P"R"Z: I'm an adult male of European extraction ("white," well, I got this really nasty sunburn in California and it hasn't completely gone away). I am a full-time employee of the Post. My title is something like Nightside News Aide/Music Assistant-Style. God and a couple of administrators only know for sure. Zanko IS my real name.

TWW: And your blood type is what?

P"R"Z: My mother tells me it's O positive. That would put me in the plurality of human beings. I kind of wish I had one of those spanking cool blood types, like AB negative. But O positive is good donor blood, so at least I know that if I'm ever short of beer money...

TWW: Right-handed or left?

P"R"Z: Will you stop with the toughies? Seriously. I write with my right, throw with my right, and play guitar right-handed, so I guess that is dominant. But I eat (you know, use utensils) with my left most of the time as well as bat and play hockey left-handed. I've got a really nasty left hook and tend to jab with my right, but frankly I could kick anybody's ass with no arms at all.

TWW: OK, enough of that. By what process does one become the Czar's flunky?

P"R"Z: I've told this story so many times that it hurts to even start it again. I'll give you the short version: slept my way into it. A little bit of elaboration? The Czar's flunky is traditionally the responsibility of the person in my position. Peter Hayes held this job for a long time, and Michael Farquhar before him. I believe David Jackson did it for a while, though he was always the guy who was responsible for assisting the TV writers and compiling the daily listings (not a fun job, believe me). Rumor has it that there were a string of failures between Hayes and myself, which is why there was a massive spurt of mailing when I came aboard in the summer of '99. I had a lot of catching up to do. There are assistant flunkies. They basically help me out when I'm doing other people's stuff.

TWW: We know you mail out the prizes and keep the on-line Loser scoring for the Post, but there must be more to your job. What else do you do?

P"R"Z: I'm the guy that guards this joint at night, I assign the music reviews, I do the TV listings when the normal guy is sick, I get all of the art for the section when others are sick, I fix machines, I write the Names & Faces column sometimes, and I provide light-hearted anecdotes for work-obsessed journalists. And I send out crap to you people.

TWW: Speaking of crap, how soon before we start seeing the new "Hangman" shirts? Will they be a reasonable color?

P"R"Z: Well, it was an ill-timed contest since I've recently restocked with hundreds of the intentionally-ugly yellow things, but the Czar, kidder that he is, decided to have the "design a new shirt" contest on Week XL. Get it? We'll probably get some prototypes in the not-too-distant future. As for the color... I've made a point of designing bad shirts, because frankly I believe in punishing Losers. (Actually, I looked back and noticed that yellow was a color we hadn't gotten yet). The Czar would like a better shirt, with a three-color scheme and all that. I'm trying to decide whether the primary should be some sort of purple or perhaps a vicious pink. Yeah, you heard me, pink shirts.

TWW: While we're on the topic of prizes, are first runner-up pens ever going to be mailed out again?

P"R"Z: It takes weeks for those things to arrive. Of course, we have to order them first. That has much to do with the fact that they come from a faraway mail order joint. Also, I can't blow half of the Style section's budget at once buying this junk only to send it to the same 15 people every week (well, that's how it's perceived). So I pace my orders. On that topic, I do want to point out that many of you have not received bumper stickers recently. There's a very, very good reason for that. As with all things, I have a limited supply of them, so what I've done recently is only send them to first-timers or extremely infrequent Losers in order to satisfy them. I figure that even the most humorless of Losers (Beland, Hull, Dudzik, etc.... yeah you, Dudzik) can understand that, since most of you probably have a few dozen stockpiled anyway. I do this without a guilty conscience because Chuck Smith once told me that he just throws his out. I'm sure he's not alone. When I get more, especially if there's a new design, I'll resume sending them to the Top 20. Yeah, the rankings do come in handy sometimes.

TWW: Does the Czar ever seek your help or advise in picking entries?

P"R"Z: Not really. The Uncle doesn't either. If an entry does jump out at me, I'll mention it to him, but that usually only happens, like, once a month, if that. With all due respect, the real joy of F2 is on Thursdays when Richard Thompson couriers over his cartoon and a bunch of us gather round and laugh at it. Loudly.

TWW: You've used the name Rasputin at times, do you object to the term "flunky?"

P"R"Z: It's not that this a bad task, it's just a boring, lame, dumb, something-a-coked-up-monkey-could-do task and I need to find humor in it somewhere. "Rasputin, the Czar's trust[ed] assistant," is obvious but it works. I don't have any particular problem with the title "flunky," except that it reminds me of how underpaid I am.

TWW: Ok, we'll start calling you "Flunky" again. If you were looking for a new job at a different paper, how would you describe all this on your resume?

P"R"Z: A new job at a different paper? Why would I do that? This is the greatest newspaper in the world, full of groundbreaking features, in-depth coverage, humor, insight, cool graphics... I could go on, but why bother? You, sir, should know damn well what I'm saying.

OK, truth is, I probably wouldn't even mention it until I was being interviewed, and even then it would be at the point where the interviewer says, "Wow, Mr. Zanko, you really are something special!!! We'd love to have you as our executive editor, but under penalty of death and/or dismemberment, is there anything else we should know?"

TWW: During a typical week, the Invitational must get several hundred e-mails, faxes, and letters. How do all those get processed and filed, and such?

P"R"Z: One big pile, kept in a leather bag, passed on to the Uncle, then over to me.

TWW: Wait a moment here. Are you suggesting the Uncle is a separate individual? If so, who is it? Bob Woodward maybe?

P"R"Z: The Uncle is indeed a seperate individual... who wishes to remain anonymous. I can give you one hint... he makes more than myself, the Czar, Staake, and [weekend Style editor Tom] Shroder combined. Of course, the Czar isn't in it for the money.

Note: The Weak Week pressed the Czar for additional information concerning the possibility of the Uncle being a separate person. His reply: "I am not permitted to comment about the Uncle. It is the only material restriction placed upon me by Len Downie [excutive editor of the washington post.]"

TWW: Every now and then the Czar has been known to misattribute an entry or, more commonly, not give credit to everyone who sent in the same (or virtually the same) entry. Is this unavoidable or is the Czar just a lazy, sloppy goof-off, or both?

P"R"Z: I'll give the Czar the benefit of the doubt and say mistakes happen, but he's not afraid to point out, as he did in the last What Kind of Foal am I? contest, that there will be several of the same entries. Understand that there's only so much room for the contest, and that wasting space on every single name makes the column boring for readers who don't stay up all night waiting for it to arrive in their driveways so they can get a jump on trying to be funny. Sometimes he'll memo me and tell me, you know, send a sticker here or a shirt there, but not that often. There's a bit of luck, I suppose.

TWW: When the Czar's body is found floating in the Anacostia, riddled with toothpick wounds, will you take over judging the contest? What would you call yourself? What would a typical contest be under your rein?

P"R"Z: The Czar was appointed by God himself, and that screws things up for me because I dig Satan. I don't think there's an actual line of succession, though I can rule out Dick Cheney and Tony Kornheiser. Now, if I were the Czar, the big change I would make is I would force people to self-edit. The most pathetic thing Losers do is enter their entire streams-of-conscience, and force the Czar to decide what's funny before he decides what's actually funny. Several of you do it, most of your entries aren't remotely humorous, just dumb, and that irks me. I'd probably institute a limit, the so-called Hart-Carnahan-Flake Act (you see, I can play too), which would limit entries to ten a week or something like that. Oh, and I'd hire a crack hit squad, armed with the finest in former Soviet weapons, to "take out" any Loser who complains.

A typical contest wouldn't be much different, though I might do more variations on the "forced pun" contests and the like. Most of us in the office agree that the best we've seen all year was the "What's the beginning of a sentence you don't want to hear the end of..." contest, probably because it wasn't that hard but still required one to be clever and witty.

TWW: Do you have a favorite Loser?