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Style Conversational Week 1361: The old (crystal) ball game

The Empress of The Style Invitational looks at last year’s ‘Year in Preview’ predictions -- and she has some party news

December 5, 2019 at 4:00 p.m. EST
All the way over and out: Beto O'Rourke — pictured at the far right during a debate in July — didn't turn out to be the Loser-Turned-Nominee that our Week 1311 entry predicted. (Paul Sancya/AP)

As we kick off (as in begin, not die) our at least annualish Year in Preview contest, Style Invitational Week 1361, I thought I’d check on last year’s inking predictions — remember, they are jokes — and see if any of them turned out to have a wee bit of foresight.

Here are a few prog“no”stications from Week 1311 (full list of results here):

Nov. 6: Beto O’Rourke loses election for dogcatcher, but his rousing concession speech vaults him to the lead in Democratic presidential primaries. (John Hutchins’s third-place winner) A year ago, O’Rourke was the Democrats’ glamour boy, being touted as the Heir to Obama even though his most famous political achievement had been losing to Ted Cruz in their Texas Senate race. Alas, O’Rourke bumbled in the early debates, ended up in the outside lanes, and dropped out of the presidential race Nov. 1. Perhaps nominations are still open for dogcatcher.

Sept. 22: The National Council of Teachers of English disbands after a violent battle over inserting a comma into MeToo. (Ira Allen’s Lose Cannon winner) Commas and apostrophes continue to disappear, thanks especially to the hassle of typing punctuation on phones, and because you can’t use them in hashtags. (Note in Gary Crockett’s song parody today that The Post has decided to use “OK boomer” rather than “okay, boomer,” which would be its standard spelling and comma.) I personally will continue forever to use a comma when addressing a person by name (“Hi, Joe”) even as it begins to make me seem like a language-fossil. It’ll be my brand.

Jan. 20: Rudy Giuliani declares that Trump has been totally vindicated and condemns Robert Mueller for “not even trying to find the criminal, Individual 1.” (Frank Osen) Can’t blame Frank for lacking the imagination to guess what Rudy would really end up doing.

March 21: In a last-minute deal, the EU trades the UK and a country to be named later for Bryce Harper. (Kevin Dopart) Of course, the UK still can’t figure out how to leave the EU, and Bryce Harper never got traded, but left the Nationals for the Phillies and $330 million — and got to watch the World Series on TV.

April 14: The NRA announces, proactively, that there will be nothing that could have been done. (Art Grinath) Well, at least we’re past our NRA-induced legislative paralysis on gun control. Ha ha no. But you can’t send this entry again unless you substantially change it.

April 15: Ruth Bader Ginsburg wins the Boston Marathon, throws her lace collar into the air in celebration. (Lynne Larkin) I worry about a jinx from even reprinting this.

June 2: Jimmy Carter announces he’ll seek second term as president; he immediately jumps to top of the polls. (Jon Ketzner) Ditto.

Dec. 1: Melania Trump unveils this year’s White House holiday decorations, which feature a festive motif based on the Spanish Inquisition. (Frank Osen) Last year’s color scheme could be described as Hemorrhage Red; this year’s, perhaps, could be called Rally White.

July 25: Ben and Jerry’s finds unprecedented success in Massachusetts, New York and California with its new flavor, Peach Mint. (Ken Gallant) Maybe it never made it onto Ben and Jerry’s menu, but the peach-mint pun continues to pop up with tiresome regularity in Style Invitational entries. See, people, we did that one already.

Anyway, there’s a lot to imagine for 2020, and we might as well get our laughs in beforehand. Note that you should include a date on your entry only if it’s relevant to the event you’re “predicting”; I’ll fill in the date more or less at random otherwise (if I use dates at all). Also note that last year’s entries were in present tense. We’ll probably do that again.

This just in! Loser Post-Holiday Party, Saturday, Jan. 11

Watch your email for an Evite — or just read this column next week — about details of our annual Losers’ Post-Holiday Party, once again at the lovely, Metro-convenient house of Losers Steve Langer and Allison Fultz, who despite being wildly overeducated, ridiculously accomplished professionals, seem to think it’s just dandy to have 50 or 60 Style Invitational Losers and Various Hangers-On swarm through their house while dripping potluck dinner, and make their cat start to howl pitifully upstairs by singing song parodies en masse in their living room.

Really, it’s a great way to Meet the Losers, hit on their spouses, bitch at the ink-robbing Empress, etc. Once again, we’re lucky to have Loser Steve Honley as piano accompanist — and we’ll certainly have some good new material to sing. Out-of-town folks, I understand that there are a few other attractions in Washington, D.C., that might interest you were you to make a tourist weekend out of it.

Nerds and Music*: The Parodies of Week 1357

*Non-inking headline by Chris Doyle

We had run a parody contest — with the exceedingly broad them of “modern woes” — only four months ago. But not one of those 20-odd songs mentioned Ukraine. Say what you will about this whole mess, but it sure has given us a lot of new material. And I got a deluge of it for Week 1357. Easily more than half of the songs — I don’t have an exact count, but I heard from 161 different people, many of whom wrote multiple entries — concerned Ukraine and/or impeachment hearings. (Well, we also had a World Series and a departing panda.)

As I explain in the intro to this week’s results, I had so many fine entries that wouldn’t work on the print page — the song was too obscure and needed a link to the melody, or it was a video — that I decided to name a winner and three runners-up both for songs that are running on the print page (in the Arts&Style section in the Sunday Post) and for songs being published only online. This allowed First Offender Donna Saady to choose between a Grossery Bag and a Loser Mug for her parody of “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid,” a fairly deep cut from Stephen Sondheim’s “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” And for parodist/performers Sandy and Richard Riccardi to make it into the Losers’ Circle with a new addition to their video parody collection.

The remaining members of both Losers’ Circles this week are all repeatedly decorated Loserbards, with lots of parody ink from over the years. I was especially thrilled to see the return to Loserdom of super-parodist Nan Reiner, who’s been dealing with health issues for quite a while. As usual, Nan makes videos of herself singing the parodies to karaoke-type accompaniment, and her voice sounds great; check out the ones for her two inking entries this week, and YouTube might well offer you some of the others.

Unfortunately, there were easily another 19 songs — oh, more than that — that I’d hoped to run before I realized that the column would have been way, way too long. Feel free to share your favorite “noink” parody (one at a time) in the Style Invitational Devotees Facebook group. That won’t disqualify you from also reentering it in one of our upcoming retrospective contests, in which you get another chance at any of the contests from the past year.

What Doug Dug: Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood read the print version yesterday and, after grave consideration, declared, “They’re all good!” With the exclamation point and everything. Doug also got a kick out of Malcolm Fleschner’s sample 2020 event of Trump giving the State of the Union with a little Lindsey Graham curled up in his lap.

Last call for North-of-the-Beltway types: Loser brunch Dec. 8 in Columbia

I can’t make this one, but I’m sorry I can’t try out the highly recommended pan-Asian restaurant Asian Palace in Columbia, Md., for this month’s Loser brunch. RSVP to Elden Carnahan at NRARS.org; click on “Our Social Engorgements.”

And watch for the Evite! If you’re not regularly in touch with me and want to make sure you’re on my mailing list, write me at pat.myers@washpost.com