The Style Invitational;
Takes a Powder


Week CIII (436): The contest resumes next week. This week, our last installment of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the All-Time Stars of The Style Invitational in 100-Word Autobiographies That Contain One (and Only One) Falsehood. The revised title for next week's column is by Chris Doyle of Burke.

I am the son of a preacher man, the brother of two preacher men, and the brother-in-law of another. "I only am escaped alone to tell thee" (Job 1:16). I have degrees in history and linguistics and have yet to use them professionally for a single day. I am married, and we live in a former boardinghouse in which Maj. Dwight Eisenhower got down with Mamie. I also own a half-restored Citroen taxi in which Gen. de Gaulle and the Czech president lunched on oysters and marmalade while fleeing Paris. I now rent out backhoes for a living, so to speak.

(Elden Carnahan, Laurel)

I am an engineer originally from the wee state of Rhode Island. My parents' vaudeville act semi-inspired my humorous bent. I am newly married and newly mortgaged and bear a vague resemblance to Anthony Newley. In the grand scheme of things my success in the Invitational and other humor contests doesn't amount to a hill of flatulence-inducing beans but it does keep me sane. Laughter is the best medicine and is much cheaper than Cipro. If I don't have children, then my Invitational entries will have to be my legacy to the world. Sorry, Mom!

(Stephen Dudzik, Olney)

Top Ten Things About Me

I appear regularly in one of D.C.'s two best newspapers.
My wife is a brilliant babe and regular reader of Style.
My house runs on renewable energy, and I don't mean my production of methane.
Two words: Rice cakes.
My mother thinks she'll live forever, and with my luck, she will.
I kick butt on AOL cribbage.
I had an 11-word job title at the Energy Department.
I'm a good loser but a bad winner.
What I lack in originality, I make up in self-referential pithiness.
There are two lies in this list.

(Joseph Romm, Washington)

I was born in Mississippi in the 1960s, which is the 1920s in rest-of-the-U.S. years. An early distaste for math led inexorably to my getting a PhD in economics. My hobbies are consulting (for MiCRA, where intelligent bosses should give employees large raises for plugging the firm in the newspaper) and making movies (the latest, "Revenge of the Dark Chocolate Bunny," is available on VHS for the low price of $ 19.99 plus tax). Did I mention I was an economist? Art Grinath is my nom de plume; most people know me as Alan Greenspan. (P.S. I'm the one in red.)

(Art Grinath, Silver Spring)