Style Conversational Week 1473: What’s your sign? The Empress of The Style Invitational on this week’s new contest and results An honorable mention by Jonathan Kang in The Style Invitational's Week 672 contest in 2006; the photo is from the sign generator at atom.smasher.org. (Screen image/atom.smasher.org) By Pat Myers January 27, 2022 at 5:21 p.m. EST This week, for Style Invitational Week 1473, I’m giving another go to a contest that I repeatedly told people we couldn’t do because we already did it. But Loser Stephen Dudzik caught me at an “oh, all right” moment, perhaps engendered by a to-do contest list that was mostly for neologism contests, and we did one of those two weeks ago and three weeks ago. And so we repeat the Week 672 contest of 2006, originally suggested by “Fairly New but Already Far Gone Loser Kevin Dopart of Washington” [who’s gone on to amass 1,666 blots of ink], with the option of a barbecue-joint marquee in addition to the original road sign. The generator at atom.smasher.org now lets you go up to four lines, but otherwise it’s the same deal. As I say in the instructions, you don’t need to use the generator; you’re going to type or copy your text entries into the form as usual. But it’s handy because you won’t have to count characters; type into the lines and it’ll stop you at your 19th keystroke. The results of Week 672 hold up really well, perhaps because they’re not as topical as many Invites; traffic jams are not the stuff of nostalgia. But they do date from more than 15 years ago, and I’m optimistic that you’ll have lots of good new ideas. And the barbecue sign is an all-new opportunity. ADVERTISING Here’s the Week 672 ink, from July 2006. For Week 1473, I’ll probably run the results as sign-style multiple lines. But today below, to avoid putting in all sorts of coding to prevent excessive space between lines, I’m running them below just as lines of text. Report from Week 672 [blahblah] … Too frequently submitted for individual ink: “This Highway Paved With Good Intentions.” “This Sign Intentionally Left Blank” and “If You Lived Under This Bridge, You’d Be Homeless.” Fourth place: ENTERING NYC/ INCREASE SPEAKING SPEED (Phil Frankenfeld) Third place: REPORT PHONE-USING DRIVERS: CALL 202-555-3147 (Mike Connaghan) Second place, the winner of “The Worst Picture Ever Painted”: HONK IF YOU’RE AN IMPATIENT MORON (Art Grinath) [See the section below “The immortal Ugly Painting” for the story of this thing] And the Winner of the Inker: (Pictured on the sign-over-traffic) NOW ENTERING THE WILSON BRIDGE SCENIC REST AREA (Lisa Younce) [The Woodrow Wilson Bridge, Interstate 95 — a DRAWBRIDGE over the Potomac River between Maryland and Virginia — was a notorious and almost constant parking lot until it was doubled in size and its height raised in 2009.] And a Few More for the Road: Honorable Mentions (Subhead by Brendan Beary) REST STOP CLOSED / CROSS LEGS NEXT 23 MILES (Sue Lin Chong) SHOW US YOUR HEADLIGHTS! (Jay Shuck) IF YOU LIVED IN YOUR CAR YOU’D BE HOME BY NOW (“Elwood Fitzner,” now known to be Tim “Milo” Sauer) HAVE YOU BELTED YOUR KIDS? (Bird Waring) WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT LOOK IN YOUR REARVIEW MIRROR (Bruce Alter) BRAKE! BRAKE! NEVER MIND. MY BAD. (Kevin Mellema) END ROAD WORK. I MEAN IT. END IT NOW! (Lawrence McGuire) DO THIS DON’T DO THAT — CAN’T YOU READ? (Stephen Litterst; Stephen Dudzik) BRINKS TRUCK SPILL AHEAD/ EXPECT DELAYS (Barbara Turner) DETOUR AHEAD: HARBOR TUNNEL UNDER WATER (Marty McCullen) NON-TEXT PORTIONS OF THIS MESSAGE HAVE BEEN REMOVED (Jay Shuck) TUNE RADIO TO AM FOR POOR SOUND QUALITY (Russell Beland) KEEP KICKING YOUR BROTHER — DAD CANT TURN THE CAR AROUND (Jonathan L. Kang) HITTING STATE INSECT: $200 FINE (Mike Peck) PUT DOWN THE PHONE NOW AND NO ONE WILL GET HURT (Melissa Yorks) 3 CAR CRASH AHEAD/ 1 IS FLIPPED/ BEST VIEW LEFT LANE (Michael Platt) WASHINGTON 1 / NEW YORK 229 / WP: GLAVINE LP: ORTIZ (Dan Seidman) 2 RDS DIVERGE, SORRY YOU CANNOT TRAVEL BOTH (Brendan Beary) HEY YOU IN THE H2/ PULL OVER SO WE ALL CAN SMACK YOU (Michael Doughten) ALL LANES EXACT CHANGE/ TOLL 1.95 (David Kleinbard) HONK IF YOU’RE IN AN UNMARKED CAR (Lisa Younce) YOU IN THE PORSCHE! YOU GONNA LET THAT PRIUS PASS YOU? (Art Grinath) I’M JUST DOING THIS TILL I GET A GIG AS A BROADWAY MARQUEE (Brendan Beary) IN CASE OF RAPTURE/ HELP YOURSELF TO UNATTENDED VEHICLES (Alexander D. Mitchell IV) ORDER 8X10S NOW OF YOUR TRAFFIC VIOLATION PHOTO (Kevin Dopart) ROCK 1 MI / FOREIGN POLICY 2 MI / HARD PLACE 3 MI (Russell Beland) DAYS SINCE LAST SIGN-FALLING ACCIDENT: 02 (Mike Connaghan) EXITING DC/ KEEP FAR RIGHT NEXT 2500 MI (Kevin Dopart) RIGHT LANE ENDS 500 INCHES (Jon Reiser) SLOW TO 45 MPH WHEN DROPPING OFF PASSENGERS (Elden Carnahan) TIME: 417 PM — OR IT WAS WHEN WE SET THIS THING (Jay Shuck) ARE WE THERE YET? ARE WE THERE YET? ARE WE THERE YET? (Joseph Newman) YOUR WAIT TIME TILL NEXT ACCIDENT: APPROX 4 MINUTES (Brian Fox) GAS THIS EXIT — MUST BE PRE-APPROVED FOR FINANCING (Drew Bennett) COULD SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN TODAY’S ZIPPY? (Jay Shuck) CONSTRUCTION AHEAD A BIG DELAY EXPECTED MEN WRITING HAIKU (Tiffany Getz) [That one NEEDED three lines] THRU TRAFFIC KEEP LEFT/ HAHA! LIKE U R MOVING! I CRACK MYSELF UP! (Cheryl Davis) NO HUMMERS PERMITTED/ PLEASE BUCKLE UP (Art Grinath) ANY OF YOU KNOW HOW TO TURN OFF THE CAPS LOCK? (Kim Herman) Wow, they hold up well after 15 years. But I’m optimistic that we’ll have another bumper crop of them four weeks down the road. The immortal Ugly Painting You have to play your cards right when it comes to the very funniest entries for the week: If you’re the very funniest, you get a trophy. If you’re the third- or fourth-funniest, you get a Bob Staake-designed collectible tote bag or coffee mug. But if you place second this week, you get Derriere Repair skin balm. In Week 672, Art Grinath ended up with the painting pictured here. As I recounted in a story about Invite prizes as part of our 20th-anniversary retrospective in 2013: “Fred Dawson of Beltsville took the Empress aside at the 2005 Loser holiday party and whispered: ‘Would you like to see a really bad painting? I did it myself.’ For a long time after that, if you Googled ‘world’s ugliest painting,’ you would see the portrait of Red-Haired, White-Faced, Joker-Mouthed, Drumstick-Armed Girl that Fred donated as a prize. “The winner regifted the Ugly Painting [“Frankly, it scares my cats,” Art declared], then won it right back in a contest for what to do with the thing. It eventually went to someone who’d painted a mirror image. The Ugly Painting became an icon for the Loser community, featured on the Losers’ name tags at Loser brunches. And Loser Stephen Dudzik even made them into genuine U.S. postage stamps through Zazzle.com.” The mirror-image painter, however, wasn’t the winner of Week 686: It was, yes, again, Art Grinath. His entry: “I should get it because everyone thinks you’ll give it to me because that would be funny, but then people will think you would never resort to such a cheap and easy laugh, so they’ll be sure you won’t give it to me, and that’s when you’ll fool them.” But he readily let me send it to the other guy. Art — one of the very funniest people ever to enter The Style Invitational — is still Inviting, with 417 blots of ink, and 15 wins. (His name is pronounced grin-ATH.) That’s intertainment*: The results of the Week 1469 obit poetry contest *Non-inking headline by Tom Witte As it has every single year since I started running it in 2004, our obit poetry contest brought out a highly entertaining (and occasionally poignant) variety of tributes — and a few good-riddances — to last year’s ex-folks. (This week’s results.) There were, as always, too many good poems to include, but I did get 21 onto the print page and 39-count-em elegies online. It’s already the third win for Jeff Rackow, who still counts as a rookie almost two years after his debut, under Elden Carnahan’s arcane Loser Stats rules. Jeff was one of several Loserbards to pen a joint commemoration of four “Mary Tyler Moore” cast members to die in 2021: Ed Asner, Gavin McLeod, Cloris Leachman and, at the last moment, Betty White. The rest of this week’s Losers’ Circle is populated by Losers who’ve gotten veritable vats of Invite poetry ink: Mark Raffman, with his just-damning enough dig at G. Gordon Liddy; Melissa Balmain, who specializes in lesser-known decedents, on the inventor of Post-it Note adhesive; and the happily returning Scotsman-turned-Londoner Stephen Gold, alluding to the current deep-dip of Prince Andrew in his poem for Prince Philip. (And don’t miss the outstanding ink farther down the page for all of them: Mark’s on Bernie Madoff — which might have won the contest had I not worried that readers wouldn’t know the Yiddish terms; Melissa’s on a pioneer of Botox; and Stephen’s pricelessly racy ode to Larry Flynt.) What Doug Dug: Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood, who read the 21 entries that fit on the print page, sweetly — but not so helpfully — offered, “I liked 'em all!” During the entry period for this contest, Loserbard Brendan Beary posted a challenge to the Facebook group Style Invitational Devotees (join us now!): Write an obit poem in memory of the renowned Belgian-born mathematician Jacques Tits. Several Losers rose to the occasion, quite perkily. And not just in English! Here sits Jacques Tits Ta-ta (Andy Schotz) A mathematician, invited to a lecture At Duke on his famed algebraic conjecture, Heard muffled guffaws from the hall’s back row seats When he opened his talk with “My name eez Jacques Tits.” (Chris Doyle) Rest in peace, dear Dr. Tits Your surname gave the schoolboys fits Until they found out (it’s the pits) Your field was math, not naughty bits (Bill Dorner) The jokes about this mathematician’s name would never cease. Now that Dr. Tits is gone, would you please let him breast in peace?(Bill Dorner) His figures uplifting, sublime, In math he provided swell treats, His algebra fitting each time, And he’s now transcendental: Jacques Tits.(Ann Martin) Professor You-Know-Who has gone To meet his great reward, And now he rests forever in The bosom of the Lord.(Brendan Beary) Finally: In French! Plus a rhyming English translation! Jacques Tits est mort. il a décrit les “bâtiments de Tits” – Ils sont mathématiques, pas “bleus.” Son nom dit qu’il a poursuivi Les seins – peut-être, mais nous savons Qu’il est près du bon sein du Dieu. An approximate translation: Jacques Tits is dead. He had devised “Tits buildings” – not at all smutty, But quite geometrically odd. His name implies he also prized Breasts – perhaps so, but he Is now at the bosom of God. (Dean Alterman) Save the date for May 21! The Loser Post-Holiday party — understandably a smaller-scale gathering during these Omicronic times — proved to be a delightful event nevertheless, with about two dozen Losers and Devotees gathering in the large and cool party room (pool table!) of the apartment building of Loser Kathleen Delano. The parodies were sung socially distanced but heartily; thanks go especially to coordinator Duncan Stevens, pianists Steve Honley and Jesse Rifkin, and vocalists Duncan and Matt Monitto (who once again drove all the way down from Connecticut). Newbie Steve Bremner came down from Philadelphia for his first Loser event, while Early Years of the Invite Superstar Sarah Worcester decided to join us once again, because it was time to go somewhere, dang it. And we got — with witnesses — an invitation from Loser Steve Leifer: He and wife Jackie would like us to come back to his backyard patio in Potomac, Md., for our annual Flushies awards/potluck/songfest. Last year at Chez Leifer was one of the best ever. Save the date for Saturday afternoon, May 21.