Style Conversational: Easy as A, B or C
‘Wait Wait’s’ Roxanne Roberts weighs in on the Style Invitational
quiz questions
By Pat Myers
Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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March 24, 2016
“risky, imo.”
That was the prognosis last month, via Google Chat, of The Czar of The
Style Invitational
, the Empress’s
predecessor and continual sounding board, when I broached the idea —
suggested by the Royal Consort — of doing a contest in the mold of the
multiple-choice quiz questions on NPR’s “Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me.”
“this calls for a lot of clebberness,” the Czar continued in the idiotic
lowercase-and-stupid-spelling format that we’ve used for decades with
each other while instant-messaging. “of course you only need ten.”
right, I concurred in similar failures of capitalization. Then the
conversation turned to whether the term “bucco-genital” was too spicy
for The Post, even in a quote from a 1926 sex advice manual that was
being given away as a prize (upshot: It was deleted from the print
Invite for Week 1162, ran in the online version,
got zero complaints).
Anyway, one thing the Loser community has in abundance is clebberness.
Many, many entrants in the Week 1164
contest
knew just what we were looking for: a multiple-choice question about a
Ridiculous but True news event (we also allowed for historical or
general trivia), along with two wrong answers that were entertaining in
their own right — either because they were ridiculous but marginally
plausible, or because they made a good joke.
Even the Czar agreed, lauding 20 of the entries I showed him and selling
only a few short.
But one neat part of the “Wait Wait” contest was the chance to hear from
my longtime Style section colleague Roxanne Roberts,
who’s been a
regular Waiter for years, and perhaps the highest-scoring panelist on
the show’s news quiz. On Tuesday I sent Rox a list of 27 entries, all of
which I’d researched online to check against contemporary news stories.
That afternoon she came over to my desk with a printout marked with her
favorites — but wait! wait! She also had highlighted four entries that
she remembered from the show itself, one of which she remembered
answering recently. “Wait Wait” posts a number of transcripts online,
but I was striking out trying to search for specific questions through
either Google or the show’s own site, and so I couldn’t see if the Loser
versions might be the same as (or even — gasp — inferior to) the Wait.
So I dropped those entries from the Invite itself and share them below,
after lauding the winners and Losers. Unfair? Just bad luck? Either way,
it’s the life of a Loser.
*Opinion from the Roberts court: Roxanne’s favorites *
“My entirely unscientific and arbitrary favorites are based not on the
weird-but-true answer because the entire Internet exists because of
weird-but-true and I’m mad at Bill Gates for thinking of that first. No,
greatness lies in the twisted fake answer that sounds real (aka lying),
which ‘Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me’ has transformed into to a respected art
form. So my personal favorite is #23 [Kevin Dopart’s question about the
date 11/11/11], based on C: ‘Most like a fence, according to Donald
Trump’s Veterans Day remarks at the New York Military Academy’ – a
perfect mix of the topical and the absurd, not unlike the GOP
presidential campaign. And my second is #21 [Duncan Stevens’s entry
about the East Chicago, Ind., election], because the world would be a
better place if dogs were elected to public office.”
The Empress liked those entries, too, obviously, but as usual, her
results varied when it comes to the tippy-top of the list, where she
gave the ink to four others.
It’s the fifth win and 83rd blot of ink for Larry Gray of Middle of
Nowhere, Md., who — just as I’d chosen his Burger King entry and looked
up who’d written it — messaged me urgently on Tuesday afternoon re Week
1164. Whuh-oh, was he suddenly ashamed of his joke about onion rings?
No, he was suddenly ashamed of a different entry, submitted back on
March 6:
/Why have badly needed repairs to the crumbling road infrastructure in
Brussels, Belgium, been delayed?/ /
/ / A: The city's legislature has been paralyzed by a particularly
vicious and sometimes violent lobbying war between the concrete and
asphalt industries./ /
/ / B: The discovery of unexploded WWII ordinance has prompted one
Belgian politician to claim that they've uncovered secret terrorist bomb
caches./ /
/ / C: The construction plans for a number of key road tunnels were
apparently eaten by mice./ /
/ /Answer: C. /
//So yeah, that would have been extremely unfortunate, considering. So
we’re glad it worked out for Larry otherwise.
Duncan Stevens, one of this year’s Invite phenoms, should be able to
get a sort of weird radio job if he tires of his current federal-lawyer
gig: He scored not just the second-place International Barf Bag
but also three
honorable mentions out of the 21 inking entries in this week’s results —
and there were more on the shortlist. Today’s ink bumps his total to 35,
five of them “above the fold.” And filling out the Losers’ Circle are
frequent squatters Lawrence McGuire and Kevin Dopart, the latter of whom
has been asking for honorable-mention magnets lately, rather than the
runner-up mug or vintage T-shirt; it’s rumored that he plans to assemble
them into some Garment of Shame.
And here are the entries on the topics that Roxanne remembered from the
show (and you know, if it turns out that Rox was remembering something
similar but not /exactly/ this topic — well, that’s why we’re glad we’re
not handing out prizes of monetary value in this contest):
*A chunk of hard whale vomit sold for $16,700 at auction last year
because:*
A. A diamond ring was visible inside.
B. It was wanted for use in perfume.
C. It was once owned by Herman Melville.
/Answer: B (bbc.com) /(Dave Prevar)
*What action did some women in China take to ward off men who kept
ogling them?*
A. Bought stockings that simulated very hairy legs.
B. Carried blow-up male dolls by their side to pretend they were escorted.
C. Aimed laser pointers at them to zap their lecherous eyes.
/Answer: A.(chinasmack.com)
/ (John McCooey) [there’s a little question whether this product was
ever marketed, anyway]
*Officials at Britain’s ancient Salisbury Cathedral have relocated a
20-foot-tall statue because: *
A. The headless Anne Boleyn was frightening children.
B. People were walking into it while texting.
C. The nude depiction of Winston Churchill was deemed inappropriate.
/Answer: B/ (Reuters)
(Frank Osen)
And Rox remembers answering this one herself:
*What made it easier for Escambia County, Fla., police officers to find
and arrest Donald “Chip” Pugh on DUI and other charges?*
A. He was the Escambia County chief of police.
B. He had sent a mug shot of himself, saying the one on the wanted
posters didn't look very good.
C. He started a “Help Me Avoid Arrest on My DUI Charge” Kickstarter
campaign. /
Answer: B (cleveland19.com)
/ (Yet another one from Duncan Stevens)
(Today’s headline was a non-inking hed suggestion by Jeff Contompasis)
*PUTTING THE ERR IN ‘ERUDITE’? THIS WEEK’S CONTEST*
I’ll admit it — I’ve been wary of repeating Asterisky Business — a
contest that requires specialized knowledge to understand the punchline
of a joke -- though I’ve gotten numerous requests for an encore. For one
thing, my mantra is that explaining a joke is a good way to kill it. I
do see the humor in telling a joke that’s ridiculously specialized, and
also in a dull explanation that explains something else more: that the
teller is an incorrigible nerd. But a whole list of dull explanations?
But Washington has so, so many highly educated people — several of the
instructors at my gym have graduate degrees — and the Loser Community is
even more overrun with them than the general population. Last week on
theStyle Invitational Devotees Facebook page, I
posted the results of Week 485
and
asked whether we should give this contest another go. Lots of Likes.
(Along with endorsements like this from biologist Mike Creveling: “I
thought some of them dragged on. But I like to read long tedious
passages with big words.”) Finally, I — yet again — consulted the Czar;
he’s the one who ran the contest last time. I showed him the results
(once again via Google Chat):
Czar: okay, i f[very much] LOVE these results. i would count this among
the great contests. ... the winner is fabulous, as is the first
honorable, the one about latin. i love how convoluted it is.
Here’s the winner, by Seth Brown:
George Bush: Who's* on first?
Ariel Sharon: Me?*
George Bush: No, the guy on first base.
Ariel Sharon: Me?
George Bush: You are on first?
Ariel Sharon: No, I'm asking you. Me?
George Bush: Who?
Ariel Sharon: Wait, you mean that fellow over there?
George Bush: So he* is on first?
Ariel Sharon: What are you talking about? There are no girls on this team.
George Bush: So who's on first?
Ariel Sharon: Me?
*In Hebrew, the word meaning "who" is pronounced "me"; the word for "he"
is pronounced "who"; and the word for "she" is pronounced "he."
Here’s the first honorable mention:
Physicist 1: What's new?
Physicist 2: E/h*
*In physics, photon energy (E) divided by Planck's constant (h), is the
frequency, expressed as the Greek letter nu.
Okay, people, let’s go for it — worse comes to worst, we can run more
Wait Waits.
One issue that will inevitably arise: /“That’s/ not obscure! Every
literate person knows /that!”/ Okay, fine, you can feel smug once or
twice four weeks from now. There’s no scientific standard for joke
nerdiness; I’ll ask around about some of the entries, probably, but will
mostly go on my gut; although I can spell better than you can, I’m
probably not as well educated; I finished my higher education after four
years and three summers when you could get into the University of
Maryland by paying $25 to the person who came to your in-state high
school a few months beforehand. No essay, nothin’. I’d say that jokes
requiring knowledge of a foreign language, or those using technical,
academic or otherwise specialized terms that don’t usually appear in
newspapers, should work.
*Important note! *Your erudite joke doesn’t have to be a bad joke! In
fact, I fervently hope for all truly funny jokes. Listen, if you can
explain the punchline of a joke and still make the reader laugh, that is
a good joke.
*Other important note! * YOU HAVE TO THINK OF THE JOKE YOURSELF. We’re
not interested in running the funniest nerdjoke you ever heard. This is
true for every Style Invitational contest.
I see that a couple of years ago, The Post’s Health and Science blog ran
some “Popular Science readers’ favorite science jokes”
;
I liked this one: “I was going to tell a joke about sodium, but Na.” Not
quite erudite enough for this contest, though.
Asterisky Business reminds me of one of my favorite Steve Martin standup
bits , where he pretends to
be telling a joke to the plumbers in the audience: “This lawn supervisor
was out on a sprinkler maintenance job and he started working on a
Findlay sprinkler head with a Langstrom 7-inch gangly wrench. Just then,
this little apprentice leaned over and said, “You can’t work on a
Findlay sprinkler head with a Langstrom-inch wrench.” Well, this
infuriated the supervisor, so he went and got Volume 14 of the Kinsley
manual, and he reads to him and says, “The Langstrom 7″ wrench can be
used with the Findlay sprocket.” Just then, the little apprentice leaned
over and said, “It says ‘sprocket,’ not ‘socket’!”