proudly resents ...

The Week in Loserdom:

Week LII, the final contest of the first restoration year, is upon us. Exactly when the Style year ends is, however, debatable. In addition to ending on January 21st, one can make a case for January 29th (the last day to submit entries for Year I) or for February 18th (the day the results of Week LII will be printed). The Washington Post (which recently demonstrated its inability to master the use of a calendar by failing to comprehend that completing two thousand years requires you to, well, complete the two-thousandth year) further muddied the water by adopting a calendar year approach in its ratings. Even before the odd restarting of their credits, the Post's statistics were routinely inaccurate and widely ignored by the regular Losers.

Results of Week XLVIII

Summary: The Week XLVIII^* (Explain the Idiom) was one TWW thought would be tough and the space required to print each entry ensured that ink would be scarce. We seem to have been wrong on both counts. The Czar packed lots of entries into the standard amount of space (mostly by giving the new contest very little room) and he found many fine entries to print.

The Siberian Express: Driving that train, high on the smell of bumper stickers, is John Held for his "Drunk as a skunk" dig at journalists. The Czar gave out just one Loser shirt this week; it should have been at least two.

Score Losers: With just four week's results left to be printed for Year I, several Losers face the potential for milestones. Here is a quick list of what the top dozen for the year still have to shoot for:

• Hart hits a new record with every ink, but needs 18 more to average 2.5 for the year.
• Beland needs 3 to tie (4 to pass) Genser's old record of 96 inks in a single year.
• Doyle needs 3, and Genser 4, to reach a 1.5 average for the year.
• Witte needs 10 to tie (11 to break) his personal best of 80 inks in a year.
• Paul needs just 1 to tie (2 to break) his personal best of 63 inks for a year.
• Smith needs 13 more to break his personal best since Year 2.
• Sullivan needs 5 more inks to DOUBLE her previous best of 30 inks in a year.
• Romm needs 5 to reach a 1.0 average and 7 to break his previous best.
• Genz needs 5 more to reach 75 career inks.
• Hull and Sorensen each needs 4 inks to reach a 0.5 average for the year.

Week LII (A touch of Ginger):

This week's challenge is to describe what the secret over-hyped miracle invention will turn out to be. TWW is pretty sure it knows what both the invention and this contest will prove to be: bombs.

The Weak Week Prediction: After last week's contest, the hardest of the restoration, this week looks comparatively easy. Still, we expect a lot of frustrated Losers with really good entries few and far between.

The Weak Week Word to the Wise (WWWW) : TWW thinks this contest would have been better if it had been to have someone famous offer ideas about what Ginger should be. WWWW is that entries along these lines could prove fruitful. Try sending in an entry by Dan Quayle, Pee Wee Herman, or anyone else that strikes you. Hey, it can't hurt.

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

TWW has found itself second guessing its ratings recently (a very bad trait in a critic). It all started two weeks ago when we gave a lowly two to the gender a noun contest and decided, a few days later, that it deserved something much higher. We perhaps over compensated by giving the benefit of the doubt (and a rating of three) to last week's contest which proved to be, let us say, a huge pile of crap. Now we are faced with another contest that is somewhere in the poor range and left completely unsure of the rating to assign. On the feeble grounds that this week is, if nothing else, better than last week, it gets its four.

How Cool the Drool: On a one-five scale (where five is a stuffed mongoose) this week's Republican flag gets a:

What, exactly, are we supposed to do with eighteen square feet of Republican flag?

The Week Link: The End of the Original Year 1

Week 52 asked Losers to offer bad choices for celebrity endorsements. The ultimate winner was none other than Chuck Smith with "John Wayne Bobbit for Microsoft." Chuck won a framed Rocky Marciano poster. Nick Dieman, who had suggested the contest, got the first runner-up (in those days, just another shirt) with "The Jackson Family for Chock Full O'Nuts." Perhaps more interesting, Week 52 generated no special comment from the Czar (at least not in print).

A fourth moon away: Pick-up Lines
A half moon away: Male/Female
Three-fourths of a moon away: Cartoons from hell

Read more Weak Weeks

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