Style Conversational Week 1472: As a matter of fict
The Empress of The Style Invitational on this week’s fake-trivia contest and retrospective winners

“Norman Bates” in front of the facade of the Bates Motel set, part of the Universal Studios Studio tour. Loser Duncan Stevens sets the “Psycho” character's, er, devotion to his mom in a song parody that tops this week's Style Invitational. (Alfred A. Si/Wikipedia, Creative Commons)
By Pat Myers
January 20, 2022 at 4:19 p.m. EST



The fake Norman Bates pictured above — he’s part of the Universal Studios tour in Hollywood (or was in 2010) — ties in with our general celebration of inaccuracy of The Style Invitational’s recurring fictoid contests: spoofs on trivia lists and Fun Facts to Know and Tell in almost two dozen areas so far. This week’s fictoid contest, suggested by the Totally Genuine Loser Duncan Stevens — who also managed to win this week with his “Wouldn’t It Be Motherly” song parody featuring Mr. Bates himself — covers money, financial institutions, barter, ancient coins, new coins, totally made up coins, whatever. I tend to be expansive about the boundaries for the fictoid contests, just so the jokes are funny and original.

For guidance and inspiration, here’s a list of inking entries from some of the earlier fictoid contests; notice how some of the entries are twists on well-known trivia (which is often inaccurate anyway, like George Washington having wooden teeth); others are bogus “corrections” of various expressions. Some make you think a second or two before getting the joke, making the payoff more fun than if it’s spelled out for you.

You can slide down your rabbit hole all weekend by clicking on the links in the Master Contest List’s sublist of fictoid or fictoidish contests, starting at Week 702 in 2007, kept by Elden Carnahan on the Losers’ own website, NRARS.org. (Links to the contest results are in the far right on each row.) But for those who’d rather stay above ground:


From Week 702, the original, general “unreal facts” contest, playing off the “real facts” printed on the undersides of Snapple bottle lids:

A man in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, has created a ball of string the size of the planet Jupiter. (Sue Lin Chong)

Viagra was originally developed to keep celery fresh. (Andy Bassett)

There is as much nutrition in the peel of one potato as in a 12-ounce serving of carpet tacks. (Brendan Beary)

Week 768, movie trivia:

Despite their classic love story that has thrilled millions, Fay Wray and King Kong actually hated each other. (G. Smith)

In an extreme example of Method acting, Jack Nicholson had an actual lobotomy for the nding of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” His doctors later reversed the operation, restoring almost all function. (Jonathan Kaye)

Week 924, history trivia:


Gen. Ambrose Burnside was aided greatly in Civil War planning by his largely forgotten assistant, Col. Wendell Soulpatch. (Malcolm Fleschner)

George Washington also had a wooden pancreas. (Mike Turniansky)

Susan B. Anthony’s middle name was Barbie. (Judy Blanchard)

Week 1015, music trivia:

In the fade-out of the Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar,” you can clearly hear the phrase “I buried Jughead.” (Rob Huffman)

Van Morrison wrote “Brown Eyed Girl” about his then-girlfriend Elizabeth Taylor. They broke up shortly thereafter. (Paul Kondis)

“Pompatus” is the Latin word for “festering disease.” (Mark Raffman)

Week 1057, sports trivia:

Synchronized swimmers are typically fitted with plastic mouth inserts to ensure that their smiles precisely match. (Robert Schechter)

In a study of 67 athletes who said they gave 110 percent, it was found that they actually gave an average of only 93.2 percent. (Art Grinath)


Early in their history, the Yankees were frequent losers to their archrivals, the Yankers. (Steve McClemons)

Week 1075, trivia about cars and other vehicles

The name of Erik Prndl, inventor of the automatic transmission, is displayed on most cars’ dashboards. (Edward Gordon)

The voice actress for the Garmin GPS made a guest appearance as an extra in the third season of “Lost.” (David Friedman)

In Florida, residents over age 80 must renew their driver’s licenses every 10 years or 2,000 miles, whichever comes first. (Jeff Covel)

Week 1132, military trivia:

Before Greek soldiers fought at the Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C., they had to qualify at the Battle of 10K. (Drew Bennett)

The word “khaki” comes from the Urdu language, in which it means “always wrinkled.” (Larry McClemons)

The Swiss Army fights with knives. (John O’Byrne,


Week 1253, fashion and clothing trivia

Naugahyde is not made from the hide of naugas. It is from the linings of their digestive tracts. (Dave Prevar)

Under pressure from feminist groups, American Apparel has rebranded its white tank top as the “Spouse Discusser.” (Mark Raffman)

In response to popular outcry, Paris fashion models are now required to weigh at least four times as much as the outfits they wear on the runway. (Chris Doyle)

Week 1289, animal trivia

The painting “Dogs Playing Poker” was based on a secretly acquired photograph of dogs playing poker. (Roger Dalrymple)

The trumpeter swan has a small, flap-covered hole on its neck to drain saliva. (Jeff Shirley)

The male orange clownfish has a genetic predisposition to bone spurs. (Dottie Gray [yup, we’re up to 2018])

Week 1345, Food trivia

Baby carrots must be at least eight weeks old before they are harvested away from adult carrots. (Robyn Carlson)


McDonald’s top-selling burger in Europe is the .1134 Kiloer. (Mike Phillips)

The word “cafeteria” originated as a combination of “cafe” and “diarrhea.” (Jon Ketzner)

Week 1360, Fictoids about winter (the first of four seasonal contests)

If the temperature drops below 10 degrees, the Washington Monument retracts a few feet underground. (Bruce Reynolds)

Snow in the Southern Hemisphere forms on the ground and “falls” upward, which explains why penguins are white on the bottom. (Andrew Wells-Dang)

In Jamaica, Jack Frost is known as Johnny Gentlebreeze. (Eric Nelkin)

And most recently, Week 1438, trivia about the law and the legal/law-enforcement system:

Judges and barristers are no longer required to wear wigs in British courtrooms, but only if they work their own hair into those little curls. (Daniel Galef)


A law in Tudor England levied a fine on anyone who passed gas in church; the fine was set at a farthing. (Keith Ord)

The emblem of the National Lawyers Guild features a pelican, representing the giant bill. (Jesse Frankovich)

Needless to say, I welcome any more categories that you think could work! ALWAYS feel free to email me at pat.myers@washpost.com with contest ideas. I do, I concede, reject most of them, but I’ve also used many, many suggested contests — and remember, if you’re local and I use your contest ideas, I’ll take you out for ice cream. (So you’d think Duncan Stevens would weigh 400 pounds by now, but not quite.)

Hars do-overs: The results of the Week 1468 retrospective
Just as in last week’s Kook’s Tour do-over of half the year’s contests, but with decidedly more entrants, I was flooded with far too many good entries to run — and so dozens of inkworthy jokes got robbed a second time. But I did publish, I believe, a pretty darn whoppin’ 48 of them (32 in print), both resubmissions and new material. This part of 2021 included two song contests, one for topics in the news, the other for lyrics written in the first person, and worthies from just those two could have filled the page. (I used two in the paper — Duncan’s Norman Bates winner and First Offender Arnie Rosenthal’s “I Feel Petty,” “sung” by Vice President Harris — and added Duncan’s Trump administration summary (done to the Invite’s fave parody tune, “Be Our Guest”) and Beverley Sharp’s “Xi’s the One” for the online version.


But mostly I found myself gravitating toward the shorter-form contests, especially those that needed minimal explanation and stood on their own as jokes, rather than, say, Ask Backwards, in which the cleverness comes from making a joke out of a noun on a random list. So lots of books with new subtitles, good idea/bad idea, new sports, spoonerism jokes.

It’s Duncan Stevens’s nineteenth Style Invitational win, and his multiple blots of ink this week whoosh him right past the 750-ink mark since his debut in Week 970. Perhaps we can sing his inking parodies this week as part of the Loser party songfest (see the bottom of this page).

Hildy Zampella is also a wholesale ink-blotter, with somewhat saner totals but huge ratio of “above the fold” winners: of 170 blots of ink, 12 of them won the contest and 15 were runners-up. She scored second place this week, and wins a stupid board game, with her “first draft” of FDR: “Yesterday, December 7, 1941: A crappy day we’ll never forget, amirite?”


On the other hand, the Losers’ Circle is filled by two newbies, or at least newerbies: John Klayman grabs Inks 9, 10 and 11 (!!) and already his third above-the-folder; he got it with his determination by visiting space aliens that “in the early 21st century it became popular to have one’s nostrils professionally cleaned. People would queue up, sometimes for hours, to obtain this service.’ and Jennifer Martin Broadway, out in Michigan, gets the first of her runner-up prizes with her sixth blot of ink, reinterpreting the book “No Bad Dogs” with the subtitle “Living With Corns, Calluses and Bunions.”

What Doug Dug: Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood enjoyed all four top winners, and also singled out from among the honorable mentions on the print page: John Hutchins’s neologism “yesno” (“How a distracted spouse answers the question ‘Do I sound like my mother?’”), Jeff Contompasis’s conclusion by a future anthropologist that “there was once a divine being who walked the earth, performed miracles and was called Chuck Norris”; Selma Ellis’s “Jimbo Bond”; and Arnie Rosenthal’s “I Feel Petty” parody.

[Nerdy parenthetical; feel free to skip this paragraph: This week marked the debut of publishing the online Invite with The Post’s Ellipsis system, rather than the 11-year-old Methode system (which is still typesetting the Invite’s print page because of layout issues). Ellipsis isn’t naturally equipped to handle the formatting of poems and songs, since every time you hit Enter to end a line, it automatically generates a line of white space after that. Most systems have a simple “soft break” override in which you use Shift-Enter instead, but that doesn’t work in Ellipsis, and for now the solution is for me to mark all the poems and songs with tedious HTML codes. Except for some extra space around the beginnings and ends of the poems (and perhaps that’s easily fixed) I think it worked pretty well. Next week — when all the results are poems (it’s the obit poem contest) — will be the real test. And I hope I’ll be able to use the HTML in the Conversational as well, so as not to repeat the look of the songs shown four weeks ago.]

Last call! All-boostered Loser party this Saturday, 5-9 p.m.
Copying this one more time from my earlier post:

Right now, we’re at a super-cozy guest list of 23 people [I think we’re now up to 24], so there should be a minimum of crowding. Still, that’s plenty for singing and schmoozing, and it’ll be nice to chat with people and not have to rush from guest to guest. Okay, here:

If you didn’t get an email Evite to our Losers’ Post-Holiday Party — Saturday, Jan. 22, 5 to 9 p.m., in close-in Crystal City (Arlington), Va. — consider yourself personally invited anyway; anyone who reads The Style Conversational is Loserly enough for us. Here’s the link to the Evite, which you can respond to.

The accompanying message, which tells about the precautions we’re taking so we can get together after skipping last winter’s potluck/parody-fest, asks you to email me a picture of your boostered vaccine card, so we don’t have to ask at the party. It’s going to be a smaller crowd this year, for obvious reasons, and masks are entirely welcome. But it’s also in a spacious party room of an apartment building, rather than the usual cozy space of a Loser’s home.

I’ll be there, along with the Royal Consort, and always eager to meet new Losers and Invite fans, as well as to reconnect with longtime ones. Loser and pianist Steve Honley will be at the keyboard, and Invite Celebrity Duncan Stevens will be choosing the lineup of singalong parodies.

I also will bring some gewgaws that, for various reasons, don’t work as Style Invitational second prizes. If there’s a game — like the trivia game that Kyle Hendrickson led at our summer fest, the Flushies, last year — perhaps someone might win the Nose Condom.