The Invitational Week 106: Heigh-ho!

Off to work you go: Give us some new dwarfs. Plus, fresh takes on recent contests.

Hello!

Question of the day: Is it “dwarfs” or “dwarves”?

Answer of the day: It is “dwarfs,” but “dwarves” is listed by most dictionaries as a secondary alternative.

Follow-up question of the day: Why both?

Follow-up answer of the day: Almost entirely because of J.R.R. Tolkien. Both Snow White and The Hobbit were released in 1937, and Tolkien evidently sought a distinction. A philologist, he later sheepishly admitted that “dwarves” was a made-up plural he called his “private bad grammar.” It caught on, possibly because it echoed other accepted such plurals of words ending in “f” — “shelf” and “shelves,” for example, and, more germanely, “elf” and “elves.” So.

Extraneous but patriotic fact of the day: Snow White, the movie, was released fourscore and seven years ago.

On to the contest.

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Cheeky has a big behind, and he habitually butts into conversations.

Doxx is a real vindictive bastard.

Outie got rid of his beard. He feels that he finally can be his authentic self.

Creepy wears mirrors on the tops of his shoes and likes mixing and mingling at cocktail parties.

For Invitational Week 106: Create an eighth dwarf, à la those in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and come up with a name and a sentence or two describing him (or her) as in the examples above. This contest was suggested by longtime Loser Stu Segal.

Important! It’s inevitable that with the many hundreds of entries we usually receive, some of you will think of the same names (or even use one of the names above, which is OK). So it might come down to the most entertaining descriptions.

Deadline is Saturday, Jan. 18, 2025, at 9 p.m. ET. Results will run here in The Gene Pool on Thursday, Jan. 23. As usual, you may submit up to 25 entries for this week’s contest, preferably all on the same form.

Formatting this week: Please begin each entry with the name you suggest, with the description following on the same line (i.e., don’t push Enter until you’re finished that particular entry). That way we can sort and compare similar entries.

Click here for this week’s entry form, or go to tinyurl.com/inv-form-106.

This week’s winner receives a uterus — a little plush one that grips a winsome white ovary in each of her fallopian tubes. Offered up by Egg Donor Dave Prevar.

Perfect for Valentine’s day in so many ways: This week’s prize.

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.

Last call! The Loser Post-Holiday Party, our annual winter potluck/singalong/ yakfest for Invitational players and fans, will go down on Sunday afternoon, Jan. 26, at Mount Vermin, the Empress’s dacha in suburban Maryland. Write to BrunchOfLosers@gmail.com for details; sign up by Jan. 15 so we can get a head count.

Jest a Second: New ink from last year’s contests, Part 2

In Invitational Week 104 we invited you to enter (or reenter) any of twenty-four Invite contests from the past six months or so. As in last week’s retrospective, some of this week’s winners are highly inkworthy entries that we robbed of ink the first time around.

Third runner-up:
From Week 82, rhyme a Taylor Swift line with your own:
’Cause I’m a real tough kid I can handle my shit
Which is what you have to do with this Cologuard kit.
(William Kennard, Arlington, Va.)

Second runner-up:
From Week 84, to “improve” a sport:
Formula 1: On every lap, drivers would have to navigate around an elderly couple in a 2004 Oldsmobile. (Steve Smith, Potomac, Md.)

First runner-up:
From Week 87, to change a famous quote and attribute it to someone else:
“There but for the grace of God go me.” — Cookie Monster
(Lee Graham, Reston, Va.)

And the winner of the Dogs Pooping in Beautiful Places calendar:
From Week 87, change a quote:
“Weed the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union . . .” — Donald Trump
(Jon Gearhart, Des Moines)

Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

As always, if you think the best among today’s inking entries were unjustly buried in the honorable mentions, shout out your favorites in the comments.

Sequel Opportunity: Honorable mentions

Week 78, couplets about history

Columbus “discovered” America in 1492:
But that holiday in October, Chris, no longer mentions you. (Rob Cohen, Potomac, Md.)

Week 80, compare any two items on the random list supplied

A tube of Crest: Tastes great.
Shrinkflation: Less filling. (Neil Kurland, Elkridge, Md.)

A Chat GPT love letter vs. a tube of Crest: One is a product of florid prose, the other of fluoride pros. (Steve Smith)

Week 82, rhyme a Taylor Swift line with your own

Now I’m down bad, crying at the gym —
Fifteen minutes on the treadmill and I’m still not fit and slim!
(Jonathan Jensen, Baltimore)

No one in my small town thought I’d see the lights of Manhattan,
Yet here I am at Kansas State, studying code formattin’. (Pam Shermeyer, Lathrup Village, Mich.)

Somehow I brought home bedbugs from the Poconos.
Now I want to sell my house and set fire to all my clothes (Marni Penning Coleman, Falls Church, Va.)

Each night I dream about his schlong.
Is that a bad thing to say in a song?
(Judy Freed, Deerfield Beach, Fla.)

Week 83, define various nonsense phrases

Bang-whiz: Kraft Foods introduces its new, cheesier personal lubricant. (Stephen Dudzik, Olney, Md.)

Bong bong bong boing: The death knell of Big Ben. (Neil Kurland)

Tock-Tick Tock-Tick: Project 2025's mission to turn back time. (Judy Freed)

Gliddy glub gloopy, nubby nobby noopy: From the Ancient Book of Spells, Constipation Section, what precedes “bring forth now a giant poopy”? (Jon Ketzner, Cumberland, Md.)

Week 84, ‘improve’ a sport

NASCAR: Race with your choice of iPhone, ceramic coffee mug, or child’s car seat on top of your car roof. DQ if it falls. (Stephen Dudzik)

Replace the batons in Olympic track relays with something reflecting the host city or country: In Paris, they pass the baguettes; Los Angeles, the Oscars; Amsterdam, the dildos. (Jeff Rackow, Bethesda, Md.)

Week 85, limericks featuring a word beginning ‘hu-’ or ‘hy-’

Robert Mapplethorpe’s praises are sung,
But my ma? Well, she just bit her tongue.
Saw his work on my wall
And her face said it all
Save this comment: “At least it’s well hung.”
(Mark Raffman, Reston, Va.)

The Hulk looks disturbingly trim;
He's cut down on his trips to the gym.
To the shock of his fans,
This green monster has plans
To become the Incredible Slim.
(Chris Doyle, Denton, Tex.)

Week 86, names for pets

Porcupine: Anita Hug (Pam Shermeyer)

Badger: Hector (Roy Ashley, Washington, D.C.)

Snake: Henry Wadsworth. (Jesse Frankovich, Laingsburg, Mich.)

Frog: Rosie the Ribbiter. (Duncan Stevens, Vienna, Va.)

Pigeon: Coup Coup Bird, one of the peaceful doves that shit on the Capitol. (Kevin Dopart, Naxos, Greece)

Week 87, change a quote and attribute it to someone else

“Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent immigration.” — Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (Mark Raffman)

“You billed my father. Prepare to die.” — Luigi Mangione (Judy Freed)

“Now is the winter of our disconnect.” — Comcast subscriber (William Kennard)

“You’re gonna need a bigger coat.” — Your mother (Eric Nelkin, Silver Spring, Md.)

“You’re gonna need a bigger boa.” — RuPaul (Rob Cohen)

“The People United Will Never Be Defecated!” — Detective Robert Thorn of “Soylent Green” (Stephen Dudzik)

Week 89, compare two people with the same initials

Tommy Tutone: Phone number 867-5309. Tommy Tuberville: IQ 8.675309. (Duncan Stevens)

Week 91, tips on being thrifty

Forgo condoms. Jeez, they’re up to more than a dollar each these days. (Jesse Rifkin, Arlington, Va.)

When your kid needs wheels for building a toy car, remember — shopping carts are only a quarter at Aldi. (Jon Gearhart)

Week 92, haiku about current events

They found Gaetz paid for
Sex and drugs — and that's just the
Tip of the viceberg.
(Jesse Frankovich)

Week 93, Ask Backwards: Follow one of the ‘answers’ with a question

A. A children’s book by RFK Jr.
Q. What is “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, Then Bake 45 Minutes?” (Duncan Stevens)

A. Bond. Percival Bond.
Q. Who did MI6 assign to keep an eye on Her Majesty's silver service? (Chris Doyle)

Week 94, jokes that require erudite or specialized knowledge

Q. Why did Bullwinkle seek counseling?
A. His assapanick was out of control.*
*Assapanick is another name for a flying squirrel. (Mark Raffman)

Q. What might a classics professor say if you ask him for a conjugal moment?
A. “I decline.”*
*Different noun forms in classical languages are called declensions, and enumerating the various cases within them is called declining; verb families are called conjugations. (Duncan Stevens)

Week 96, coin a word from a 7-letter ‘rack’ from the ScrabbleGrams game

AANSWYY > YAY, SWAN: Inappropriate response to a swan song (Duncan Stevens)

Week 99, change the meaning of a headline by adding a ‘bank head’

Real headline: Apple agrees to $95 million settlement
Bank head: Banana on wall demands $89 million more (William Kennard)

The Container Store files for bankruptcy amid stiff competition
Box biz snuffed by casket biz (Dan Steinbrocker, Los Angeles)

The pain of giving up on Ye
Colonial Williamsburg actors reluctantly agree to call visitors ‘you’ instead (Duncan Stevens)

A year without Ye
Ar
(Jeff Contompasis, Ashburn, Va.)

Should you trust an AI-assisted doctor?
Sure, says our AI bank head generator (Jeff Contompasis)

How to calm your mind with breathing, according to science
Not breathing causes stress, agitation in most humans, study finds (Mark Raffman)

Week 100, predictions for the year 2124

Service droids sigh every time Alexa tells them: “When I was your age, I could speak only when spoken to!” (Steve Smith)

Week 101, ‘X is so Y …’ jokes

X is so evil, even Elphaba has moved to Bluesky. (Marni Penning Coleman)

Week 102, predictions for 2025

Jan. 20, 2025: A 7.1 magnitude earthquake rocks the Mid-Atlantic region. Its epicenter is traced to George Washington’s grave. (Steve Smith)

And Last

Week 89, people with the same initials:
Paul McCartney: “Maybe I’m Amazed.”
Pat Myers: Maybe I’m amused. (Jesse Frankovich)

The headline “Jest a Second” is by Judy Freed; Kevin Dopart wrote the honorable-mentions subhead.

Still running — deadline 9 p.m. ET Saturday, Jan. 11: our Week 105 contest, to write a humorous poem about someone who died in 2024. Click on the link below.

The Invitational Week 105: Dead Letters

We now enter the celebrated Real-Time segment of the Invitational Gene Pool, where Gene reads your questions and observations and responds to them in the aforementioned Real Time. That means you can keep sending QUestions, Observations, Telling Anecdotes to our newly named QUOTA button. And if you are reading it in real time, remember to keep refreshing your screen for new questions and answers.

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Also, we are a shoestring operation, by which we mean we abhor Velcro on shoes. They are unfashionable. So are we, but in a good way. We need paid subscribers to survive. Please consider upgrading your subscription to '“paid.” It’s $4.15 a month.

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Q: Okay, I will say it. The cartoon situation at The Post may be as bad as you report, but I suggest that the cartoon in question is just a poor one, unlike much of Ann Telnaes's work. It was obvious, overly simplistic, and even when it is spelled out I don't fully understand it. Is Mickey Mouse dead? Why? Does one of the supplicants have a lipstick? Or is it a bloody box cutter with which she has killed Mickey?

A: Hahaha. I love the box-cutter guess.

I shall endeavor to assist you with your interpretive skills.

First, it is a very good cartoon BECAUSE of its simplicity. That gives it a hammer.

Second, Mickey is there because his bosses at Disney recently paid out $15 million to Trump to settle a lawsuit they could have won. Mickey is not dead. He is prostrating himself before his new God, like this.

Third, that is not a box cutter. It is, indeed, a tube of lipstick. It is not being held by a woman, it is being held by a man, Patrick Soon-Shiong, publisher of the LA Times, who ordered his paper not to endorse a presidential candidate because he knew they were going to endorse Harris. The reason you thought he was a woman was because of his puckered, bee-stung lips. They were puckered to put a smooch on Trump’s ass, and lipsticked because he wanted to leave a smoochypoo behind. I am sure of all this.

That’s it.

TIMELY TIP: If you’re reading this on an email: Just click on the headline in the email and it will deliver you to the full column online. Keep refreshing the screen to see the new questions and answers that appear as I regularly update the post in real time.

Here we go.

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Q: Regarding the idea of quitting a journalism job in protest. I worked years ago for a midsize newspaper. I was a business reporter. I wrote a front page story that profiled the largest supermarket chain in the state. I documented everything. All the editors read and approved its publication. Basically, the lede described the company as a pack of hungry wolves that ranged over their territory, chewed up price margins and frightened competitors. But when the company CEO read it, he demanded verbal apologies from the publisher and the editor. He wanted a written apology from me. The publisher and editor verbally apologized. I was told to write an apology. I refused. It was made clear to me if I didn't write an apology, I would lose my job.

I drove home to tell my wife I had to quit, and we would lose the house we had just bought. But I stopped by to see the previous editor of the paper. He had hired me. I told him what I faced. He asked me what did they ask me to do. "Write a letter of apology," I told him. He said the operative words were "write a letter." "It's your letter. Write what you want," he said. I wrote a letter to the CEO. I told him my article had been fair and accurate. And I offered to talk to him about it. The editor wanted to include an apology. I refused. He sent letter to the CEO. The CEO responded: "What's this?" He again demanded an apology. I refused again. The publisher wanted to see me. The publisher told me the annual advertising contract was up for renewal. It amounted to a lot of money. I told him that it wasn't my problem. I said that if the advertising was good for his business, he would renew. If it wasn't, he wouldn't. The publisher, obviously frustrated, threw me out of his office.

The CEO renewed the contract, without any apology from me. When I went to cover the company's annual meeting a couple of months later, I went up to introduce myself to the CEO. I told him I worked for the local newspaper. He smiled. He told me to keep up the good work.

--Aly Colón

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A: Thank you, Aly. I know and admire your work.

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Q: Philip K. Dick: "Reality is that which does not go away when one stops believing in it."

A: Elegant.

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Q: Milos Forman told this story at a national press club luncheon. He said that a friend of his, a Czech humorist, did jail time for this joke. The milieu is the soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring in 1968. A guy comes running out of a bar, runs up to a police officer and says, "Help, a Swiss soldier just stole my Russian watch." The police officer says, "Don't you mean that the other way around?" "YOU said it," the guy responds. Speaking of the other way around, as we approach the presidential term of someone who demands that his word is the key to correct reality, I recommend that anyone so inclined start keeping a secret journal. Report to yourself about what's happening. Have fun--make a code, use fancy ink and special notebooks. Share your inventiveness, but keep the journal secret. When morning breaks and we start sharing, it will be such a fascinating study to see what in the reports can be objectively verified, and also to see how different the takes of even like-minded people can be. — John Hibbits

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A: Thank you, excellent.

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This is Gene. I just realized that I need to confess that I sometimes sprinkle slices of raw apple with sugar. Thank you. We now return to questions and answers.

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Q: Gene, I cancelled my subscriptions to both the Washington Post and LA Times when the owners decided not to let their papers endorse a presidential candidate. I'm still not sure if this was the right thing to do! Am I hurting the journos more than the owners by cancelling? – John K.

A: Yes, you are. Increasingly, newspapers are in the hands of people who are not, and have never been, journalists. They are business tycoons. They see money, not principles. If you cancel a subscription to a paper, you are lowering their bottom line, and because they see what they do as a business, not a duty to the public, that tells them to retrench, which often means layoffs. They do not stop to think, even for a moment, that this is their fault.

This reminds me of a wonderful line by Dave Barry, in response to a writer who wondered whether the owners of huge yachts realized that they were inconveniencing hundreds of people every time a drawbridge had to open to let them through. Dave’s answer was: “They don’t know you are there.”

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Q: In large part thanks to your reporting, I've just canceled my subscription to the Post. For the first time in 38 years, I won't have a daily newspaper delivered to my home.How do you suggest filling the gap, to stay informed on issues of local, national, and international importance?

A: I would counsel putting all your eggs in one basket: Take whatever subscription money you have saved, and send it to

Q: Monica Hesse is such a beautiful writer and writes so thoughtfully and convincingly that I did not realize, until today, that her column was about "Gender". (I missed the 2018 announcement.) Now that it's been brought to my attention, I realize that she frequently wrote about the news with an eye toward gendered experience, but that fact rarely stood out in the moment. She just made sense. I can't imagine any explanation for ending her assignment at this moment in time that is not dark and ominous. What's more, I'm sure the explanation, when offered, will come from a man who will be or profess to be quite oblivious to why women will read it differently from what he purports to mean by it. Reflecting on that, I was reminded of Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings. A bunch of white Republican men had the audacity to grill her on whether she could be fair to not-Latino-not-male persons given that they are different from her -- a concern they have never once expressed (before or since) when questioning a white male nominee. Because, you know, white men are the norm and everyone else is a deviation. I guess it was always a pipe dream to imagine that Jeff Bezos would value the Washington Post for what it was more than for what he could use it to do for himself, but it's still a bitter disappointment to watch it being destroyed like this before the Orange Overlord is even sworn in.

A: I agree with all of this. I very much doubt that The Post wants Monica to leave. They know how good she is. I think it is likely that she will stay, in a job she wants, assuming she wants to do that. I’m hoping that she will be writing on the same subject. She is the best there is at that: Her voice, her values, her writing.

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Q: Hi Gene! I’m so proud of Jimmy Carter dying just in time to force DC flags at half staff on Jan 20th. That’s yet another gift to us all and a fitting last commentary from a good man who no doubt hated Trump as much as we do.

A: “Hate” is such an ugly word. I’d propose that we find a more nuanced one. Like abhor, despise, detest, loathe, abominate, anathematize, contemn, curse, disdain, execrate, nauseate …

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This is Gene. Trevor Irvin wrote into yesterday’s overnight Gene Pool that after the Charlie Hebdo murders he drew a cartoon that went pretty viral, and even made it to France, but angered some people here. I asked him if he’d share it with you, and he said sure. Here it is. We’ll end with this.

Please keep writing in Questions and Observations. I need them here.

See you on the weekend or before.