Week 88: Give Us Some Good Newts.


This Week's Contest: Come up with ways Washington is going to be different now that Republicans have ascended to power. First-prize winner gets a fabulous, never-opened 1983 Groucho Marx doll by Efanbee, a value of $ 50. Runners-up, as always, get the coveted Style Invitational losers' T-shirts. Honorable mentions get the mildly sought-after Style Invitational bumper stickers. Winners will be selected on the basis of humor and originality. Mail your entries to the Style Invitational, Week 88, The Washington Post, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071, fax them to 202-334-4312 or submit them via the Internet to this address: losers@access.digex.net. Entries must be received on or before Monday, Nov. 28. Please include your address and phone number. Winners will be announced in three weeks. Editors reserve the right to alter entries for taste, appropriateness or humor. No purchase necessary. Employees of The Washington Post and their immediate families are not eligible for prizes.

Report from Week 85, in which we asked you to come up with new urban myths.

A brief thank you to Kym Helbig, a graduate student in Bowling Green, Ky., who cheerfully informs us that this entire contest was based on a misconception and is therefore invalid. Technically, Kym says, these are not urban myths at all, but urban legends, myths being more like folklore. Right you are, Kym. Kym wins a burning bag of poop on her doorstep.

Fourth Runner-Up: The rifle that was found at the Texas School Book Depository was the same one that killed Old Yeller. (Chuck Smith, Woodbridge)

Third Runner-Up: Early in this century, workers at meatpacking plants regularly fell into rendering vats and became a frequent ingredient of premium sausage. With OSHA safeguards now in place, it doesn't happen anymore, but the public has grown so demanding of the taste that company officials need to kidnap vagrants and hitchhikers and insert them manually. (Elden Carnahan, Laurel)

Second Runner-Up: The smoke detector industry is covering up research that shows more people are killed every year falling from ladders and stepstools while trying to replace smoke detector batteries than are killed in house fires. (Brian Easter, Centreville)

First Runner-Up: There really is a government office where a million monkeys sit banging away at typewriters. It has been going on for 65 years, and already the output has resulted in one Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and a hit screenplay. (J. Calvin Smith, Laurel)

And the winner of the life-size female clothing-store mannequin:

The bloody glove has six fingers. (Ben Lea, Lexington, N.C.)

Honorable Mentions:

The Avon Corp. pays a secret $ 1 million annual advertising fee to Metro for using the "ding-dong" sound every time a subway train is about to depart. (Paul Styrene, Olney)

The reason expensive delicacies usually "taste like chicken" is that they really are chicken. Frog legs, rattlesnake, sweetbreads etc. are actually totally inedible, and fancy restaurants have been fleecing us for decades. (Earl Gilbert, La Plata)

Last Halloweeen, some kid was out trick-or-treating in a ghoul costume with great fake latex wounds when he was hit by a car. Doctors spent so much time trying to sew up the phony wounds that the kid died on the operating table. (Thomas A. Logan, Alexandria)

While many conspiracy theorists have seen the so-called "Zapruder film" of the Kennedy assassination, Dallas city officials hastily destroyed the only known print of the "Zuckerman film," a Super 8 movie that clearly shows President Kennedy being struck by a rock flung from the blades of a Dallas Public Works Department lawn mower trimming the grassy knoll. (David Geonfriddo, Washington)

Cool "Disco" Dan is really Dan Quayle. (Wendell Wagner, Greenbelt)

Coca-Cola has been gradually altering its formula. The Classic Coke we are now drinking is identical to the New Coke we rejected several years ago. We're just accustomed to it now. (Earl Gilbert, La Plata)

The Wonderbra provides so much supportthat it causes breasts to atrophy, like a leg in a cast, within months. (Ken Krattenmaker, Landover Hills)

Johns Hopkins University is willing to pay $ 25,000 to anyone willing to grow a goiter. (Sarah Worcester, Bowie)

Tom Hanks did "Forrest Gump" because he suffered brain damage in an auto accident and he was really speaking and acting that way. (Mary Whittington, Washington)

The comics "Blondie" and "The Family Circus" were secretly taken over by the Japanese years ago. The cartoons are actually still very funny, but lose something when translated into English. (Russ Beland, Springfield)

A renegade assistant sculptor working on Mount Rushmore carved out a giant booger in Teddy Roosevelt's nostril. It's still there. (Mike Thring, Leesburg)

And Last:

Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley are very much in love. (Daniel Riley, Woodbridge)