proudly resents ...

 

News Flash

The Loser world was captivated recently by the new computer sensation One Hit Wondering. For the benefit of any readers living in remote areas, One Hit Wondering is a game in which you enter an unusual series of words into a web browser in an effort to generate exactly one hit. In an unsolicited e-mail, the noted journalist, rock musician, and friend of the Czar (FOC) Dave Barry declared it "excellent."

The Week in Loserdom

With the exception of the excitement described above, it was a quiet week in Loserland, with e-mail at near record lows. Watch for an increase in Loser activity once those darn Olympics are finally over.

Results of Week XXXI

Summary: Week XXXI^* Ink was spread widely, with no Loser hitting more than twice. As expected, the contest was punctuated with highly clever, but not particularly funny entries. The Weak Week stands by this assessment, period.

The Siberian Express: The Editorial Junta had a difficult time awarding this week's passage to the permafrost. As mentioned above, all of this week's entries lack a quality we professional e-journalists describe as "humor" and none of the HMs stood apart from the rest. Our eyes, however, kept returning to the Eclipses entry by Mike Genz, and it was selected on a split decision. While Eclipses was not any better than the rest, it had a certain vague appeal. It was a short time later that we realized that appeal was attributable to the fact that it is identical to an entry submitted by The Weak Week's editor-in-chief. Legal action is, for a change, not expected.

Score Losers: Sue Lin Chong became the sixteenth Loser to reach double-digits for year, while Ned Bent made it half-way to his coveted roll of pennies with his twenty-fifth career appearance. On the year's leader board, Jennifer Hart's lead slipped to single-digit for the first time in months. The calendar is, however, ticking. With just twenty-one weeks' results left to go, Ma Hart needs only a couple of dominant showings to ice the first LOTY of the restoration.

Week XXXV

The Weak Week Prediction: Week XXXV is a classic format and prior Hyphen contests have favored the regulars. Tom Witte has a tradition of doing well with this contest, as does Dave Zarrow.

The Weak Week Word to the Wise (WWWW) : The key to hyphens is work. Pick a story that looks to have interesting hemi-words, list them all on a sheet of paper, and start mixing and matching. Many contestants will focus on the first section and Metro (and, of course, Style) but a wider range of words can often be found in Outlook, Sports, Book World, and even Travel.

Messing With The Czar: This week's challenge was going to be to submit entries from the Czar's article in the Sunday Magazine. We note, however, that he cleverly left his own work nearly hyphen free, making the challenge a bit too. . . challenging. Oh well, do your best.

Russ to Judgment: On a one-seventeen scale, sixteen being best, Week XXXV gets:

While the results of Hyphen the Terrible are often great, it lacks originality and has one of the worst effort-to-ink ratios ever.

On this date in Sophistry

Sunday, September 24, 1995 (Week: 132). Losers were asked to describe the back of the T-shirt that featured the man in a tub tossing a toaster. A bejeweled fez was won, three weeks later, by George C. Montgomery. That same day, Sarah Worcester (Gaymon) was declared the winner of Week 129 for her adaptation of the film Sorry, Wrong Number.

Read more Weak Weeks

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