The Invitational Week 100!

... which we celebrate with a centennial contest

AN INFLATABLE SLICE OF PUMPKIN PIE!

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Hello. Happy Thanksgiving. We’ll be quick with this one so you can get busy eatin’ and excretin’.

We confess that when we resurrected the Style Invitational contest in these newer, narrower confines in January 2023 after its assassination by The Washington Post, we weren’t sure that with a smaller, subscriber-only entrant pool, we’d still have the firepower left to run funny, inventive, daring results week after week.

You’ve pulled it off. It turned out that the readers who moved with us, as well as those of you who’ve contributed since then, are largely a distillate of the very best. You make us proud. We feel secure.

So, to celebrate Week 100, we look ahead. Waaay ahead.

Give us your predictions about some things that might be happening 100 years from now, in 2124.

We actually did a similar contest once before, on Feb. 29, 2004, when we calculated that there wouldn’t be another leap-day Invitational until Feb. 29, 2032, so we called for predictions for that year, 28 years in the future. At the time we set up four potential categories:
— What a news headline of the day would be;
— The best-selling book;
— The most successful corporation;
— What would win The Style Invitational that week.

For Invitational Week 100: Tell us about what will be happening anytime in 2124. This time, you may use the categories above or any other you come up with. Here are some winners from 2004 (full results here):

News story: Hundreds Dead in Segway Pileup (Art Grinath)

Successful corporation: Big Al’s Smog Saws (Russell Beland)

News story: Al Qaeda Threatens Security Council Veto (Bob Dalton)

Book: Heather Has Three Mommies and One Happy Daddy (Jeff Brechlin)

This contest was suggested by Longtime Loser Marni Penning Coleman, aka Marni Penning the Stage Actress and Audiobook Narrator. As threatened promised to Week 100 contest suggestors, Marni wins an ice cream date with the Empress.

Deadline is Saturday, Dec. 7, 2024, at 9 p.m. ET. Results will run here in The Gene Pool on Thursday, Dec. 12. As usual, you may submit up to 25 entries for this week’s contest, preferably all on the same form.

Click here for this week’s entry form, or go to tinyURL.com/inv-form-100.

Formatting your entries this week: We’re back with our regular request that you write each individual entry as a single line (i.e., don’t push Enter until the end of each entry). And trust us: You won’t insult us by making it clear that your entry is that day’s news story, Invite entry, or whatever.

This week’s winner gets the fine inflatable slice of Thanksgiving pumpkin pie pictured above. We bought it at Target for $3. We will not inflate it for you.

Runners-up get autographed fake money featuring the Czar or Empress, in one of eight nifty designs. Honorable mentions get bupkis, except for a personal email from the E, plus the Fir Stink for First Ink for First Offenders.

Still running — deadline 9 p.m. ET Saturday, Nov. 30: our Week 99 contest to read a real headline as something funnier than it is, then write a “bank head” with the new interpretation. Click on the link below.

The Invitational Week 99: Mess With Our Heads

Since Pat was on vacation last week, we don’t have any Invitational results today — we’ll be back next week with our winning bank heads. Usually, what will follow below is a Real-Time segment where Gene responds to your questions and observations in Real Time. But because it’s Thanksgiving, and everyone wants to get out of here, we are publishing and responding to questions received earlier in the week. It’s all already packaged for you below. No real-time work today.

But PLEASE send your new Observations and Questions right here. We will deal with them next week.

Eat hearty, mateys.

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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Pool:

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Q: I think the gender difference in your poll where men mostly said that sexting is not cheating and most women said it is, is largely explained by (many) men feeling that sex can be enjoyed without emotional connection, and (many) women feeling otherwise. Extending that to sexting is not a stretch.

A: You are probably right, but I also should say that I got plenty of responses from people who felt otherwise; the majority of the mail disagreed with me that sexting is not really an infidelity — occasionally, angrily: This one short excerpt below is from a woman who said she was cheated on in her marriage, and who further dryly suggested that my views might be self-servingly and self-absolvingly informed by personal experiences. It is succinct and excellent, and can stand in service for all the rest:

Q: … If it is something you feel you are entitled to do in secret, without the knowledge of your partner, how is this about her “possessiveness” rather than your desire to have your cake and eat it too? Yes, I’m bitter. But you are full of it.

A: I admit to possibly being full of it. It wouldn’t be the first time.

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Q: On What is Art: Living on a farm when I was young, I saw people welding and noticed the welding on butane tanks and other large containers. To me, that work was a work of art. It took a steady hand and eye to do it so well. – G4B

A: Hm. It is great skill … but art? Doesn’t sound like there is much design and creativity involved. I do agree that craftsmanship can be so brilliantly conceived and designed that it rises to the level of art. Some furniture, for sure, is so recognized. As is some elaborate grillwork on outdoor structures. Some stone gargoyles on old buildings. The Brooklyn Bridge.

As I’ve said before, I believe the Seth Thomas #2 clock from the 19th century is art, which is why I have five of them. This is the earliest of those, from 1858, when James Buchanan was president:

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Q: Regarding the banana taped to the wall: The artist publicly fleeced a dim-witted, attention-seeking rich person who doesn't seem to realize that he's made himself ridiculous. That falls into the category of performance art, which I usually dismiss as pretentious and self-indulgent. But this, I like.

A: I agree it is performance art, and for that reason. However, there is a complication. The very wealthy winner seems to know it is essentially a joke. Still, there were SEVERAL bidders, and I doubt all of them felt in on a joke, so I think your thesis holds.

It also reminds me of that dry British joke with the punchline: “Sorry, banana in the ear, you know.”

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Q: Responding to your reader who saved the bag that a gift came in, and considered it art. The director of the Shakespeare Theatre invited playwrights to be interviewed at the Corcoran and I bought a season pass. In the Q&A I got to ask questions of famous people like Edward Albee. I asked one woman playwright what her favorite lines in one of her plays was. She had a number but she said there was one that always got an emotional response from women in the audience. After a woman’s husband had died, she was cleaning out the basement but she could not throw out a beach ball because it had her husband’s breath in it. Almost on cue, the women at the lecture sighed. Back on topic, that beach ball could be considered art. — Chuck Smith

A: Hey Chuck. Good to hear from you, and I agree. I think she could have exhibited it.

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Q: The duct-taped banana reminded me of my very first visit to the Hirshhorn museum 30+ years ago (for non-D.C. natives, this is the modern-art Smithsonian museum, and exhibits a lot of modern crap). I was attending a Smithsonian Associates class in a basement classroom of the musuem, and to get to it I had to pass, every week, past a “recent acquisition,” Richard Tuttle’s “Tan Octagon.” Here it is.

It annoyed me to see this misshapen piece of meaningless cloth mounted on a museum wall, and at some point I sent a picture of it to my sister, then an art major, with a rant about how ridiculous it is to call this “art.” She responded with a lengthy explanation of the metaphoric and spiritual message of its mismatched sides and monochromatic nothingness, all in perfect ArtSpeak, before ending with this sentence: “And to think that you thought it was just a worthless piece of cloth that cost some moron millions of wasted dollars. Shame on you.” It is still my favorite letter from her.

A: Nice!

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Q: My little gauge for izzitart is remembering a scene from the seventies. I decided that decorating a household item with loud odds and ends would be artistic. My housemate came home and I showed him my work. He said, “You're drunk. Put the toilet seat back on.” —John Hibbits

A: Excellent.

Q: “Is it Art?” The question brings to mind a now-deceased friend, the WYPR radio commentator Art Buist. He is still Art in the memories of all who knew him, but since he has left the realm of the living, he is no longer Art. So: is it art or isn't it? Yes, and no.

– Bryan Crockett

A: It’s both at the same time, a paradox of quantum physics, like Schrodinger’s Cat!

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This is Gene. It just occurred to me that one of the highlights of my professional career was in a column I wrote about Thanksgiving. I shall revisit it here:

Of the roughly 379,502 words I have assembled into 22,712 sentences in 11 years of column writing, I have reluctantly concluded that only a single line — a hyphenated dependent clause published on Dec. 18, 2005 — is so good it cannot possibly be improved upon. It was in a column about a plumber who saved my Thanksgiving — I was hosting 12 people and at the last minute a clogged toilet somehow stopped all flow of water to the house (the clog began in the outside water pipe). After a half-hour of high-tech fiddling, the plumber abandoned his fancy tools that hadn’t worked; he picked up an old-fashioned rubber plumber’s helper, stood over my clogged toilet like a colossus, plunging it madly with all his might, turning himself into a human piston. It worked, with a giant sucking sound. The plumber, I wrote, was a modern-day John Henry, “a stool-drivin’ man.”

Okay, it’s time. You are free to go. Happy Thanksgiving.

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Observations, questions here:

And comments here:

And alms for the needy here:

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