The Invitational Week 178: Playing the numbers
Change a number in a well-known phrase. Plus winning portmanteau names.
Hello. Today we inaugurate a brand-new contest that (1) involves numbers; (2) makes make a point that will teach us all a thing or (3). But first, the results of the contest we offered two weeks ago.
Merrymandering: Portmanteau names from Week 176
In Invitational Week 176 we asked you to coin a new term that combined a real person’s name with something else. We were inspired by the now-ubiquitous “gerrymander,” which was named for Elbridge Gerry, who as governor of Massachusetts in 1812 authorized a cunningly redrawn state Senate district resembling a salamander. Of course, now the term is no longer about Gerry himself — it doesn’t even use the hard-G pronunciation of his name — but refers to any crafty redistricting for one side’s political gain. We like that universality in a neologism.
The “real person” part of the instruction meant that Loser Ann Martin couldn’t use Bambivalence: “Do I show my 7-year-old a movie in which Mommy gets shot?” Otherwise, Ann would have gotten ink below.
Third runner-up:
Frappacino: Overcaffeinated acting. (Jonathan Paul, Garrett Park, Md.)
Second runner-up:
Springsteenage: Describing the years between 50 and 90. (Lee Graham, Columbia, S.C.)
First runner-up:
Putinkerbell: “You’d better clap or you’ll be able to fly — briefly.” (Gary Crockett, Chevy Chase, Md.)
And the winner of the tea infuser that looks like an upside-down dabbling duck:
Xip: Those who blindly follow the leader of China. (Jesse Frankovich, Laingsburg, Mich.)
And now it’s the weekly Invitational Gene Pool Gene Poll:
(As usual, if you think one or more of the honorable mentions below are better than these, shout out your favorites in the Comments.)
Near Mixes: Honorable mentions
Belichicanery: Blatant cheating in sports, such as deflating footballs, spying on other teams’ practices, using rocket-propelled sneakers . . . (Kevin Dopart, Naxos, Greece)
KinZingers: Bons mots from an acid-tongued never-Trumper, like “He smells like armpits, ketchup, makeup, and a little butt…” (Mark Raffman, Reston, Va.)
Goldwaterboarding: The torture of watching endless election night coverage when your candidate has lost really, really badly. (Jon Gearhart, Des Moines)
Trumpire: One of those referees known for exploding at players and managers, ejecting them for disagreeing with him, etc. (Gregory Koch, Falls Church, Va.)
Patellall: A book written by a government insider disclosing how much of an absolute jackass the boss was. (Gary Crockett)
Bidenial: Blindness to the obvious senescence of a politician you support. (Mark Raffman)
Warhallmark: Cutting-edge art that’s been turned warm and fuzzy. (Kevin Dopart)
ABBAttoir: The type of bad dance-pop group that makes you want to disembowel yourself. (Stephen Dudzik, Olney, Md.)
Ovechkindergarten: Junior-junior hockey school: “Hey, kids, let’s get rid of those two front teeth NOW! They’re just baby teeth, you wimps!” (Karen Lambert, Chevy Chase, Md.)
Snyderriere: A huge ass. (Tom Witte, Montgomery Village, Md.)
Amadeus ex machina: A dramatic device like the three little angels who suddenly pop up to save the day in The Magic Flute. (Jon Gearhart)
Gabbardine: Whole cloth. (Michael Stein, Arlington, Va.)
Picasshole: A would-be art critic who drones on about the Rose Period’s clear superiority to the Blue Period. (Stu Segal, Southeast U.S.)
Kafkamamie: Surreally nonsensical. (Jonathan Jensen, Baltimore)
Grahamma: An oldster who finds a biblical rationalization for everything. (Sam Mertens, Silver Spring, Md.)
Hegsethics: The guiding principles of a strong misleader. (Jesse Frankovich)
Rubiocon: The line you cross from calling Trump “reckless and dangerous” to “I enjoy working for this president.” (Chris Doyle, Warminster, Pa.)
Netanyahubris: A quality that didn’t work on Obama or Biden, but did work on Trump. (William Kennard, Arlington, Va.)
Dorothy Parker Bros.:
Landlords drain your
Cash apace
When you’ve landed
On Park Place.
Hotels cost you
Quite a bit.
Got no railroads?
You might as well quit.
(Duncan Stevens, Vienna, Va.)
The headline “Merrymandering” is by Jeff Contompasis; Jesse Frankovich wrote the honorable-mentions subhead.
New contest for Week 178: Change a number in a phrase — and do it again
Five-second rule: Food dropped on the floor is safe to eat if you pick it up and eat it within five seconds.
Five-minute rule: Your dog will regurgitate any gross food scrap it just ate.
Five-hour rule: Trump will change his mind about his Iran war deadlines.
1.6 candles: In lumens, the light output of a refrigerator bulb.
16 candles: As in the song, the light output on a debutante’s cake.
1,600,000 candles: The light output at a Phish concert.
For Invitational Week 178: Offer a well-known phrase that contains a number or quantity, then change that number or quantity two or more times and define each altered phrase, as in the examples above. The first is by Stephen Dudzik, a Loser Every Freaking Year But One Since 1993 who suggested this contest. Bonus points, most likely, if the phrases echo one another in some way. The order of the elements is up to you.
Formatting your entries — IMPORTANT! While we’ll publish the series of phrases one on top of another as in the examples above, you need to put both (or all) your phrases for each entry on the same line (i.e., don’t push Enter until you’re ready to write your next entry). Otherwise they’ll show up on Our Big Judging List with one line here, one line there, and they will not seem funny to us. So do it just like this, in one long line (also by Steve):
The $64,000 question: The essence of the unknown about an issue. The $64,000,000 question: Mike Lindell thinks he’s entitled to how much from Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund”? The $64 question: For a quarter tank of gas?
Deadline is Saturday, June 6, 2026, at 9 p.m. ET. Results will run here in The Gene Pool on Thursday, June 11. 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-178a.
Winner gets this ultra-creepy trompe l’oeil T-shirt. It’s in transit right now and it likely won’t trompe your oeil quite as much as in this photo (especially if you’re not a fairly large man), but some similar shirts we’ve gotten from the same place were pretty amazing. (Arm tattoos not included. Get your own.)
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 Sunday, May 31, at 9 p.m. ET: It’s our biannualish song contest for parodies (or originals) about current events — either just the lyrics or a video performance. Click on “read full story” below for details.
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, to Ye Olde Mailbagge:
And last, if you have not already done so, please consider becoming a paying subscriber to The Gene Pool. 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 family’s dog cat hamster bunny potbelly pig. weasel. sea monkey. giant squid. raccoon. humpbacked whale. Clydesdale.
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Q: Hi Gene and Pat.... I have a confession to make, and a strange thing to note. Sometimes, before the new contest drops, since the URL for the new form is always the same, I will go there to see if I can find out what the new contest is a short time ahead of everyone else. It sometimes works, Except that, imagine my surprise, a few hours before this new Invitational dropped, I went to the site and found a Google page entitled “Gene Weingarten’s last meal”. Are you about to be executed? For what? Why? And what was your last meal?
A: To my shock and awe, I checked that site, and that is indeed what it has on it. To answer your question, my last -- as in most recent -- meal was leftover home-made duck soup with potatoes, leeks and parsnips, accompanied by baby bok choy seasoned with sesame oil. And yes, I survived that.
Neither Pat nor I knows why that link was out there. Pat had not yet made the link for today’s contest, though that would likely have been its URL.
The most astonishing part of this is that the site also links to several food-related columns I have written, and one I did not write. That one is better than any of mine. It concerns a report that a Texas man awaiting execution by lethal injection had requested a child for his last meal.
The man is said to have demanded that the child be no older than eight.
This is the story, which also indicates that Snopes has determined the initial story was a hoax. In linking to the Snopes story, I discovered this:
In fact, the state of Texas ended the provision of last meal requests to inmates back in 2011, when a condemned man ridiculously asked for “two chicken fried steaks, a triple-meat bacon cheeseburger, fried okra, a pound of barbecue, three fajitas, a meat lover’s pizza, a pint of ice cream and a slab of peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts,” then didn’t eat any of that bounty.
To the Invitational saboteur who created that bogus link, much obliged. Do it again, and you’re dead to The Invite.
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Q: Your shimmering zipper lightning bolts in one eye! Years and years ago, I too started having that occasional thing, lasting about a half-hour, coming on as slowly as they would later depart. Deeply freaky. I was deeply freaked. So I made an appointment to see the doctor.
To save explanation, I told him that I could easily draw on paper what I was seeing, and did so. He took my paper and disappeared to another room for a few minutes. When he returned, he was carrying an open textbook and looked excited. “It’s what we call an optical migraine,” he said, in a tone of voice suggesting that he was happy that all that med school training had finally paid off. He thrust the book at me triumphantly, and indeed there was a diagram looking almost exactly like my drawing.
A: As of this writing, I have received 20 emails from people who experience the same alarming, but benign, phenomenon. It is evidently far more common than I knew. And it seems to be something people seldom talk about, because it always goes away and makes you seem like a feeb if you whine about it.
Several people asked me to detail the self-administered “test” I took to determine what kind it was.
Here:
There are basically two forms of this scary, but not serious condition. The current name for it is a “scintillating scotoma,” which sounds, you know, witty and stimulating. It isn’t, except in the sense that you are stimulated to be scared out of your wits, like a person who suddenly realizes he is going blind and faces a lifetime in the dark. Both forms are a type of migraine, yet neither usually is accompanied by a headache, nausea, or other migraine symptoms. — just temporary visual impairment. Both forms tend to present in one eye only.
Form one is what I have, which originates from some brief short in the part of the brain controlling the optic nerve.
Form two occurs in the eyeball itself, a kind of hiccup in the retinal capillaries.
Which form do you have? Here is the test: While the visual disruption is going on, and you see the shimmering zipper, close the eye in which it seems to be located. If you still see the scotoma, against the darkness of the closed eye, you have form one. If the scotoma disappears when you close that eye, you have form two. That is because the existence of the shimmer when the eye is closed means, despite how it looks to you, the migraine is actually affecting your whole field of vision, meaning it originates in the brain. If you have form two, the thing is actually concentrated in that one eyeball.
Form two is considered a little more worrisome — just a little — because it might indicate an incipient weakness in the retina.
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Q: Regarding your views on bumper-tapping while parallel parking: If you accidentally tap my car while parallel parking, I really don’t care. If you deliberately hit it, you’re paying for damages. If you deliberately and repeatedly strike my car, I’m calling the cops and you’re going straight to jail. Totally inappropriate and illegal.
A: WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?
Do people repeatedly strike your car to inflict damage, like at a demolition derby? Are you involved in some sort of ongoing bitter domestic dispute? I think you have to calm down. See next post.
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Q: I live in Silver Spring. I was rear-ended about ten years ago, just barely, by a young woman who was in total hysterics over it (she was clearly at fault). I had an old sedan at the time and said, “don’t worry about it. That’s what bumpers are for.” We drove off and nothing more happened. Now this was a risk! She coulda been an actress who pinned it on me. But it worked fine and I drove that car for 25 years and never fixed the scratches. People, you gotta calm down.
A: Amen.
That’s it for today.
My favorite this week was "Dorothy Parker Brothers". Great poem!
ABBAttoir resulted in a spit take. Out-of-the-box creativity.