Bob Staake has been getting into Full Loser Mode lately! Usually, over the course of our 18-plus years working together to come up with a Style Invitational cartoon virtually every week, I’ll send Bob some examples for the next contest, and he’ll usually choose one or two to sketch up, and then I’ll choose something or we’ll first haggle a bit. But over the past few weeks, Bob has repeatedly outplayed my own efforts, trying out the contest himself and sending me back up to a dozen ideas of his own (some, alas, unprintable or at least uncartoonable). For Week 1478 he composed his own poem using the required bank of the 1,000 most common words.