The Invitational Week 94: Asterisky Business
Put words in Horace's mouth: Tell us a joke that not everyone will get. Plus winning haiku on the news.
“Barney & Clyde” art by David Clark.
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Asterisk, first cartoon: Medically, “tinnitus” is not pronounced “tin-EYE-tis,” like arthritis; the suffix “-itis” refers to an inflammation, which is not what tinnitus is. The preferred pronunciation is “TIN-it-uss.” Ergo, the poet was in error.
Asterisk, second cartoon: In cricket, a “silly” is a fielding position that is very close to the batsman and considered foolish because of the risk of being hit by the ball or bat. Ergo, Horace presented this as a “silly joke,” which was technically correct, if obnoxious.
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Hello! In today’s new Invitational, we once again ask you to do Gene’s work for him, in return for tepid and grudging attribution in teeny writing between the panels of his syndicated newspaper comic strip, “Barney & Clyde,” which is about a friendship between a billionaire and a homeless man. Today’s topic is overly sophisticated humor, in which you have to come up with jokes that will be attributed to the recurring character Horace, who tells jokes so arcane that nobody understands them; to be understood, they require asterisked explanations, as in the examples above.
Backstory: Horace is named for Horace LaBadie, a funny, urbane, erudite man from Dunellon, Fla., who is a co-author of the strip, and whose clever efforts at scripts are occasionally rejected by Gene because only eleven people, max, will understand them.
For Invitational Week 94: In a Q&A riddle or other fairly short form, write a “Horace” joke that requires hifalutin or specialized knowledge to understand, as in the “Barney & Clyde” examples above. (This is similar to the results of our 2016 and 2002 Asterisky Business contests. You can use them as a guide.) Follow your joke with a brief explanation, as in Duncan Stevens’s Asterisky Business winner from 2016:
Q. Why were the French tourists in D.C. embarrassed when they took their toddlers to the National Zoo?
A. The kids started yelling, “Seal! Seal!”*
*The French word for seal is phoque.
In this case, you do not have to write it all out as a completed comic strip script; just the joke and its explanation will suffice. We’ll draw some of the good ones, with Horace telling them.
Formatting your entries this week: We’re NOT exhorting you as usual to submit each entry as a single line. Just write them up in some form we can figure out.
Deadline is Saturday, Oct. 26, 2024, at 9 p.m. ET. Results will run here in The Gene Pool on Thursday, Oct. 31. 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-94.
The winner gets, apropos of the sophisticated humor we seek this week, a pair of toilet earrings. We will call them the Hoity Toities.
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.
Meanwhile, send us questions or observations, which Gene hopes to deal with in real time today. You do this, as always, by sending them to this here button:
’Ku Cards: The news haiku of Week 92
In Week 92 we asked you to write haiku — which we described as any poem with three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables — about subjects in the news. Rhymes were welcome, but unnecessary.
Third runner-up:
I bet Trump is mad
The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
Let in Foreigner.
(Jesse Frankovich, Laingsburg, Mich.)
Second runner-up:
Late last Thursday night
Millions saw the Northern Lights
In their Facebook feeds.
(Jonathan Jensen, Baltimore)
First runner-up:
Patriots player
Accused in woman’s assault.
And he’s a “safety”?
(Pam Shermeyer, Lathrup Village, Mich.)
And the winner of the Light poetry journal tote bag featuring the “Vote” haiku:
Pouty Trump Cancels ‘60 Minutes’ Interview
60 Minutes is
The amount of time it takes
To cook a chicken.
(Mark Raffman, Reston, Va.)
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.
Hai Crimes: Honorable mentions
Democracy shakes
Like a self-driving Tesla
Veering off the road.
(Leif Picoult, Rockville, Md.)
“Migrants take Black jobs,”
Trump said. So, to balance things,
Just vote for Harris.
(Neil Kurland, Elkridge, Md.)
Woman Caught Smuggling 748 Pounds of Cold Cuts
Our Southern border
Letting in bad guys? Just a
Load of bologna.
(Marni Penning Coleman, Falls Church, Va.)
Putin, Orban, Xi.
Each is what Trump wants to be:
Grand Theft Autocrat.
(Chris Doyle, Denton, Tex.)
TikTok’s sued by states
Because it’s so addictive.
What’s next, Häagen-Dazs? (Pam Shermeyer)
Mayor indicted!
New York might no longer be
The Adams Apple.
(Duncan Stevens, Vienna, Va.)
Winning Commanders
Show the difference between
Daniels and Daniel’s.
(Kevin Dopart, Washington, D.C.)
Trump’s bad at lying,
So he chose a running mate
Who’s better at it.
(Jesse Frankovich)
A discovery!
Christopher Columbus was
A wandering Jew.
(Judy Freed, Deerfield Beach, Fla.)
Now open! Trump’s Place!
Management reserves the right
To serve just himself.
(Connie Akers, Radford, Va.)
As an irritant
A grain of sand makes a pearl
But Ted Cruz makes squat
(Jeff Shirley, Richmond, Va.)
At a Trump rally,
Elon showed White men can jump.
It’s just they shouldn’t. (Jesse Frankovich)
Russian bombers use
Elon Musk’s Starlink dishes.
Does X mark the spot?
(Pam Shermeyer)
Dems hope to see this
Slogan in ’28: Keep
Kam and carry on. (Chris Doyle)
If Trump gets caught in
A Florida hurricane
Would he go hair-borne? (Neil Kurland)
My beautiful Court
Says Presidents are immune.
Nyah nyah nyah nyahhh-nyah.
(Michael Stein, Arlington, Va.)
Or ‘Aim Higher’?
When 45’s butt
Is targeted by some nut
Does Pence say, “So what?” (Kevin Dopart)
Qantas Interruptus
An explicit film
On “the Flying Kangaroo”
Had some hopping mad
(Jon Gearhart, Des Moines)
“A Bar Song (Tipsy)” —
Billboard’s top hit for three months:
You don’t know it, right?
(Jesse Rifkin, Arlington, Va.)
Since it’s a witch hunt
Just throw some water on Trump
He’s melting, melting … (Neil Kurland)
The headline “ ’Ku Cards” was submitted by both Chris Doyle and Kevin Dopart; William Kennard wrote the honorable-mentions subhead.
Still running — deadline 9 p.m. ET Saturday, Oct. 19: our Week 93 contest, the perennial Ask Backwards, in which we give the “answers” and you write the questions. Click on the link below.
We now enter the coveted Real-Time Segment of The Gene Pool, where Gene responds to your questions and observations, which were made in Real Time. Today’s Q’s and O’s (so far) deal with many subjects, including our Weekend call for you to tell us in which ways You Suck, and also the bewilderingly close electoral situation considering Donald Trump’s increasing dementia.
PLEASE send your Observations and Questions right here. They will be dealt with with alacrity and gusto, a promise employing an amazing sentence that uses the expression “with with.”
Also, please take a moment to pity your poor hosts. We try to scrape by in what passes for our “lives” through the continuing kindness of strangers. Not that you are strangers, exactly. Many if not most of you are persons we have never met, though we feel we somehow know you and sense the naive generosity in your hearts. You are persons with real jobs and real incomes who deceive yourselves into thinking our fate — wretched street mendicants — will never befall you. Out of respect for you, we would do nothing to disabuse you of these notions. We will, however, ask you to find it in those weeping, financially successful hearts to come up with $50 a year — $4.15 a month, 22 cents a day, barely more than a ha’penny an hour — to fund us a bit.
Good.
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Q: I don’t remember if you’ve ever noted an apto-acronym. But here’s one reported in the WaPo: “We are so grateful to CHOP for helping make this day possible and letting us start this next chapter.” It was a quote from the parent of conjoined twins who were surgically separated at the Children’s Hospital Of Philadelphia. - Kevin Dopart
A: Excellent. A Hall of Famer. Thank you.
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Q: Did Harris make a mistake by going on Fox News?
A: No! It was a tactically brilliant move. There was not a single person among Fox’s septuagenarian audience who was for Harris before they saw that. She had nothing to lose. If she gained 100 voters, that’s a win. Also, she was great. Look at what she does to Bret Baier here. Begin at the one-minute mark.
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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.
Here we go.
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Q: Do you know where I can get some of whatever Trump was on during that "Town Hall" the other day?
Tom Logan - Sterling, VA
A: Yes. It was definitely horse tranquilizers.
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Q: I recall the topic of an atheist President being brought up in here a while back, and you mentioning you believed Trump was an atheist. I recall a quote from science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer during the second Bush administration where he said he'd personally feel a lot safer if the guy with his finger on the button didn't think there was a better world after this one. Do you agree with this?
A: I totally agree. To a lesser extent, I believe that you cannot trust anyone who has never once tried pot.
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Q: The main reason I suck is that I haven’t bought any new underpants in 12-15 years.
A: Me, either! I am paraphrasing a standup comic whose name I don’t remember: I don’t ever throw them out, exactly. I open a window, hold them out, and blow on them, and they scatter to the wind like a dandelion.
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Q: I realize you have some very strong opinions about poetry, so I thought I'd ask your thoughts about Russell Edson. Your kind of thing? Is it, in fact, poetry?
A: Whoa. This has caused me to rethink some of my thoughts about what constitutes poetry.
This is, clearly, prose. Technically. But it is presented in such an oblique and intriguing way, I’d have to call it poetry. I admit I did not know of this guy.
Let us consider the farmer who makes his straw hat his
sweetheart; or the old woman who makes a floor lamp her son;
or the young woman who has set herself the task of scraping
her shadow off a wall....
Let us consider the old woman who wore smoked cows’
tongues for shoes and walked a meadow gathering cow chips
in her apron; or a mirror grown dark with age that was given
to a blind man who spent his nights looking into it, which
saddened his mother, that her son should be so lost in
vanity....
Let us consider the man who fried roses for his dinner,
whose kitchen smelled like a burning rose garden; or the man
who disguised himself as a moth and ate his overcoat, and for
dessert served himself a chilled fedora....
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Q: The principal reason I suck is that I suck. When I get to the bottom of a drink that I am drinking through a straw I keep sucking at it, loudly, as the ice melts and provides more tasty, if diluted, goodness. People hate this. I believe I had a relationship break up over this.
A: Thank you.
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Q: From your last Gene Pool.
*
Me: Why I suck: I HATE talking on the phone. With a passion. When friends ask me when a good time to get in touch with me is, or want to find a time to talk, person to person, my barely-held-back response is, "Never. How about never. Would that work?" - Marni, VA
You: This only makes sense to me, Marni, if you are a Millennial. Are you? Millennials hate the phone. Also, were you named after the Hitchcock character?
Answer I am not a millennial - Gen X. But I am neurodivergent - ADHD, with a soupçon of Autism thrown in for good measure. I think it's because there's no "undo" on the phone. I also can't see people's facial expressions or watch their mouths moving, which makes it easier to understand them.
And I was not named after the Hitchcock character - though it was fun to listen to Sean Connery say my name when I saw it. My parents' names are Mary Ann and Nick: Mar-Ni. Their friends Kathy and Ray had just had a daughter they named Kara and thought it was cool. My uncle joked that their next child would be named Ni-Mar.
A: – “Nomar” Garciaparra is the stupidest sports name ever, other than Anfernee Hardaway. His dad named him Nomar because the father’s name is Ramon, and Nomar is Ramon spelled backwards. Me, a Red Sox hater, once jokes that his name should have been “Elohssa”
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Q: My near-death experience:
I was going upwards of 80mph on a long, straight gravel road. For the benefit of you self-righteous Manhattanites who never learned to drive: 80mph is not too fast for a gravel road if you know what you're doing. I knew what I was doing because I had been to a rally racing school a year before and learned to drive fast on twisty, icy roads through the woods on a mountainside.
Because of my rally training, I recognized that I would have to slow down to negotiate the 90-degree turn that appeared suddenly (as things tend to appear at 80mph) at the end of the road. Because of my rally training, I knew that the precise point where I needed to start braking was 57 feet 4 inches behind me. And because of my rally training, I recognized that the tall, sessile life form immediately beyond the corner was a tree, and that the appropriate speed to collide with a tree was not at all.
I was not expecting the tree. I was a few miles outside of Lubbock on the dry, flat expanse of West Texas. Trees do not grow in Lubbock of their own free will. You might argue that this lonely tree would have been visible from a distance of about 15 miles across the unobstructed plain, which might have spoiled the surprise. I might argue you could go fuck yourself.
I was back in Lubbock, my childhood home, because my father was dying. Watching someone die sucks, especially when you don’t want them to. My sister had relieved me from my bedside vigil and I went out for a drive to clear the morose fog from my head. It was probably the morose fog that obscured the tree. I didn’t think it very fair that God had caused this tree to grow, obviously under extreme duress, exactly in the path of my vehicle, and especially unfair that he had initiated my father’s demise in order to hide it from me. I needed a break right then. I also needed a brake, right then. So I pushed it. Hard.
I got neither break nor brake. For a moment, it seemed the only thing I was going to get was the opportunity to express my displeasure to God in person. I added the incompetence of Kia’s automotive engineers to my list of grievances, and decided that the in-diligence of the Avis maintenance department should be on there, too. Come to think of it, the in-existence of the Avis maintenance department might deserve mention.
Now listen up, Manhattanites: I’m gonna man-splain to you how anti-lock brakes work. There’s a sensor on each wheel to measure how fast it’s turning. When the sensor detects that its wheel has stopped turning, the ABS pulses the brake pressure on that wheel to get it turning again, because a sliding wheel won’t stop the car. But you’ll notice that when you pull into your driveway and stop, the ABS doesn’t activate. That’s because all the wheels stop at the same time. When I stomped on the brake pedal, all four wheels locked up at once, and the ABS system said, “Wow, we were just doing 80 and now we’re at a complete standstill. Nothing wrong with that; those Kia engineers really know how to make a car stop on a dime.”
I took a time-out for a few milliseconds. Indignation doesn’t stop cars. I put aside my grievances and did some meditation. With fresh eyes, I realized why the car wasn’t stopping and remembered what to do about it. As hard as it is to accept while barreling toward death, you have to release pressure on the brake pedal to get the wheels turning and gripping again. A little bit of throttle, simultaneous with the brakes, also helps pull the car through the corner. None of this feels right, but it works. I had faith. I did it. It worked. The car slowed, rotated, and slid sideways into the turn in a righteous cloud of dust.
I didn’t exactly hit the telephone pole. I brushed it like a friendly cat brushes against your leg. I left paint on it like a friendly cat leaves hair on your pants. You might remind me that I had previously described the obstacle as a tree, not a telephone pole, and that I had joked about my professional-level ability to identify trees on sight, which ability I manifestly lack. I might remind you that the invitation still stands to go fuck yourself.
I escaped death. Because I had used my employer’s discounted contract to rent the car, I had a free damage waiver, so I also escaped any financial consequences for my poor judgment. My father still died, though. – Jay Moore
A: I print this because you are a good writer, and I appreciate good writing. Some might argue you sound like an arrogant asshole. I would not agree with that, and would further argue that you WANT to sound like an arrogant asshole, because, as a good writer, you know exactly what your words are doing.
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Q: I was reasonably confident about the election three weeks ago. Now I'm terrified because it seems like no matter what the Orange Menace does, he's Teflon. Please reassure me.
A: I think she wins, but I am less confident than before.
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Q: I can relate to a lot of what you wrote about on Tuesday. I was bar mitzvahed on Long Island on February 22, 1963; my family left Long Island for West Palm Beach, Florida, several months later; I had to go with them (I've been in Seattle since 1975). But . . . for some reason, I, too, remember a lot of the 1961 Yankees, e.g., Hector Lopez, #11, Tom Tresh, #15, Bill "Moose" Skowron, #14, Elston Howard, #32. And yes, the election has me on edge, but I remembered the Yankee lineup even before that, so maybe my brain is just addled.-- Neal Starkman
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A: You are right about all those numbers, but how can you forget Bill Stafford at 22, Ralph Terry at 23, and Whitey Ford at 16?
Regarding Hector Lopez, the reserve outfielder and one of my favorite players, his nickname was “Whatapairofhands.” I only recently remembered that it was not a compliment. He was notorious for dropping easy flies in the outfield.
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Q: My house was NOT hit by a tornado, thank the whims of the winds, but you wouldn’t know it from the inside. I used to be able to keep the house tidy, but I truly SUCK at it these days. There can be any number of explanations/lame excuses, however we’ll stick with “procrastination.” If I’ve just vacuumed the house, why not wait until later to put everything back on the floor (like waste baskets and magazines and shoes . . . And Amazon boxes, and cat toys - no, ALL the cat toys - and yesterday’s grocery bags, and books to donate, etc.)? Why rush to make the bed when I’m going to take a nap in about 2 hrs (after I vacuum)? The rationale is a siren song to disarray. Sigh. — Lynne “Tornado” Larkin
A: I share this deficiency, and compounding it is that Rachel does, too.
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This is Gene. I am calling us down. Pleeeease keep sending in Questions and Observations here. See you on the Weekend.
A round of applause, Jay Moore, for the excellent story!
Dopart's Washington Commanders wryku is very good.