he dies.”

Also on fire, Invitationally, has been Frank Mann, whose runner-up reminds us of Tucker Carlson’s blink-of-an-eye stint on “Dancing With the Stars”: “Right-Wing Whiner Can’t Cha-Cha — Sad.” Not only has Frank snarfed up 16 blots of ink in the past 10 weeks, but I just realized that on my first-cut “shortlist” of about 100 entries from the total of 1,150, twelve of them were by Frank. And remember that when I’m judging, I’ve already shuffled all the entries, with no names attached, into alphabetical order. So maybe the TV news reporter turned federal lawyer was kind of robbed this week, getting “only” two blots.

And we’re delighted with the return of Amanda Yanovitch, an English professor in the Richmond area who blotted up a little vat of ink from about 2011 to 2016 — sometimes with the aid of one or another of her three young boys — but then pretty much disappeared until a few weeks ago. But this’ll be the third week in a row that I’ll be sending her a prize: this time, a Loser Mug or Grossery Bag for teasing technologically hesitant seniors with “America’s Funniest Home Videos > Send the Nice Man Our Homemade Errors From the VCR.” Keep it coming, Amanda.


Also back in Loserdom this week is Milo Sauer, who quickly ran up exactly 100 blots of ink in the early 2000s, then vanished. Well, his name did, anyway: Milo (a.k.a. Tim, a George Mason University math professor) just recently confessed to me that in 2005, he broke the Invite’s strict no-pseudonyms rule and assumed the identity of an Elwood Fitzner of Valley City, N.D., amassing 100 more blots before retiring him as well. I’d actually looked up Elwood in my early days of Empresshood, and while I didn’t find that exact name back then, I did find numerous Fitzners in Valley City (population 6,400) and figured he must be there somewhere. (It turns out that Milo has Fitzner relatives there.) All is forgiven now, almost 15 years later, and I’m delighted to see that Milo is as clever as ever — two blots this week! — but people, do not enter under false names.

What Doug Dug: Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood got a laugh (or four, I hope) out of all this week’s top winners, and also singled out several honorable mentions: Mark Raffman’s anagram “Seinfeld > Life’s End: A show about nothingness”; Frank Mann’s “Lost in Space > Plastic Noses, Lips et al.," about the family Kardashian; and Jesse Frankovich’s “The Lone Ranger > The Orange Gloater,” who won’t be a masked man.

Yes, the Trump jokes keep coming, and keep getting ink. And in case you think I’m being politically biased here: I don’t remember seeing a single Biden joke among the 1,150 entries; a search on his name yields two mentions, neither really about him. Really, there’s nothing to take on about him and his administration? Understandably, no one on Earth is as mockable as TFG, but hasn’t Biden done anything in the past almost-year that deserves a valid barb?

Last call for Loser Brunch! Sunday, Nov. 14, Aditi
We’re back and boosted and I’m all ready to meet (and remeet) Losers, Devotees and Invite fans this Sunday, Nov. 14, at noon at the restaurant Aditi in Kingstowne, not far from the Beltway exit to Van Dorn Street in Northern Virginia. There’s a buffet or you can order from the menu. Details and RSVP on the Our Social Engorgements page on the Losers’ website at NRARS.org. (Especially if you’re new, can you let me know as well at pat.myers@washpost.com?) Everyone (as long as you’re vaccinated) is welcome — and in person, we do not snark.