Week 734: Turnaround Time


It's known that any sapient guy
Likes the line that panties supply.

A couple of weeks back, the results of Week 728 marked the first
Invitational ink for Edmund Conti of Raleigh, a longtime wordplay
aficionado who says he had been "meaning to enter ever since the New
York Magazine Competition shut down." (That was seven years ago, Ed.
Glad you finally took the plunge.) Anyway, Ed has come up with a word
game called Bananagrams, in which he writes a rhyming couplet containing
two words that are anagrams of each other, and the reader has to figure
out what those words are. A one-right-answer contest doesn't work for
The Invitational, but that won't stop the Empress from exploiting it.

This week: Write a rhyming coupletcontaining two words that are
anagrams of each other. And don't make us guess what they are. The
example above is by Washington Post Magazine humor columnist Gene
Weingarten, opining on what is just about his favorite subject besides
toilet fill.

Winner gets the Inker, the official Style Invitational trophy. Second
place gets a copy of Ed Conti's "Quiblets,"
a brand-new collection
of terse verse, AND the inkworthily named "The Ed C. Scrolls," a little
book of poems on more spiritual themes ("Concerned about the
hereafter?Well, don't be.It will be there with joy and laughter.You
won't be.").

Other runners-up win their choice of a coveted Style Invitational Loser
T-shirt or yearned-for Loser Mug. 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, Oct.
15. Put "Week 734" 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 Nov. 3. No
purchase required for entry. Employees of The Washington Post, and their
immediate relatives, are not eligible for prizes. Pseudonymous entries
will be disqualified. The revised title for next week's contest is by
Tom Witte of Montgomery Village. This week's Honorable Mentions name is
by Kevin Dopart.

Report from Week 730, in which -- reflecting on the online effort to compile definitions in
limerick form (now past 44,000) for every word in
the Oxford English Dictionary -- we asked for "activities that make
entering The Style Invitational seem like a constructive use of one's
time."

A handful of Losers didn't notice the context and thought we
wanted them to explain why entering The Invitational IS a constructive
use of one's time, though 99 percent of the entrants took it as we meant
it: to describe even bigger wastes of time than entering The Invite.
Among the former group, 32-time Loser Lawrence McGuire of Waldorf swears
that "a twenty-something thin blonde admirer" heard him called by his
name in the local library, and almost came up to introduce herself, but
shyly vanished before she summoned the courage. Ah, yes, that
oh-so-troublesome Loser groupie problem.

4. Counting the stairs on the escalator. (Russell Beland,
Springfield)

3. Becoming the world's leading authority on a person chosen at random
from the Akron, Ohio, phone book. (Jeff Brechlin,
Eagan, Minn.)

2. the winner of the Float'n Firefly toothbrush with the flashing
red light:Writing letters to the editor about grammatical mistakes in
the classified ads. (John O'Byrne, Dublin)

And the Winner of the Inker

Metrobus-spotting. (Anne Paris, Arlington)

More From the Fritterati

Playing Poor Man's Pac-Man: Type a row of periods, then hold down
Backspace and watch that cursor gobble 'em all up. You win every time!
(Jay Shuck, Minneapolis)

Martin van Buren-bashing. (Randy Lee, Burke)

Rotating the air in your tires. (Bill Spencer, Baltimore)

Using a flight simulator program to visit all the airports in the world
in alphabetical order by airport code. (Michael Turniansky,
Pikesville, Md., currently virtually en route from AAE [Les Salines
airport, Algeria] to AAF [Apalachicola, Fla.])

Alphabetizing your days-of-the-week underwear. (Russell Beland)

Counting the days since Christmas. (David Moss, Arlington)

Filming a shot-by-shot re-creation of every episode of "The Sonny and
Cher Comedy Hour," using Pez dispensers for the performers. (Andrew
Hoenig, Rockville)

Compiling the Klingon dictionary entirely in double-dactyl format.
(Kevin Dopart, Washington)

Reenacting the Civil War draft riots. (Larry Yungk, Arlington)

Doing a study examining whether fingertip width is correlated with
nostril size in the higher vertebrates. (Peter Metrinko,
Chantilly)

Buying the Gonzales2012.com domain name. (Chuck Koelbel, Houston)

Entering a 12-step program for dodecaphobia
. (Russ Taylor,
Vienna)

Trying to pay for that item advertised for .99 cents with a penny.
(Paul VerNooy, Hockessin, Del.)

Setting the Guinness recordfor time spent reading the Guinness Book
of World Records. (Russell Beland)

Swapping perfectly healthy kidneys with your identical twin. (Russell
Beland)

Drawing 500 tiny circles on a piece of paper, then saying "Pop" as you
press each circle with your thumb. (Jay Shuck)

Collecting a napkin from every restaurant you visit, but not labeling
them. (Martin Bancroft, Rochester, N.Y.)

Stopping the DVD, frame by frame, to verify that there really are 101
Dalmatians. (Russell Beland)

Bootlegging audio recordings of "live" Britney Spearsconcerts.
(Dan Colilla, Pittsburgh)

Digging a canal across the narrow part of Oahu. (Russell Beland)

Well, I'm actually pretty proud of the time I perfectly reconstructed,
using wood glue and tweezers, a shattered pecan shell whose pieces were
mixed with bits of other pecan shells, so I guess this doesn't qualify.
(Michael Peck, Alexandria)

Setting up a logbook in your bathroom to verify that the toilet bowl
cleaner really works for 1,000 flushes. (Russell Beland)

Cornrowing your eyebrows. (Brendan Beary, Great Mills)

Finally learning how to program my Commodore 64
. (Randy Lee)

Weighing yourself before and after restroom visits, and plotting the
difference on a graph. (Martin Bancroft)

Foreplay -- Kobe Bryant. (Kevin Dopart)

Reading 10,000 fictional racehorse names and carefully evaluating each
one based on humor and originality. (Jay Shuck)

Next Week: Doo Process, or Hoot Cuisine