Style Conversational Week 1250: Ode on a Broken Mug, Part II
To eulogize a Loser prize: Once again, the Loserbards spring into action
James Yanovitch, 14, may be in the doghouse after breaking his mom's
Loser Mug. But he proved to be a literary inspiration. (Amanda Yanovitch)
By Pat Myers
Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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October 19, 2017
A mere three weeks ago, The Style Conversational
shared the sad story of Melissa Balmain’s
broken Loser mug — and the happy consequence of fellow Loser Brendan
Beary’s commemoration of it in a brilliant parody of “Ozymandias” in the
Style Invitational Devotees
Facebook group. (That poem appears farther down this page.)
I swear: I do /not/ coat the surface of our runner-up prize with a thin
but dangerous application of olive oil.
Nevertheless, just two weeks later, 53-time Loser Amanda Yanovitch
posted the photo above to her fellow Devotees. Amanda, a writing teacher
at Tyler Community College near Richmond, Va., is the mom of three
extraordinarily active young sons; I see her Facebook posts of her kids
excelling in baseball, swimming and especially gymnastics. So maybe it’s
more impressive that Amanda’s “This Is Your Brain on Mugs” Mug — the
first of four designs we’ve issued — lasted several years before
14-year-old James prompted Amanda to play off the old dog-shaming
meme with some
good-natured offspring-shaming. “My kid just dropped my loser mug,”
Amanda lamented. “Yesterday he dropped the lid of the butter dish we got
when we got married. I was bummed. But THIS!”
Brendan Beary — himself the dad of two youths — mused: “I don’t doubt
that you'll earn another mug, but remarrying to get a replacement butter
dish will take some explaining.” Then added: “And BTW, if you're
expecting another broken-mug poem of the sort I did for Melissa Balmain,
you're out of luck. First come, first served.”
So Melissa — /also /the mom of two teens, as well as a writing
instructor at the University of Rochester and the editor of the poetry
journalLight — couldn’t let Amanda be
wounded doubly, so she offered this limerick:
/“Who destroyed this?” growled Mom, the accuser,
But her kiddo was quick to defuse her.
“Me, me, me!” he replied,
His small chest puffed with pride.
“Now I'm just like you, Mommy — a loser!” /
*Then: Brendan: * (sigh) Okay. You know I never could say no to you.
/By the shores of Whatsit Tooya
In the tranquil Old Dominion,
Stood Amanda, tribe of Waltman
(Now a Yanovitch by marriage),
With a heart packed full of grieving
O'er a Loser mug, now shattered.
She who, only separated
By a single sunset’s passing
From the similar destruction
Of another prized memento --
That, a butter-holding relic
Of the day that she was wedded,
She, who knew that these destructions
Were not brought upon her household
By the evil Megissogwon
Nor some other dreaded shaman
But the progeny she raised there
In that home in Old Virginny,
She took in these grievous burdens,
And did channel then the spirit
And the words of every mother
Through the countless generations
As she spake unto her children,
"This is why we can’t have nice things!"/
However much you care for “Hiawatha,”
I hereby declare
Brendan’s poem a Higher Watha.
Brendan’s idea in the Devotees thread:
Whoever breaks a Loser mug next, it’ll be Amanda’s turn to write the
mugular thanatopsis.
Meanwhile, here’s Brendan’s definitely-worth-repeating parody of
“Ozymandias” for Melissa’s mug:
/I met a Loser from upstate New York/
/Who said: The rubble of a well-earned mug/
/Lay strewn here on my floor. I’m such a dork;/
/My absent-minded swatting at a bug/
/Unleashed this fine ceramic to its fate./
/Upon its lip my lipstick glints, and then/
/I all alone beweep my outcast state,/
/To know that it and I won’t kiss again./
/Caffeine and great encouragement it lent,/
/And thus urged on, no obstacle I saw — /
/Declaring, for each entry that I sent,/
/“Look on my works, ye Empress, and guffaw!”/
/Nothing beside remains. From the parquet,/
/The lone and level shards, swept all away./
*AND NOW, BACK TO THE INVITE POEMS*
I’m so excited about this week’s Style Invitational contest, Week 1250
— for one thing, even in the couple of hours
since I published the Invite this afternoon, the @StyleInvite Twitter
account has been dinging off the hook
with likes and retweets. That’s thanks to Merriam-Webster, which spread
the word about the contest, in which you use M-W’s Time Travel tool as a
prompt for a poem. Surely, the wordies who follow a dictionary’s Twitter
feed are as good a cohort as any to become Invite fans.
It turns out that there’s no link to Time Traveler directly from the M-W
home page; instead, you have to go to a definition of some word, which
now included its “first known use” year, and a link to others from that
same year. But m-w.com/time-traveler will
take you there as well. Meghan Lunghi, M-W’s marketing person (thank her
for the tote bag donation), emphasizes that the word might not have made
it into the dictionary in the listed year, only that it was found in
some published writing for the first time.
I think the rules are pretty clear for this contest, but I’ll emphasize
(or reemphasize) a few things:
— A clever, zingy, readable poem with just three of the year-words will
be more likely to get ink than one that’s impressive only for how it got
so many words in. Quality, people.
— New Losers, take note: Our typical light-verse length is four to eight
lines. If you write a sonnet, it had better be both brilliant and funny.
— PLEASE write your year-words in ALL CAPITALS. I don’t want to have to
track them down, and that ‘s the only way they’ll be apparent to me. Our
entry form doesn’t read boldface.
— You may use a slightly different form of the word: plural, past tense,
adverb, etc.
— There’s no rule that the poem has to rhyme. But in my experience of
judging Style Invitational poetry contests, which has involved literally
tens of thousands of entries, poems that have perfect rhyme and strong
meter tend to be more clever and end up getting the vast majority of
ink. Remember, we’re a humor contest; I’m not ruling on what is the
Greatest Art.
— Haiku? Fine with me if you can make it interesting. I like to mix up
longer and shorter poems, so there’s a decent chance that I’ll run at
least one haiku.
— Song parody? I won’t say no.
— Should the poem relate somehow to the words’ year? It doesn’t have to.
But I could see how that might make a very clever entry.
— New people, please note that you can write as many as 25 entries, all
from one year or 25 different ones; it doesn’t matter to me. And there
is absolutely no advantage in sending them in before the Oct. 30
deadline. I read them in one big list, and I won’t see your name during
the judging.
My thanks to Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood, who suggested I add the
first-known-use date of “duh” — 1943 — in my instructions.
*Q CARDS*: THE RESULTS OF WEEK 1246*
/(I’d actually made that my headline winner this week, until I was
alerted by Jesse Frankovich that we’d already done that headline — even
though it was Jesse’s own entry)/
I’d be happy to do our Questionable Journalism contest every few weeks
if it didn’t require so much work for the entrants; there’s never a
shortage of fresh source material — that week’s paper — and never a
shortage of laughs. But as you might guess from this week’s results
,
which drew ink for only 16 Losers, not many people wanted to look all
over their Post (or other paper) for suitable material; fewer than 100
people entered, a number that would frighten the blank out of me had I
not be confident that I could fill the page with the work of five or six
of the True Obsessives.
And indeed, just about everyone who got ink this week, most of them more
than once, is a household name in Loserland. But I was shocked to
discover — just this moment, it turns out, as I check theLoser Stats
— that it’s the first win ever, out
of 73 blots of ink, for Steve Honley. This bumps Steve off the
Cantinkerous list of people who get the most ink without ever having won
a contest. (Kyle Hendrickson, who once again came close last week with
two honorable mentions, still stands atop Mount Cantinkerous with 89
always-a-bridesmaid blots.)
But runners-up Mark Raffman, John Hutchins and Jesse Frankovich are
soaking in ink so deeply that I’m not going to dirty my typing fingers
by discussing them further.
I decided that linking to all the original sentence to show them in
their original habitat wasn’t worth it; I hope you sense that Steve
Honley’s “don’t care for brown and reds together” was about interior
decorating, for example. , or that “dropping shoes” meant that Mueller
was talking about “letting the other shoe drop” with some revelation.
*What Doug Dug:* It’s been a while since Doug agreed with me on the
winners, but he liked all the “above the fold” entries this week, also
singling out Mary Kappus’s 300-square-foot studio for 1-percenters;
Kevin Dopart’s yoga pants joke (“pants” is a great joke word); and Frank
Osen’s “dunked in soy sauce.’
*Unquestionable: The unprintables of Week 1246:* A lot of stuff this
week that clearly couldn’t see the light of the Invite:
A. We’ve been going down, and everything has just gotten more and more
depressing. Q. How have things been at the Thomas Hardy Memorial
Brothel? (Duncan Stevens)
A: “You’ve got to come right now.” Q: What is a typical direction while
filming a porn movie on a strict budget? (Tom Witte)
A: He’s jumping up and down, saying, ‘Nana! Nana! Nana!’”
Q: What is one line in the script for “Grandma Likes her Incest Rough?”
(Witte again. Sheez.)
A: It didn’t matter if you were a good player or you sucked., Q: Did
oral sex used to help one’s career as a professional athlete? (Guess who.)
A. “This is what you’re going to reach for when your kids spill cereal
in the morning.” Q. What is a belt? (Steve Honley) Yuck.