The Invitational Week 170: Ask Backwards XLVI

A contest so classic it has four Roman numerals. Plus a look back at another vintage challenge.

Just a few weeks ago, to orgasmic public reaction, The Invitational announced a permanent change to its 33-year-old format: We would begin with the results of the previous contest, then follow it with the announcement of the new contest. But this week, and this week only, we are reverting to the old form — for the simple reason that we don’t have any new results this week; for vacation reasons, we didn’t offer a new contest two weeks ago.

Do not despair. We’ve got something special down below to replace it. You’ll just have to wait a sec.

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• Rambo and Juliet

• X Marks the Spot

• The Night of the Guano

• A bacon, lettuce, and NATO sandwich

• It can be found only in Istanbul and RFK Jr.’s house.

• That’s what he said

• That’s what Xi said

• The Battle of Bull Shit

• Wynken, Blynken, and God

• Other than a cat, no one

• Just a typo

• Trump’s finest hour

• A better motto for the new, streamlined Washington Post.

• One Bottle After Another

• It was found in Kash Patel’s Email

For Invitational Week 170: Choose one of the “answers” listed above and follow it with a question it might humorously answer. See the contest itself for links to a couple of our 44 previous Ask Backwards contests.

Important formatting instructions! Write each “answer” — in full, just as written above — followed by your question on the same line, just like the following examples, which are the top winners of our last Ask Backwards contest. Do not press Enter between the answer and the question.

A. A French fry and a French kiss. Q. What might Donald Trump proudly serve you, whether or not you actually want it? (Judy Freed)

A. Karoline Leavitt’s lectern. Q. Where can one hide a wee nip o’ Kool-Aid? (Barbara Turner)

A. The first thing RFK Jr. does in the morning. Q. What are fifty don’t-know squats? (Jonathan Paul)

A. One of those thin eyeglass-cleaning wipes. Q. What do they use as a towel at the ICE detention center? (Kevin Dopart)

Deadline is Saturday, April 11, 2026, at 9 p.m. ET. Results will run here in The Gene Pool on Thursday, April 14. 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-170.

This week’s winner gets these gotta-laugh-at-’em headrest covers for your car. They look both forward and back — in pretty good 2-D trompe l’oeil — but they slip on and off easily if your passenger is the freaks-out type.

Just the thing for a driverless car.

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.

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Good. Now, brace for the nostalgia.

We’d suggested that we would publish, this week, the second half of the winners of the re-engineered Donald Trump SOTU speech, but we’re actually postponing that for reasons closeted in mystery, reasons too enigmatic to reveal. They’ll arrive soon.

Instead, below are the results of a contest from the very first year of The Style Invitational, back in October 1993, in The Washington Post. We liked the results a lot then, and still do.

All that follows is from 33 years ago:

Report from Week 29, in which we asked you for unfortunate advertising slogans.

Yeah, yeah. We know. “Eureka Vacuum Cleaners: We Really Suck.” And “Miami: A Vacation to Die For.” Our rule of thumb is that if more than two people come up with the same idea, regardless of its wit, it flunks the originality test. So we cannot honor by name the four entrants who submitted this most excellent slogan: “Denny’s. For People With Discriminating Taste.”

Fourth Runner-Up: Saturn Motor Co. “Remember That First Car of Your Dreams? We Recall Ours.” (Kurt Rabin)

Third Runner-Up: Lincoln. “The Cadillac of Cars.” (Gary Patishnock)

Second Runner-Up: Trojan Condoms. “It's the One Your Father Used.” (Christina Bahl)

First Runner-Up: Sears Auto Repair. “No Problem, We'll Fix It.” (Geoff and Jacki Drucker)

And the winner of the life-size inflatable moose head:
The Hubble Telescope Corp.: “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet!” (Tom Gearty)

Honorable Mentions:

Aquaban Diuretic: “We’re Number One!” (Tom Gearty)

Otis Elevators: “We Won’t Let You Down.” (Mary Ann Curtin; Geoff and Jacki Drucker)

R.J. Reynolds Tobacco: “A Growth Industry.” (Susan Wenger)

Amtrak: “Take the Plunge!” (David M. Howe)

Cellular One Telephone: “We Don’t Give You a Lot of Talk.” (Michael Scott)

“Switch to Clearasil. Break Out From the Pack.” (Michael Scott)

Suzuki Samurai: “You'll Flip Over Our Low Prices.” (Sheryl Katz; Katherine Fink)

Midas Brakes: “There's No Stopping Us Now!” (Ed Leonardo; Paul F. Krause)

Bell Atlantic Cellular Phones: “When You Talk, We Listen.” (Roz Jonas)

Dinty Moore Beef Stew: “We Put a Little Bit of Ourselves Into Everything We Do!” (Anne-Marie Da Costa)

Weight Watchers: “Join Us. You Can’t Lose.” (Walter H. Kopp)

AT&T: “We Stay Busy for You.” (Walter H. Kopp)

Denny’s: “A Taste of the Old South.” (Tony Buckley)

Michelin: “Going Flat Out to Keep Your Business.” (Peggy Hyde)

Schick Razors: “A Cut Above the Rest.” (Fran Ludman)

Chiquita Bananas: “We'll Spoil You Rotten.” (Michael Fribush)

Packwood Reelection Committee: “Keeping in Touch With Our Constituents.” (Michael R. Megargee, Arlington)

Good.

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Today’s Invitational Gene Pool Gene Poll:

As always, if you like one or more of the honorable mentions more than these, tell us in the Comments.

Now we seamlessly segue into the Mailbag portion of The Gene Pool, in which Gene responds to your questions and observations. Please send your new Questions and Observations here:

And last, if you have not already done so, please consider becoming a paying subscriber to The Gene Pool. It is pretty cheap and it lets you enter the Invitational, rather than just reading the results every week and sourly deciding you would have done better and then kicking the dog cat hamster bunny rabbit.

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Q: I suspect that somewhere in Washington DC or Palm Beach, FL there is a stash of already-signed pardons for the members of this administration. None of Trump’s minions would be doing what they’re doing without being certain they would be pardoned and Trump’s health is too poor to wait until the pardons will be needed. Ergo, the pardons have already been created and signed.

A: Can this be? Could it … work? The answer seems to be Probably, but Not Definitely. As with all matters of clemency and pardoning, the Constitution is damnably vague. It basically says a president can pardon anyone whenever he wishes for any federal crime, period. There are no specific procedural requirements regarding when a document must be signed, dated, or made public.

However, there is murk.

First, a president can definitely sign a “preemptive” or “pocket” pardon in private and have it delivered. Yet a pardon must be accepted by the pardonee for it to be valid.

But what if the president is dead at the time of the issuance of the pardon? Unclear.

Here is the murkiest part: Judicial rulings suggest a subsequent president can invalidate a previous president’s pardon, though apparently only if the previous president was under impeachment at the time, or if the pardonee had not yet accepted the pardon. This last thing actually happened once, when U.S. Grant revoked two pardons issued by Andrew Johnson before they could be delivered on horseback.

Nothing directly addresses the after-death scenario, as far as I can tell. The Internet dryly hypothesizes that the issue, if ever raised, would be decided by The Supreme Court.

Uh oh.

Q: You censored me! I am officially appalled and righteously indignant. In your recent column about the No Kings Day, you wrote about a protest in “Boise, Iowa.” I sent in a Comment pointing out that Boise is in Idaho, not Iowa. YOU DELETED IT. Why? Wasn’t that legit? Are you a thin-skinned wuss?

A: Okay, I am going to begin here with a big sigh.

SIGH.

First, I didn’t “censor” you, exactly. Censorship is a governmental act of repression. I “edited” you, which is equally repressive, but less threatening to democracy and the American Way of Life.

I almost never delete Comments, however contentious or censorious or personally embarrassing they may be; on the rare occasion when I do delete a Comment, it is generally because the Comment is offensive or potentially libelous.

However, in this case you left me with no good choices. I chose the least bad.

Substack newsletters like mine are living documents. They can and often are altered or amended in real time. That is why, when you get an email from me with a new newsletter within it, you are encouraged — I have begged you — not to read the email itself, but click instead on its headline. This takes no extra time, and it opens you to the online version, which is the latest version. That version may well have fixed a typo or two, or added interesting facts or observations based on things that happened after the initial email went out. (Yesterday’s Gene Pool, for example, supplied the correct answer to the poll you had taken two hours before, after public clamor for it in the Comments.)

There is no downside to you for doing this and there is a significant upside. The live, online version is always the better version of the column.

As to “Boise, Iowa,” yes, that was a pratfall, a goofstain, a schnookery, a brain fart. Substack newsletters typically have no copyeditors; mine relies entirely on my enfeebled cerebrum to get things right. i.e., TWBF. There will be farts. This one was so obvious an error, right at the top of the column, that I got my first Comment on it literally 45 seconds after the email hit your inboxes. The error was fixed online 20 seconds later. I left the Comment in, with a reply like: “Duh. Now fixed. Thanks.”

Therefore, most people reading the column in the intended way never saw or were bothered by the stoopid error at all. Others, like you, read the column only in the email, and pounced, and jubilantly informed me of the misstep in the Comments. I believe that you read the column roughly two and a half hours after it was posted. At that point, very few people reading the column had even seen the initial error, so keeping your gotcha in there would just be confusing. As would the gotchas of the six other people who read only the email and wrote in, and which I similarly deleted.

See the problem? Should I have left all of your redundant complaints in, and tediously replied to each that it had been long ago fixed — thus stinking up and confounding the otherwise lively and intriguing Comments section, over which the readers rule?

So. If for some reason you want to keep reading the email version — a reader once indignantly told me that he wasn’t going to submit to any cockamamie autocratic rules, and instructed me to always get everything right the first time — well, that’s fine, but know that if you comment on an already rectified error, you are going to force me to become a censor editor again.

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Okay, that’s it for today.