(“At Our Wits’ Den” was a non-inking headline by Chris Doyle in the Week 1337 anagram contest.)
And remember that both those contests are still running until Monday night, July 22. Lay 'em on me. wapo.st/invite1339 for the parodies; wapo.st/invite1340 for the name-changing.
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When it came to writing up the results of Week 1337 this week, I waffled on how much I should signal or explain the anagrams within the punchlines of the inking riddles. Right away I ruled out stating the anagram at the end of the entry; it’s too heavy-handed, as well as totally unnecessary most of the time. For the same reason, I also nixed my first plan, which was to boldface only the word or phrase that was the anagram: After trying that out yesterday on a few entries, I realized that it was hammering the reader over the head with THIS IS THE JOKE — something that might have been necessary for a 12-year-old reader of Mad Magazine, but embarrassing and joke-killing for us.
Part of the challenge of the contest was to phrase the sentence so that the reader would figure out the anagram. One was was to use a common and unmistakable phrase, name or title, so that the reader knew which word’s letters had been rearranged: “I flee your pain” from newbie Brett Dimaio, for example, or “Et tu, tuber?” (Jeff Contompasis had the best wording of several who sent that line) or the tack of adding “Monument” to what might not have been immediately apparent anagrams of “Washington.” Other methods included adding hints in the question, such as mentioning the character of Marty McFly returning for the Brexit-themed movie “Back to the EU Turf.” (Nice one, Jon Gearhart.)
But still, sometimes the anagrams just don’t jump out at you — and yes, I did pass over some entries because I couldn’t figure them out after a few seconds of trying; they didn’t seem to include any hints in the context of the joke. (So that’s why you didn’t get ink this week: stupid judge.) And I wouldn’t be surprised if a few of this week’s inking entries might trip up one reader or another. Here’s how I interpreted them:
Q. What is Bill de Blasio sick of being called by Big Apple haters? A. Mayor of Yer Icky Town. (Melissa Balmain) (New York City)
Q. How does the North Korean dictator refer to the American president and first lady? A. Dotard ’n’ Plum. (Mark Raffman) (Donald Trump)
Q. I hear that our president is going to open a hotel in Haiti that’s the opposite of his one in D.C. What’s he going to call it? A. Trump Latrine Nation. (Chris Damm) (Trump International) (Online I linked to a page with the hotel’s name on it; I’m hoping that our print readers, almost all of them local, are familiar with the name.)
Q. When it turns out to be too boring to call it “March Madness,” what would be a better name for a humdrum NCAA tournament? A. Bleak Blast. (Drew Bennett) (Basketball)
Q. What did Jeff Sessions do when he resigned from the Trump administration? A. He rescued himself. (Jesse Frankovich) (Recused)
Q. What iconic Wyoming locale does the administration want to open up for oil drilling? A. Ye-Ton-o’-Wells National Park (Mark Raffman) (Yellowstone)
I vacillated over whether the question needed to spell out the name of the song “Old Town Road” for Bill Dorner’s Download rot. Online, I put in a link to YouTube; our print readers who’ve missed out on hearing (or hearing about) the song that’s been No. 1 on the Billboard chart for 15 straight weeks — one more week at the top and it’ll tie the record — can edify themselves over here.
As a member of the Style Invitational Hall of Fame, with more than 600 blots of Invite ink to his credit, Mark Raffman has distinguished himself in almost every type of contest. But I hadn’t thought of Mark as one of our master anagrammers. Well, he is. This week Mark scores six blots of ink, including the first-place Lose Cannon — his twentieth Invite win — and looking at this week’s shortlist, I see several Raffmanagrams that I was planning to use before I reached 40 other entries. (There’s always that retrospective contest at the end of the year . . .)
Melissa Balmain tells me that she might let her husband Bill FitzPatrick — a philosophy professor with some Invite ink himself — play with her second-prize Alexander the Great “action figure,” given that Bill’s excited about anyone who studied with Aristotle. Ira Allen is just back from the hospital after being awarded a big blood clot in his lung a few days ago — a tad more serious than the “irritable elbow syndrome” that wins him his choice of a Loser Mug or Grossery Bag. And alone among this week’s “above the fold” Losers, it’s the first trip to the Losers’ Circle — and only the second blot of ink at all — for Brett Dimaio of Cumberland, Md., the Western Maryland mountain town where he learned about the Invite from Loser Jon Ketzner. Sure, go tell all our secrets, Jon.
Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood is still on vacation, so we’ll never know what he Dug this week. I’m sure he was clicking on Refresh all morning as he waited for the Invite to post, because what else does anyone do on vacation?
A couple of unprintables, each labeled “Conversational only” by their authors:
Q. What other part of her anatomy did Prince Charles imagine exploring? A. Camilla Parker’s Bowel. (Chris Doyle)
Q: Whose tournament shot to the top of the ESPN ratings? A: The Pro Blowers Association. (Jeff Contompasis)
The overlap dance: The Week 1341 portmanteau contest
So many of the words created our dozens of neologism contests over the decades are portmanteau words, the combination of two words. But we’ve had just a few contests specifically for them.
Here’s a link to the results of Week 476 (scroll down past the week’s new contest), from 2002, which include three of the examples for this week’s contest, Week 1341. And also to the results of Week 769 in 2008.
Style Invitational Devotee Sarah Norland Park had suggested a contest for a specific kind of portmanteau: combining two overlapping compound words, so that the result would incorporate three consecutive short words; she cited Mel Loftus’s “courtshipwreck” for a failed relationship. (Another would be Rick Haynes’s “Treadmillstone: The unused home gym that keeps staring at you,” winner of Week 769.) I was going to go with that restriction until I realized that almost none of our inking portmanteaux were of such construction, even though they were certainly allowed.
In fact, even though all in of this week’s examples, both words of the portmanteau appear in full — Parmesan/sand, frigid/idiot, estrogen/geniality — they don’t absolutely have to; for instance, see this one by Kevin Dopart: “Diarrhetoric: A speech that runs and runs.” That’s okay. What’s important is that both words must be easy for the reader to identify.
Dine with the Losers . . . and applaud for them: August and September events
Since for various reasons this year’s Loserfest vacation trip didn’t come together this month, we’ll instead go to plain ol’ Loser Brunch No. 221, this time at the Aug. 18 Sunday buffet at Brions Grill, a family eatery in suburban Fairfax. (RSVP to Elden Carnahan at NRARS.org, the Losers’ website; click on “Our Social Engorgements.”
And in a bigger deal, we ought to get a good Loser contingent to head up to Germano’s restaurant and cabaret in Baltimore’s Little Italy district for a show on Friday evening, Sept. 20, by Loser Sandy Riccardi and her husband Richard, who have a large and devoted following for their hilarious political (and other) parody videos and club performances. (Here’s one about the president’s addled comments this past July 4, “The Forgettysburg Address.”) The Riccardis, who are based in California but are relocating in Asheville, N.C., played Germano’s last year as well — on the same day as the Flushies, the Losers’ big award event. So we have this second chance. Sandy is active in the Style Invitational Devotees Facebook group and says she’d love to meet her fellow Losers. And I’m hoping that she’s entering Week 1339.
