The Invitational Week 168: Take a Breath
You get a respite this week. No new Invitational contest! Why? As with so many bad things in life, we can blame an archipelago. In a couple of weeks, Pat goes on a short vacation to Bermuda, meaning she won’t be around to judge a contest and do other technical things, and Gene claims to be helpless without her, so, bam!
Now, we know what you are thinking. You are worrying that without a new Invitational contest, your life will suddenly be without intrinsic meaning — and that, facing the absurdity of existence, you will descend into a bleak, nihilistic. Sartre-like melancholia.
Relax. We hear you. So we will be running a short Nonvitational contest, described below this week’s results.
Stop-Yap Measures: ‘Eek, that’s enough’ sentences from Week 166
In Invitational Week 166 we asked for beginnings of sentences you would not want to hear any more of. (“In a late-night post on Truth Social …” was offered by too many people to credit.)
Third runner-up:
“The Oscar for Best Performance by an AI Character goes to …” (Roy Ashley, Washington, D.C.)
Second runner-up:
Sorry to ring your doorbell so late, but I’m required to report my presence in the neighborhood because…” (Leif Picoult, Rockville, Md.)
First runner-up:
“And now, to begin our awards ceremony, the twelfth runner-up is…” (Tom Witte, Montgomery Village, Md.)
And the winner of the Passport to Hell pocket journal:
“So, when you swore me to secrecy, I assume you didn’t mean…” (Judy Freed, Philadelphia)
And for the weekly Invitational Gene Pool Gene Poll:
(As usual, if you think one or more of the honorable mentions were better than these, shout out your favorites in the Comments.)
Duh-Ohs: Honorable mentions
“This is the fire department. Did you, I mean do you, live at …” (Duncan Stevens, Vienna, Va.)
”I know exactly how you feel — which reminds me of the time when I…” (Chris Doyle, Warminster, Pa.)
“I’m betting if I cut the green wire the bomb will explode and kill us all but then I think that might be what they want us to think so it’s probably the red one except maybe they aren’t that smart so therefore now I think I’ll cut….” (Jon Ketzner, Cumberland, Md.)
“Ruling on whether Trump is eligible for a third term, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote, decided that …” (Bill Jacobs, Fairfax, Va.)
“It was a pleasure to drive you, ma’am. And now that I know where you live…” (Leif Picoult)
“Not that it’s any of my business, but…” (Diana Oertel, San Francisco)
“All I had to give him was your Social Security number and …” (Art Grinath, Takoma Park, Md.)
“Dad, my new boyfriend knows how to start a car without a key and …” (Art Grinath)
“It rubs the lotion on its skin or else…” (Jesse Frankovich, Laingsburg, Mich.)
“Please step out of line and …” (Kevin Dopart, Washington, D.C.)
“Debbie, you’re a nurse…” (Chris Doyle)
”Honey, do Grandma a favor and rub my…” (Jesse Frankovich)
“This is an announcement for passengers on Acela trains 2141, 2161, 2171, 2191 to New York Penn Station….” (Jon Cannon, Potomac, Md.)
“The good news is that this will put you high up on the donor waiting list…” (Kevin Dopart)
“In order to continue providing our readers with a sustainable product, starting Sunday, The Washington Post will …” (Rob Cohen, Potomac, Md.)
And Last: “While I’m sure you get some dumb complaints about non-inking entries, in my case …” (Mark Raffman, Reston, Va.)
The headline “Stop-Yap Measures” is by Chris Doyle; Chris also wrote the honorable-mentions subhead.
Still running — deadline Saturday, March 21, at 9 p.m. ET: It’s our contest to make a picture to illustrate any of seven captions we offered. You even can use AI to picture your own idea, though we certainly welcome biologically human creations as well. Click on “read full story” below for details.
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Okay, now for the first ever Nonvitational:
Earlier this week in The Gene Pool, a commenter wrote a spectacular list of ordinary things Donald Trump almost certainly never has done in his life. Among them: pumped gas; walked a dog or fed a pet; operated a vacuum cleaner; read a book to a child; washed a dish; did his own laundry; played Scrabble.
Today’s inaugural Nonvitational challenge is to submit additional items to that list. MAKE THEM AS FUNNY AS POSSIBLE. Nailing Donald’s emptinesses is important, but the winners here, which Gene will choose, will be those that also make it funny. He will run them in an upcoming Gene Pool or two. These results will not count for Invitational ink points in the Loser Stats … but there is one enormous benefit to entering.
The overall winner will get a prize — the shittiest prize in the 33-year history of the Invitational. And there may be glory in that, right?
Because Invitational prizes are famously shitty, we decided that for this prize to be the shittiest it had to be so random, so homely and so intrinsically unfunny and uncampy as to be of negative value. So Gene looked up from where he was sitting and grabbed the first object he saw that could be conveniently mailed.
Here is the prize:
Yes, it is an unopened $2 generic-brand mini-can of tomato paste, which Gene will autograph.
There will be only one winner, but runners-ups will also be published.
There is no entry form. Send your entries here, and make sure to START the entry with the non-word NONVITATIONAL:
You can send up to ten, total.
We’re only going to say this once twice: You must put your name and your email address IN THE BODY OF THE ENTRY. You cannot assume we know your email address just because you sent it from your email address. Capisce? IN THE ENTRY ITSELF. (We will not publish your email address. If you do not wish us to publish your name, you must tell us that in the entry.)
For this contest alone, tragically, you do not have to be a paying subscriber to enter. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t become a paying subscriber. Think about it. Let’s say you win the tomato paste, and then realize — smack to the forehead — that you could have won LOTS of somewhat less shitty prizes over the last three years. Won’t you feel stupid?
Good.
The Mailbag:
Q: Am I missing something? The corrections box in Friday’s print WaPo sez “Romania’s Maramure region was incorrectly identified as the Maramure region.” Huh? — Jay Branegan
A: It’s worse than you think. Much worse.
Consider this the most recent mini-edition of
… your periodic insight into the disaster wrought on The Post by Jeff Bezos and squad.
Yes you are correct. That correction did happen. And then more chaos followed. Observe:
Here’s the killer. NEITHER correction is correct. The stripped-down, editor-starved Post still hasn’t got its shit together. Pat Myers explains:
The first correction realized that there was a diacritical mark missing from the original story — in Romanian, a comma that goes under the letter, a variant of a cedilla — and tried to fix it. But The Post’s printing software apparently didn’t recognize that Romanian character, so simply left it out. Evidently, no copyeditor or proofreader was around to check how it turned out on the page, rather than the computer screen. (The article, a syndicated column, ran only in the print paper.)
THEN….
Someone (probably an alert reader like you) noticed the inanity of the Maramure/Maramure correction, and someone in in the depleted editing ranks tried to correct it, quickly. Evidently they found a version of a letter with the correct diacritical mark, but it was in an entirely different font and different font size, but, what the hell, they threw it in there.
Alas, they still got it wrong. The region is actually Maramureș — with the comma under the S.
Sigh.
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Q: Regarding your call for scientific “aha!” moments in one’s life.
Back in second grade I found one of those little brass clips (a small round button with two tabs about one half inch long) that can be used to fasten notebook pages together (insert the tabs through one of the holes and bend them out in opposite directions). I was amazed to discover that if I bent the tabs to exactly fit the corner of my desk, it also fit every other corner in the classroom, no matter how large or small the object was. At the time this seemed mysteriously magical; some eight or ten years later I learned that “all 90 degree angles are congruent”, which is a fundamental hypothesis in geometry. – Michael in Germany
A: In a book, I once told the story of Harry the dog learning about one of Newton’s Laws of Motion. He was playing in the backyard with one of those old small-necked refillable 5-gallon cylindrical plastic bottles from the top of an old office water cooler. At one point it rolled down a hill, which surprised and delighted him. He retrieved it, brought it back up and tried to make it go down again. It wouldn’t. I watched him nudge it around with his nose until he discovered that for the bottle to roll, its long axis had to be perpendicular to the slope of the hill. You could see the understanding dawn on his face, It was Archimedes in the bath! It was the intellectual achievement of Harry’s life, tarnished only slightly by the fact that he spent the next two hours insipidly entranced, following that bottle down and hauling it back up. He didn’t come in until it grew too dark for him to see.
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Q: Comical, maybe just barely SFW:
A: Hey, it’s SFTGP! Very funny. We’ll end on this.
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