Believe it or not, that headline up there is the one I used for Style Invitational Week 546, Feb. 22, 2004. Whether Bob Staake was inspired by my headline or I was inspired by Bob’s illustration (or it was just a coincidence) is lost to history. I thought better of using it again this week, for our repeat of the contest in Week 1505 (deadline Sept. 19). Clearly, back then — in just my 11th Invite as Empress (I’m now about 30 weeks away from my 1,000th) — I wanted to assure readers and contestants that I could be just as risque and crude as my predecessor, the Czar. I was probably pretty proud of myself for that headline.
And then there’s the cartoon — one I wouldn’t have gone with now. Granted, it’s not lewd; the woman’s getting a breast reduction procedure at the Hilly/Flat clinic, not doing a striptease. Even the “party of two” is amusing. But the boobs didn’t have to be half-naked. But my real problem with it now is that in the years since 2004 — or really, it’s been just the past few years — the general humor of making fun of people’s bodies has become really distasteful to many readers. Especially in a cartoon. (The joke itself is perfectly fine.)
Anyway, we’re giving another go to a contest firmly in the Invite tradition of pairing two elements (or stringing together several) with wordplay, something we regularly do with racehorse names, congressional names, other people’s names, businesses, animals, several etcs. It’s shorter-form than most of them, since it doesn’t demand a line of description (though this isn’t forbidden).
Perhaps the closest similarity is with our “Joint Legislation” contest, in which you combine the names of two or more new members of Congress to “sponsor” a bill reflecting their names, like last year’s runner-up “Moore-Greene-Salazar-Good Act” that mandates fresh leafy veggies to school lunch programs. (We’ll be back with that one in January at the start of the 118th Congress.) But because so many people’s names have to be, uh, flexibly interpreted to sound like common words, Joint Legislation sometimes even needs explainers. I don’t plan to translate the entries for Week 1505, given the thousands upon thousands of U.S. and Canadian place names available.
In 2004, at least for me, it wasn’t yet second nature to check every name with a quick Googling. This time, I don’t care how you find the town name, but if it’s not online with something identifying it as a town (rather than, say, a housing subdivision, or part of a longer name) I don’t want to count it. (Be sure to say what state/province it’s in, or I won’t be able to check it! I couldn’t find “Hilly,” for example, for the cartoon.) You well might find it most efficient to find an actual atlas book, which would have indexes you could quickly eyeball. I’ve heard that some libraries still stock these relics.
In 2004, to convey what we were doing, I included the state name in parentheses after each name, as I did in the first example today: The Keokuk (Iowa)-Chappaqua (N.Y.) Conference on Jazz Drumming Sounds. I made an exception when several names were strung together, as in Chris Doyle’s “Enid-Laredo-Yoder-Aldine (Okla., Tex., Wyo., Tex.) National Palindrome Competition.”
This time, though, we’re going to move those little abbreviations to the end of the line, after the joke. And as I share below some of the results of Week 546 (complete list here; scroll past that week’s new contest), I’ll move the IDs there as well. (As I note in this week’s entry form: “You can either spell out the state names or use an abbreviation, since The Post has its own style for abbreviations and I’ll probably have to change them anyway; just don’t use, say, ‘AR’ to mean Arizona since that’s the postal abbreviation for Arkansas (AZ is Arizona).”)
Third runner-up: The Rocky-Mountain-Oyster Masquerade Ball (Okla, N.D., Va.) (Chris Doyle)
Second runner-up: The Kissimmee-Ona-Butts Career Development Center (Fla., Ore., Mo.) (Jeff Nadler)
First runner-up: The Watton-Hellam-Ida-Ware “Dress for Success” Seminar (Mich., Pa., Okla., Mass.) (Brendan Beary)
And the winner of the Inker: The Pierce-Naples-Garner-Hurt-Lake-Kell-Venice-Yankton Festival of Body Decoration (Fla., Fla., N.C., Va., Miss., Ill., Calif., S.D.) (Dudley Thompson) (Did that one need the explainer? “Pierced nipple’s gonna hurt like hell when it’s yanked on.”)
Honorable Mentions:
The Enid-Laredo-Yoder-Aldine National Palindrome Competition (Okla., Tex., Wyo., Tex.)(Chris Doyle)
The Mystic-Chickasaw-Helper Magicians’ Assistants’ Conference (Conn., Ala., Utah) (Seth Brown)
Islip, Crane Neck & Sioux City Personal Injury Associates (N.Y., N.Y., Iowa) (Jeff Brechlin) [I wanted to use this one for this week’s example, but couldn’t quickly find a town named Crane Neck]
The Minnehaha-Van Clown Car Factory (Wash., W.Va.) (Bruce W. Alter)
The Tightwad-Bosses-Skidoo-Withee-Golden-Parachute Commission on Executive Pay (Mo., Va., Calif., Wash., Miss., Colo.) (Chris Doyle)
The Hartselle-Gypsum Convention of Used-Car Salesmen (Ala., Colo.) (Chuck Smith) [While the term had been in use quite innocently for ages, we no longer use the term “gyp” to mean cheat a customer, given its reference to Gypsies, or Roma people of Europe, any more than we would use “jew” to mean to defraud, a use still allowed in Scrabble as an uncapitalized word but struck from the Merriam-Webster definition.]
The Gurley-Callender-Onda-Wall Auto Shop (Neb., Calif., Ark., Tex.) (Brendan Beary)
The Maxwell-Silver-Hammer Center for Pataphysical Science (Calif., Tex., S.D.) (Carole Lyons)
The Feather Falls-Rock Falls Galileo Museum (Calif., Ill.) (Jerome Alfred)
The Smart-Ware-Coats-Wilder-Dumfries School of Dressing for the Elements (Va., Utah, N.C., Minn., Va.) (Brendan Beary)
The Lay-Dees-Canby-All-Man Gender Modification Center (Scott Campisi) (Colo., Ill., Calif., Mo., W.Va.) [Here’s another thing we wouldn’t be doing in 2022]
The Bland-Normal-Plainville-Blandford Super Duper Wacky Fun Festival (Seth Brown) (Mo., Ill., Conn., Mass.)
The Accident-Talley-Box Elder-Leeman Investigation Into Premature Burial (Md., Ark., S.D., Wis.) (Elden Carnahan)
The Whypo-Nott-Rich Conference on Income Inequities (N.M., Ky., Ky.) (Elden Carnahan)
The Quigley-Robbins-Tudor-Bat Cave Emergency Response Team (La., N.C., Calif., N.C.) (Dudley Thompson)
The Hurd-Trudy-Grapevine Center for Rumor Control (N.D., Ga., Ky.) (Brendan Beary)
The White City-Gunn City Republican Convention (Fla., Mo.) (Seth Brown) [Some things don’t change.]
The Jerry-Springerville Planned Community for Transgendered Crack Addicts Who Have Sex With Extraterrestrials (N.C., Ariz.) (Brendan Beary)
And Last: The Complete-Entry-Not-Worth-Effort Something Something (Miss., W.Va., Mo., Ga., Pa.) (Mark Hagenau)
And Really Last: The Athol-Folks Bugs Bunny Fan Club (Mass., Ga.)
Help unwanted*: The good (not) deeds of Week 1501
*Non-inking headline submitted by Chris Doyle, Jesse Frankovich and Beverley Sharp
Our Week 1501 contest for misguidedly “helpful” acts — inspired by (translation: stolen from) a Reddit thread with the same type of joke — was essentially a pet-peeve contest with a twist: a clueless narrator blithely performing said peeve. The best of the 1,100 entries (35 online, 26 in print) went beyond the stock irritants with fresh oh-noooo ideas of comically horrible cluelessness/creepiness, or especially entertaining ways of phrasing the reliables.
Those reliables, to no surprise (and this was my apprehension about the contest), appeared by the dozen, in fairly similar ways: taking two parking spaces, driving slowly in the left lane, talking rudely on one’s phone in someone else’s presence, explaining things in the movie theater, fertilizing the neighbor’s lawn with one’s dog. And, regrettably canceling out one another, something like “I know Joe would be overwhelmed with clutter in the Oval Office, so I moved out some boxes and am keeping them here …”
The Clowning Achievement goes, for the fourth time already, to Coleman Glenn, our Rookie of the Year just last year. Coleman found the Invite from some fellow poets (he’s excellent in both light verse and the weightier stuff) and turned out to be hilarious in every Invite format. His winning entry today spills out so smoothly to the surprise at the end, much like a visual joke whose punchline isn’t revealed till you scroll down an inch on your phone:
When I see tourist couples trying to take selfies, I always offer to take the photo for them because I have really long arms and they probably enjoy having a local in the picture.
Congratulations also to Coleman and his wife, Anne Grace — whom we also met when they came down from the Philadelphia area this past May for the Flushie Awards: They’re expecting their fifth child.
Among the runners-up, Sam Mertens is the only Usual Suspect in the Losers’ Circle (he was third last week, too), landing there with his method of always following the rule in the express checkout: breaking his full cart into separate purchases of 12 items each. But the other two are rarer sightings: May Jampathom, who’s accumulated 27 blots of ink over more than a decade, wins the silly socks with this helpful tip: “Nobody likes being told in public that their zipper’s down, so I just walk up and discreetly zip it back up for them.” And Paul Brown, husband of fellow Loser Lori Lipman Brown, scores his choice of Loser Mug or Grossery bag with one of the week’s ewwwiest entries: “For their birthdays, I give my grandchildren underwear I’d saved from when I was their age, so they can treasure the link between our generations.”
What Pleased Ponch: After Ace Copy Editor Ponch Garcia cited yet another week of faves all from the honorable mentions, I finally asked him last night: “I’ve noticed that you never choose any of the four top winners. Do you think it might just take you more than four jokes to get into the swing, or do they just never move you?”
Ponch: “Oh, I just figured the those were a given.”
So starting next week, if he doesn’t mention the winner or any runners-up, he really didn’t love them. But this week, here are Ponch’s favorite HMs from Week 1501:
At home, I always leave the toilet seat up so my wife can see at a glance whether she needs to clean it. (Jeff Hazle)
Every time I take a sip from the Communion chalice, I always spit it back in to make sure there’s enough for the next person. (First Offender Mark Wakefield, who might get some side-eye this Sunday at Mass)
When I get a 2-for-1 coupon for a good restaurant near my job, I always invite a co-worker to come with me so we can both enjoy some friendly conversation while I eat my free lunch. (Jeff Contompasis)
When I see someone parked in a handicap spot without the sticker, I help them stay out of trouble by spray-painting a little wheelchair on their windshield. (Mark Raffman)
When I’m alone in an elevator with another person, I subtly signal that I’m not a threat by intoning nursery rhymes under my breath. (Coleman Glenn)
Join us at the next Loser sighting: Sunday, Sept. 18, noon
(Copied verbatim from last week’s Convo)
Even though it no longer offers its brunch buffet, I plan to be at Kilroy’s, the WWII-decorated pub in Springfield-ish where we’ve had many a Loser brunch. Not only is it always fun to meet new Losers and Invite just-fans and of course the brunchin’ regulars, but my favorite Asian supermarket, Lotte, is in the same shopping center, so I’ll have a chance to stop by. The food is Standard Pub, there are interesting pictures on the walls, and it’s easy to get to and park; it’s in the old Ravenswood shopping center just outside the Beltway at the Braddock Road exit. Please RSVP to our new brunch coordinator Kyle Hendrickson at BrunchOfLosers@gmail.com; details on the Our Social Engorgements page of the Losers’ website, NRARS.org.
