Week 714: Amalgamated Steal


Grey Poupon and Dockers are expected to become PouponPants.

Polygram Records, Warner Bros. and Zesta Crackers join forces and become
Poly Warner Cracker.

Zippo Manufacturing, Audi Motors, Dofasco and Dakota Mining will merge
and become ZipAudiDoDa.

Aren't those combinations marvelous? Well, they've been marveled about
extensively in print, not to mention online, since at least 1998.
According to a Nexis search, a list of these and other clever corporate
mergers has been printed 47 times in major publications. Sometimes
they're credited to the readers who sent them in. Sometimes they're
credited to the other newspaper writer who printed them. A few times
they're called anonymous. Quite often they're not credited at all,
leaving the reader to assume they were original. Okay, clever person who
wrote these, here's your chance: Step up and be celebrated. And it would
be really, really!!! stupid if you lied, you know?

For the rest of you: Merge two or more company or product names into a
new, ORIGINAL company or product. You may want to explain what it does or
makes, if that makes it funnier.

Winner gets the Inker, the official Style Invitational trophy. First
runner-up gets "The Big Book of Duh!: A Bathroom Book," which features
lots of dumb things people say and do. The Empress will sign it so that
its resale value will plummet.

Other runners-up win a coveted Style Invitational Loser T-shirt.
Honorable Mentions (or whatever they're called that week) get one of the
lusted-after Style Invitational Magnets. One prize per entrant per week.
Send your entries by e-mail to losers@washpost.com or by fax to
202-334-4312. Deadline is Monday, May 28. Put "Week 714" in the subject
line of your e-mail, or it risks being ignored as spam. Include your
name, postal address and phone number with your entry. Contests are
judged on the basis of humor and originality. All entries become the
property of The Washington Post. Entries may be edited for taste or
content. Results will be published June 17. No purchase required for
entry. Employees of The Washington Post, and their immediate relatives,
are not eligible for prizes. Pseudonymous entries will be disqualified.
This week's contest was suggested by Kevin Dopart, who also supplied this
week's Honorable Mentions name. The revised title for next week's contest
is by Tom Witte of Montgomery Village.

Report From Week 710, our third photo contest, in which we asked for funny photos involving
kitchen utensils and household gadgets. This contest is just about the
opposite of our annual horse names contest, in that we got, well, pretty
much the opposite of 10,000 entries. Which matters not at all. Because we
got these:

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Next Week: Join Now! or Hitching Posts