Style Conversational Week 1427: The Style Invitational Empress on this week’s pun contest and anagram results

When I ran Week 540, my fifth contest ever as Empress, I asked that at least one of the elements in the “A, or B” format contain a pun, but I see that the results consisted entirely of Pun + Pun, and so this time you have to come up with a pair o’ puns. This presents a risk to spectacular puns accompanied by unspectacular ones, so do your best.

For guidance and entertainment — and so you know not to use these specific jokes — here’s the ink from Week 540, published Feb. 8, 2004. I’m beyond delighted that many of the Losers who got ink that week continue to waste their time with us to this very day. (One who’s bowed out is the suggester of the contest, Russell Beland, who was at the time the Invitational’s highest-scoring Loser.) It was one of those weeks (like today’s results) when the lion’s share of the ink went to a few especially inspired people. But that was back in the day when there was no 25-entry limit; it’s quite likely that Russell, Chris Doyle, Tom Witte and Brendan Beary each sent me 100 or more puns to choose from. I’d expect the ink to be spread around much more this time.

Report from Week 540, in which we asked for news or historical events to be presented in the “Rocky and Bullwinkle” “A, or B” format of groaner puns or other halfwitticisms.

This assignment was attacked with great fervor by a few people who bombarded The Empress with entries all week long, including a couple who must have majored in Obscure European History at Wassamatta U. (the 1566 Compromise of Breda?).

Third runner-up: 1975 — Metric Conversion Act passed by Congress: Take Us to Your Liter, or Tens Anyone? (Russell Beland, Springfield)

Second runner-up: 2001 — Bush’s tax cuts: Deficit Attention Disorder, or No Rothschild Left Behind (Andrew Elby, Arlington)

First runner-up, the winner of the plain old boring BobStaake.com coffee mug: 1066 — The Norman Conquest: Saxon Violence, or Let Me Run This Bayeux (Brendan Beary, Great Mills)

And the winner of the Inker: 1854 — The Charge of the Light Brigade: Fools Speed Ahead, or Is That Your Final Lance, Sir? (Chris Doyle, Forsyth, Mo.)

A timeline of Honorable Mentions:

65 million years ago: Extinction of the dinosaurs: Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus, or You’re Looking Awfully Paleo (Danny Bravman, Potomac)

c. 1250 B.C.: The Exodus: A Parting Wave, or I Just Dropped a Couple Tablets (Russell Beland)

c. 1200 B.C. : Trojan War: The Last Time I Saw Paris, or Beware of Gifts Bearing Greeks (Chris Doyle)

c. 900 B.C. : The judgment of Solomon: Split Decision, or Halving My Baby (Russell Beland)

431-404 B.C.: Peloponnesian Wars: A Tale of Thucydides, or Hellas-a-Poppin’ (Chris Doyle)

31 B.C.: Octavian at the Battle of Actium: Surrender Unto Caesar, or Let’s Win One for Agrippa! (Chris Doyle)

1773: The Boston Tea Party: Of Tea I Fling, or Hurl Grey (Tom Witte, Montgomery Village)

1779 : France comes to the aid of America against Britain: Lafayette You, Not With You, or Burgoyne to Be Sorry (Brendan Beary)

1814: Napoleon is exiled to Elba: Corporal Punishment, or All This for a Lousy Palindrome? (Russell Beland)

1836: The Alamo: Mission Impossible, or Texas Toast (Tom Witte)

1846: The Donner Party disaster: Family Dinner, or Meat: The Parents (Bird Waring, New York)

1846-48: The Mexican-American War: Juarez Hell, or Tijuana Make Something of It? (Brendan Beary)

Late 1800s: Liberia adopts slavery of native tribes: On the American Plan, or It Takes One to Own One (Russell Beland)

1907-14: The digging of the Panama Canal: Sedimental Journey, or The Wicked Ditch of the West (Miles Townes, St. Andrews, Scotland)

1920-28 : Paavo Nurmi wins Olympic gold: Lapps the Field, or Nice Finnish Guys Last (Chris Doyle)

1929-39: The Great Depression: American Idle, or Stock in First Gear (Tom Witte)

1933 : Roosevelt declares a Bank Holiday: A Cure for the Runs, or Do Not Collect $200 (Russell Beland)

1935: Release of the game Monopoly: Now Boarding, or Playing the Race Car (Russell Beland)

1937: The Hindenburg explosion: Dead Zeppelin, or Light My Flier (Dave Ferry, Purvis, Miss.; Russell Beland)

1944 : The D-Day invasion: Strife’s a Beach, or Did Juno We Were Coming? (Michael Denyszyn, New York)

1957: Introduction of the Edsel: Building a Car Bomb, or The Lemon Doesn’t Fall Far From the Tree (Russell Beland)

1962: The Cuban Missile Crisis: Them Ain’t Cigars, or Armageddon Nervous (Jeff Brechlin, Potomac Falls)

1968: The Soviets invade Czechoslovakia: Croaking Prague, or Dubcek’s Bounced (Gordon Labow, Glenelg)

1969: The moon landing: One Giant Schlep, or Neil Before Me — Buzz Aldrin, Los Angeles (Cliff Cummins, Hyattsville)

1971: Admission of People’s Republic of China to the United Nations: Peking Into the Naked City, or A China in the Bull Shop (Elden Carnahan, Laurel)

1996: The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal: Secret Service, or Insert Bill Here (David Iscoe, Washington) [Wow, risque for 2004!]

1996: Clinton explains the situation: Her and Her Big Mouth, or I’m Incurably Semantic (Russell Beland)

1999: Bob Dole pitches Viagra: Where There’s a Pill, There’s a Way, or I’m as Horny as Kansas in August (Chris Doyle)

2001: The Enron scandal: Piling It Up Fastow and Fastow, or A Man Is Known By the Company He Keeps Looting (Roy Ashley, Washington)

2003: Richard Grasso resigns: The Bucks Stop Here, or NYSE Seein’ Ya (Chris Doyle.)

2003: U.S. handling of postwar Iraq: Peace-Poor Planning, or Throwing the Baby Out With the Baath Water (Chris Doyle)

2003: Michael Jackson arrested: Goodbye, Mr. Chimps, or The King of Perp (Mary Ann Henningsen, Hayward, Calif.)

2004: Style Invitational succession: Czar He Goes, or Beyond the Call of Doody (Sue Lin Chong, Washington; Greg Krakower, New York)

Perhaps we can rouse Russ out of retirement for an encore.

*Non-inking headline by Kevin Dopart

As soon as I saw the headline anagrams at Anagram Times, a website under the Wordsmith.org umbrella, I knew that a classic Style Invitational contest would come of it. Thanks to Wordsmith’s Anu Garg for not only letting me rip off his page’s raison d’etre, but for actually linking to our contest in his widely circulated newsletter, A.Word.A.Day. (Anu is also the man to thank for the Anagram Checker tool, without which this contest would have been almost impossible to do.)

If you entered this contest, you know what a challenge it is to rearrange all the letters of a headline, with none left over — and not just that, but to end up with something that makes sense as an English sentence — and not just that, but to have that sentence make some sort of witty point. So I wasn’t surprised at the week’s small pool of entrants, not many more than 100, or that a lot of the ink went to a handful of Losers, almost all of whom have distinguished themselves in earlier Invitational anagram contests.

The big news four weeks ago — though it might seem like four hundred weeks ago — was Impeachment 2.0, and many of the week’s entries centered on that necessary if futile process. The headlines came mostly from The Post, and a lot from the New York Times, but papers and websites based all over the world were called into service. (I’m always happy to see people using their hometown papers, so many of which are in danger of going out of business.)

In what fellow Loser Duncan Stevens called in the Style Invitational Devotees group this morning “the dog-bites-manniest news I can imagine,” Hall of Famer Jesse Frankovich got the Clowning Achievement first-prize trophy, a runner-up, plus four honorable mentions. Jesse has been an anagram wizard for decades; in fact, he was already a star of the Australia-based Anagrammy Awards (anagrammy.com) when I similarly ripped off that concern in Week 558 — just a few months after the history pun contest — and Jesse got his first Invite ink for the anagram “Earth Day: April twenty-second. = Hardy planet? We CAN destroy it!”

Jesse has branched out far beyond anagrams for the Invite; he’s scored in virtually every kind of contest he’s tried — and this is his 16th contest win. But it’s his first for the new Clowning Achievement trophy. Similarly anagram-ink-bedecked are his compatriots in the Losers’ Circle: Kevin Dopart, author of a classic anagram of the Preamble to the Constitution, and Jon Gearhart, who once anagrammed the entire text of a several-paragraph letter that the Empress sent to him along with his prize, and sent it back to her.

In the introduction to this week’s results (scroll down to them if they don’t pop up) I offered an uncredited — I never did look up who wrote it — example of the sometimes perplexing combinations of words that constituted many an entry; if I had to struggle to understand the anagram, I didn’t use it.

And as always, I tried to avoid entries, however well crafted, that came off as so bitter and angry that it muted the humor. (My umbrella term for this is “screediness.”) Which is why this excellent anagram by Maurice Goddard of Norway — whose work in Anagram Times I cited as an example for this contest — didn’t get ink this week:

As Trump’s impeachment trial kicked off, Palm Beach argued about whether to evict him from Mar-a-Lago = A right fit place for him, that macabre, wicked, savage, brute mad former POTUS? A mental home! Lock him up!

What Pleased Ponch: As Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood, that slacker, continues to recover from a heart attack and associated fun, Panfilo “Ponch” Garcia has been shepherding the Invite through the copy desk. This week he noticed problems in two of the anagrams I hadn’t checked yet — and I hadn’t even told him about the Anagram Checker website. (I fixed one, had to toss the other.) Anyway, here are his faves, all from the honorable mentions: Almost all of them were the short ones — which indicates once again that “most impressive” doesn’t always mean most funny. First, though, Ponch cited Kevin Dopart’s lengthy scramble about the Texas power outage in the cold: “Notable climate-hoax notion tricks town’s credulous, inexplicable moron residents” (key to funny; “inexplicable moron residents”). After that, they were all compact: “The glories of cabbage = I forage, eat gobs, belch” (Jonathan Jensen); “Love, in all its permutations = A million venal prostitutes” (Duncan Stevens); “About the impeachment trial = A beaten Trump: ‘I loathe Mitch” (Jonathan Jensen) and “What are sperm telling us? = Get in! Her wall’s upstream!” (Chris Doyle)

O yawn? No way! The unprintables: I think the edgiest one that I ran this week was Jesse Frankovich’s beginning “Bastard Ted Cruz” (online only). But I don’t think I need to explain why I thought it best not to run any of the following in the Invite:

Films offer more than happy endings = Ah! Porn helps men stay firm, do “effing” (Mark Raffman)

Biden’s supporters jockey for coveted ambassadorships = Oprah: Biden’s jockeys cover a forested bod, pimp-ass truss. (gyaadh, Frank Osen)

Breakfast can be boundless = Baked cobblers? Fasten anus. (Duncan Stevens)

Millions in grip of arctic freeze = Pilgrim fiancee: frozen clitoris (Duncan Stevens, who did specify this one as “Conversational only,” although I think it would have made for a lively discussion next Monday with the other lawyers for the FDIC)

“You’re Invited” host Mike Gips tells me that he’ll be dropping — be more careful, Mike! — Episode 12 sometime this weekend. I’ll tout it more next week, but I can’t wait to listen to Mike’s talk with his guest Mark Raffman — in which he’ll debut a song parody, complete with Loser Jonathan Jensen on piano. Mark, an Invite Hall of Famer, is famous in Loser circles for his innumerable takes on one particular show tune …

So stay tuned to bit.ly/invite-podcast, or search for “You’re Invited” on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.