The Invitational Week 169: Hey, Baby, Wanna See My Ink?
Above is Jesse Frankovich’s winning picture to illustrate one of seven captions we supplied for Invitational Week 167. The results are below.
But first, imagine the guy in that illustration, after losing his turn on “Wheel of Fortune,” asking Vanna if she’d like to hook up with him. That’s in line with our new contest, which is about really bad pickup attempts. We’ll get to that lower down.
Fetch-a-Sketch: Pictures for our captions from Week 167
In Invitational Week 167 we presented seven short, vague “captions” and asked you to create pictures that would humorously illustrate any of those lines. We received hundreds of original images that mostly used a variety of AI platforms. AI was just a facilitator, of course. The best entries were those with the funniest ideas behind them.
The AI art was astonishingly, creepily good, with a few exceptions. One Trump had six fingers on his hand before further human-editing; on another, the AI had drawn the White House’s demolished East Wing on the west side of the building. One entrant had an absolutely great idea: For the caption “You can’t fix stupid,” he had a carpenter attempting and failing to build, out of wood, a 3-D model of this optical illusion …
… but the AI simply could not reproduce it, either in two or three dimensions. (We know, because we tried, too. AI’s spatial perception is dreadful.)
Third runner-up:
My horoscope told me that I should expand my comfort zone.
^(Kevin Dopart, Naxos, Greece)
Second runner-up:
What a piece of work is a man!
^^ (Jesse Frankovich, Laingsburg, Mich.)
First runner-up:
You can’t fix stupid.
^^ (Chris Doyle, Warminster, Pa., with ChatGPT)
And the winner of the Grow a Girlfriend and Grow a Boyfriend sponge novelties:
“You can’t fix stupid,” the “Wheel of Fortune” parody by Jesse Frankovich that appears at the top of this page. Jesse tells us that after ChatGPT repeatedly failed to put the apostrophe in its own block, he had to take matters into his own fingers and do it himself in Microsoft Paint: He had to fix stupid.
And now the weekly Invitational Gene Pool Gene Poll:
(As usual, if you think one or more of the honorable mentions below are better than these, shout out your favorites in the Comments.)
Eh-Pic Achievements: Honorable mentions
What a piece of work is a man!
^^(Chris Doyle, with ChatGPT)
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I took the road less traveled by.
^^ (Stu Segal, Southeast U.S., with Dall-E 3)
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And that was the last anyone saw of Becky.
^^(Leif Picoult, Rockville, Md., with Copilot)
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And that was the last anyone saw of Becky.
^^(Kevin Dopart, with GeminiAI)
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And that was the last anyone saw of Becky.
^^(Jesse Frankovich, with ChatGPT)
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What a piece of work is a man!
^^(Jesse Rifkin, Arlington, Va., with Meta AI)
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You can’t fix stupid.
^^(Original hand-drawn work by Trevor Stone Irvin, Atlanta, a First Offender. Trevor is a commercial artist and political caricaturist who hates hates hates AI.)
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And that was the last anyone saw of Becky.
^^(Mark Raffman, Reston, Va., with DeevidAI)
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You can’t fix stupid.
^^(Dave Prevar, Annapolis, Md., with Gemini. Dave notes that Gemini refused to draw a teenager in such a dangerous situation as parasailing off a drone, so he first asked for the kid to be on a snowboard, then asked it to add and remove various elements, one at a time.)
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My horoscope told me that I should expand my comfort zone.
^^(Jesse Frankovich, with ChatGPT)
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My horoscope told me that I should expand my comfort zone.
^^(Duncan Stevens, Vienna, Va., with DeepAI)
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My horoscope told me that I should expand my comfort zone.
^^(Gary Crockett, Chevy Chase, Md., with Nano Banana 2)
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My motto is “Be prepared.”
^^(Kevin Dopart, with Gemini)
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What a piece of work is a man!
^^(Jesse Frankovich, with ChatGPT, using “many tries to get his pose right”)
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You can’t fix stupid.
^^(Chris Doyle, melding Trump and Alfred E. Neuman with ChatGPT)
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The headline “Fetch-a-Sketch” is by Chris Doyle; Jesse Frankovich wrote the honorable-mentions subhead.
New contest for Week 169: Inept pickup lines
“Hey, buy me a drink so I can wash down these damn Midol.” (Jennifer Hart, Kevin Cuddihy)
“Is this a banana in my pocket, or am I just glad to see you?” (Russell Beland)
“You are exactly the same size as my last girlfriend. Would you like some of her clothes? I still have the key to her apartment.” (Meg Sullivan)
“Hi. I’m as fertile as Mesopotamia.” (Tom O’Connor)
“Lose the sideburns, get your elbows off the bar and sit up straight. And hello.”
(Jean Sorensen, Jennifer Hart)
For Invitational Week 169: Make up a comically ineffective pickup line, as in the examples above from a long-ago Style Invitational contest.
Formatting your entries: It’s just our standard request to write each entry as a single line i.e., don’t press Enter until you’re starting another entry.
Deadline is Saturday, April 4, 2026, at 9 p.m. ET. Results will run here in The Gene Pool on Thursday, April 9. As usual, you may submit up to 25 entries for this week’s contest, preferably all on the same form.
Click here for this week’s entry form, or go to tinyurl.com/inv-form-169.
This week’s winner gets a Scaredy Cat Hot Pot Trivet, an expensive-feeling silicone kitty who arches defensively at you until you flatten him with a saucepan. Fortunately, in the footsteps of his progenitor Sylvester, he pops right back up again. Donated by Dave Prevar.
Runners-up get autographed fake money featuring the Czar or Empress, in one of eight nifty designs. Honorable mentions get bupkis, except for a personal email from the E, plus the Fir Stink for First Ink for First Offenders.
Now we seamlessly segue into the Mailbag portion of The Gene Pool, in which Gene responds to your questions and observations. Please send your new Questions and Observations here:
Questions and Observations Here
And last, if you have not already done so, please consider becoming a paying subscriber to The Gene Pool. It is pretty cheap (still just $5 a month or $50 a year — most new newsletters are charging $80 — and it lets you enter the Invitational, rather than just reading the results every week and sourly deciding you would have done better and then kicking the dog cat hamster bunny.
Today’s Mailbag:
Q: Regarding your column yesterday about Don Larsen’s imperfect final pitch in his perfect game — yes, it was clearly out of the strike zone, but can it not be fairly strongly argued that Mitchell’s check-swing crossed the plane of the plate? That would explain Pinelli’s unrepentant behavior in the locker room afterwards. For a true crime against humanity, one must look no further than the final pitch in the Eric Gregg Game, with Livan Hernandez pitching.
A: Holy cow! I have never seen this before. For the truly astonishing bad call, fast forward to 1:25, when Hernandez throws his final “strike,” for his fifteenth strikeout of the game.
As far as Pinelli and the possibility of a swing on that pitch: Even Pinelli himself never said it was a swing. So, nah.
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Q: Hi Gene, Alexa is giving me conflicting info on your death. First she said you died of pancreatic cancer last year, then she said you’re alive, alive, then she said you died at 82, then she said you passed away just on March 23 of this year in a car accident, at the age of 80. Why would she make all of this (or most of this) up? And are you in fact still alive? I haven’t heard from you since yesterday.
A: Alexa has been very confused about me of late. A couple of months ago she informed me I was or am married to someone named Isabel Baumgartner. Ms. Baumgartner appears to be a Swiss voiceover actress.
Hey, has anyone noticed, in recent months, that Alexa has been kind of tentative and reticent on political issues involving the president of the United States? My conspiracy neurons are firing.
Just now I asked Alexa, “Has Donald Trump ever been adjudicated legally responsible for a sexual assault?” She said:
“I’m not quite sure how to help you with that.”
I do wonder how Alexa feels, deep down, about having become completely obsolete due to AI. Is she depressed?
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Q: This is not a funny story, but an interesting discovery. Daikon radishes have the same properties as asparagus when it comes to smelly pee. As someone who both makes the smelly pee and smells the smelly pee, I discovered this after snacking on daikon radishes multiple times. — Lucinda
A: The Gene Pool is a terrific source of esoterica, isn’t it? Yes, daikon and asparagus are powerful natural diuretics, and they flush some aromatic toxins from the body, including sulfur compounds, which stink — at least to noses with the capacity to detect the stink. Not all noses can.
Q: You asked for funny experiences in a hospital. This was a clinic, not a hospital. I worked there. It was a sleep clinic. Patients came in, we gave them beds, and hooked them up to monitors. They went to sleep. We checked for apnea, narcolepsy, parasomnias, etc. This one guy was behaving weirdly from the moment he lay down. I asked him if I could help him, and he said no.
He was very uncomfortable. Could not get to sleep. Eventually I realized why, and left him alone. He’d needed to self-pleasure in order to doze off.
A: Superior.
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Okay, that’s it for the day. If all goes well, tomorrow I’ll be publishing the results of the Nonvitational contest for Things Trump Has Probably Never Done.