The Invitational Week 98: Tiles & Tribulations

Winners of our contest to find new words from 7-letter 'racks'

Above: Man-bib! The term wins a runner-up this week for William Kennard. (This man, pictured, isn’t Mr. Kennard.)

Hello. This is Part II of “The Empress Will Be Abandoning Us to Go on Some Vacation.” So, no new contest this week; that’s so she won’t have to judge entries and write up the results in the car/on the beach/inside a volcano, etc. But we have the winners of Week 96 today (see below), and next Thursday we’ll have a brand-new contest.

So we are good to go.

A Rack and a Har Place: ScrabbleGrams neologisms

In Invitational Week 96 — a roughly annual contest we call The Tile Invitational — we presented several dozen seven-letter “racks” from the syndicated ScrabbleGrams word game, and asked you to unscramble them (or rescramble them?) into new words or phrases of either six letters or all seven, then define them.

Third runner-up: AEOUDFT > OUTDEAF: To defeat one’s spouse at pretending not to hear the baby crying.
(Gary Crockett, Chevy Chase, Md.; Mark Raffman, Reston, Va.) 

Second runner-up: ABBIMNO > MAN-BIB: A bushy beard.
(William Kennard, Arlington, Va.)  

First runner-up: CEHLORT > LECH ROT: The medical condition in which one’s genitals shrivel up and fall off from watching porn — or that’s what they taught us in Sunday school.
(Mark Raffman)  

And the winner of the alligator socks:
AHISSTU > USA SHIT: What just hit the USA fan. 
(Jesse Frankovich, Laingsburg, Mich.)

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.

AAEFFLL > LAF FALE: Honorable mentions

AADOPRX > AARP DOX: The pile of junk mail announcing that your fiftieth birthday is coming. (Jeff Hazle, San Antonio) 

AADOPRX > AX DROP: What they did way, way before mics were invented. (Barbara Turner, Takoma Park, Md.)  

AADOPRX > RAXPOD: Bra. (Ann Martin, Brentwood, Md.)  

AANSWYY >  NAYSWAY: Persuade someone not to do something. “Dude had to naysway a bro to abandon his butt-launched bottle rocket.” (Jeff Contompasis, Ashburn, Va.)   

ABBIMNO > ON, BAMBI:  What Santa has to yell when Comet or Dasher is out sick. (Duncan Stevens, Vienna, Va.)

ADGILUY > UG-LAID: Woke up next to someone who is somehow not nearly as good-looking as the person you went home with. (Tom Witte, Montgomery Village, Md.)  

AEEKORW> OK-WARE: Computer program that doesn’t do much, but at least it’s not malware. (Mark Raffman)  

AEOUDFT > OAF DUET: Don Jr. and Eric. (Gary Crockett)  

AEULPGL > LAP GLUE: Remnants of a lap dance; a.k.a. pelvic paste. (Dan Steinbrocker, Los Angeles; Tom Witte)  

AHISSTU > SHIT, USA: The phrase uttered everywhere in Europe except Hungary and the Kremlin on November 6. (Kevin Dopart, Washington, D.C.)  

ADGILUY > GUILDY: How you feel when you forget to pay your union dues. (Sarah Walsh, Rockville, Md.)

AFFNORT > FRONT AF: Well endowed. (Dave Zarrow, Skokie, Ill.)  

AAELMNU > EMU ANAL: Least watched clip on Pornhub. (Duncan Stevens)

AIORRTT > TIT ROAR: “Ow! Why can’t they make a mammogram machine that’s not a torture device?” (Judy Freed, Deerfield Beach, Fla.; Stephen Dudzik, Olney, Md.)  

ABBIMNO > ABIMBO: With hands on hips and brain turned off. (Jesse Frankovich)

ACDDEIN > IDDANCE: “He just wanted sex all the time. Kicked him to the curb. Good iddance.” (Judy Freed)  

BCEHITW > BE WITCH: Unhappy with the tepid response to her Be Best campaign, Melania decides kids need to toughen up. (Dave Zarrow)   

BCEHITW > WEB ITCH:  That feeling you get in the middle of family dinner when all you want to do is look at your phone but Dad insists that this is “family time” and we have to go “devices down” but it’s so lame and you just bite the back of your hand and your eyes roll back in your head and will this everrr be overrr??? (Mark Raffman)

CDEEIMN > DEICE ME: A last-minute directive added to Ted Williams’s will. (Chris Doyle, Denton, Tex.)  

CEHLORT > CLOTHER: A lady who seductively dons more and more garments, frequently hired for Victorian bachelor parties. (Duncan Stevens)

CILOOPT > LOO PIC: What’s Chapter 2, after “Upskirt,” in “The Pervert’s Guide to Photography.” (Tom Witte) 

GLOORUY > YOURLOG: One of the primary concerns in the field of UROLOGY. (Jeff Contompasis)   

AEOUDFT > EDUFAT:  What many a college student puts on with those nights of pizza and beer; a.k.a. “the Freshman Fifteen.” (Jon Gearhart, Des Moines) 

The headline “Tiles & Tribulations” is by Kevin Dopart, as was the honorable-mentions subhead; “A Rack and a Har Place” is by Chris Doyle.

Meet the Parentheses!  Join the Empress (Pat Myers) and sundry Invitational Losers and fans for brunch on Sunday, Dec. 1, 11:30 a.m., at Texas Jack's in Arlington, Va.  Just relaxed socializing, no competitive repartee.  Click here to sign up if you’d like to come.  

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 will be quite short, because Gene is exhausted by being exhausted. Truck Fump.

Appropriately, the Q’s and O’s will be centered on real things that happened to you That Might Be Even Worse than Trump getting elected president.

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.”

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Q: Worse things: I once had heart cancer! You included this very rare condition in your 1998 book about hypochondria; I contracted it about a year later. I survived okay after surgery. But the words, paired together, remain maybe more personally terrifying, at least to me, than “President Donald Trump.”

A: Wow. That’s up there, disease-wise, with “thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura,” which makes your skin look like a Jackson Pollock canvas. Also, “beer potomania,” which results from consuming 24-60 pints of beer in a day and sometimes leads to osmotic demyelination syndrome, which turns you into a babbling idiot.

Q: How much worse can it get after the Gaetz/Gabbard nominations?  Is Stinky the Clown up next for FCC Commissioner?  Really, this is the circus come to town. 

A: Marjorie Taylor Greene as the head of The Office of Jew Baiting.  Lauren Boebert as head of the National Endowment for the Arts and Frottage.  

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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.

Also, if you have the wherewithal, please upgrade your subscription to ‘paid.’ It’s only $4.15 a month. To paraphrase Woody Guthrie’s sign on his guitar, this machine fights fascists.

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Let’s go. It won’t take long. I have to nap.

Q: Okay, the worst thing for me is those people who drive with their car windows open, blasting out music that could deafen a naked mole rat, which is already deaf.   

A: WORSE THAN DONALD TRUMP?

I’m using this only because it is allowing me to once again publish a photo of the naked mole rat, which looks like a penis with teeth. 

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Q: Time traveler here.  The worst thing that ever happened was when the sun turned into a red giant, obliterating all remaining life on Earth (who at that point were mostly cockroaches and the occasional cockroach-eating rat).  – Stephanie

A:  Thank you.  

Q: Moping about the election is just too depressing for me to read, so perhaps you would prefer to talk about the demise of your former syndicate, the Washington Post Writers Group, see: 

https://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2024/11/10/wpwg-comics-division-poof/

A: – The WPWG was the first group to syndicate Barney & Clyde, in 2010.  They trusted us and encouraged us.   Then they fired our editor, Amy Lago, who helped develop the strip – (read, gave us orders we followed because we knew nothing about starting a strip) who happens to be the best comics editor in the country.   Once fired, Amy joined in a new venture, Counterpoint Syndicate, with the very talented political cartoonist Nick Anderson, who drew this yesterday.   Amy asked if we’d like to leave WPWG and join Counterpoint, and we unhesitatingly said yes, because business ultimately is about personal relationships and personal respect and reliance on talent and gratitude for support.  So, this was an easy decision.   We have no second thoughts.

Q: Hi Gene! I'm Julia. I'm 20, I'm studying journalism at the University of Kansas. I'm a little nervous to type this out, and I will have to check my grammar several times before I hit send. I'm second  guessing the Oxford comma I just used, but I like it and will stick to my guns. 

I'll start this out like most of your questions, I'm sure: I love your work! I initially was assigned chapters of your book, The Fiddler In the Subway, to read for my high school journalism class and have appreciated your writing since. I'll never compare my writing to yours, but I will say this and I hope it comes across correctly. I hope to write like you, and I believe I have the potential to do so. I'm definitely not as funny, but I want to be a feature writer like your old stories. 

To keep it brief, my question is, what can I do every day to just practice writing in a way that feels inspiring to me? I'm a news writer for our school's newspaper, and while I enjoy it, it has a straightforward tone that doesn't feel creative to me. I haven't felt truly creatively inspired since high school. I bought a nice pen and a cool new notebook. I open Google Docs and stare at the bright white screen. I want to write every day but end up scrolling on my phone or thinking I'll do it tomorrow. How can I fill this cool notebook? How can I type away at this Google Doc, even if it's about nothing? I enjoy writing things like your Gene Pool posts-- daily thoughts or anecdotes, whatever's relevant. I love writing, and I want to practice it. I want to develop my own voice. 

A: Hi. Well, this doesn’t have anything directly to do with Donald Trump, but it is a joy to change the subject, and I love helping young people.   

There is a trick about learning to write well.   Don’t put on a Writer’s Hat, or as Tom Shroder and I called it, a Wwriter’s Hat.   Writing with not just a capital W, but TWO capital W’s.   Young writers often think they have to adopt a posture.   If you try to write all sophisticated and fancy and whatnot, and what results is wooden, stilted language.  

Write like you are talking to a best friend.  Don’t be fancy.   Don’t be Important.  Be conversational.  Think of it this way: Write like you were beginning a sentence with “So.”    “So I was going to the  bathroom the other day, when…”  You might be amazed at how easily it flows.   Good writing is not about the breadth of your vocabulary,  It is about the breadth of your thinking. 

My father was an IRS agent.   He communicated in writing reasonably well, but everything he wrote began sort of like this: “Reference is made herein to your letter of July 7th…”

No. My ma was a better writer, and she taught me.

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This is Gene: I am going to end with this one, because it is on point and horrifying. I’ll be back tomorrow, with a new edition of The Washington Pist.

Q: The worst thing that I ever experienced was hours and hours of individual interviews with parents whose children had been violently  taken from them under the Trump Zero Tolerance policy. The interviews were conducted in tiny rooms with three chairs around a small table  - for the parent, interpreter, and myself - at a desolate Texas prison in Port Isabel. All were slated to be deported back to the countries they’d fled without their children who would be left God knew where in the United States.  None were told where their children were.  Most had not been permitted to hear their children’s voices or utter to them a word of love, or reassurance, or comfort...

Sitting across from each of these mothers and fathers I witnessed raw pain beyond the imaginable, tears and stories bleeding from every part of them with such excruciating immediacy that I kept losing interpreters who simply couldn’t bear it. And I couldn’t manage to hold back my own tears.

Each story was its own tale of horror in their countries of origin, fleeing homes and family they loved, their own lives and those of their children so acutely endangered that they often had no time to prepare. Then the trips through Mexico, a parent often standing for days in an overcrowded, sweltering truck so that their child might have a tiny space to lay down, giving up their own meager supplies of water or food so their children could drink. Succumbing to a rape at gunpoint that was now responsible  for pregnancy in exchange for food for four little children.  

But  invariably the burning memory that played and replayed - day and night - for each was the moment their children were gone - wrenched away or taken without warning while the parents were in court or in the bathroom. These parents did not eat or sleep, they were wracked with physical pain and horrible waking nightmares. Several swore they heard the cries of children and babies at night.  All felt horrible helplessness in the certainty of the suffering of their children, alone and crying for them, terrified in a strange country surrounded by strangers. Many feared their children were being physically or sexually abused or had been killed or given permanently to other parents (this last fear,, as it turned out, had some foundation). They were perpetually tortured by thoughts and fever dreams of their screaming, weeping children calling to them and their utter powerlessness as parents to answer.

As a child psychiatrist who specializes in trauma (my interviews formed the principal expert testimony for a class action lawsuit against the Trump/Sessions justice dept), I knew with certainty how the trauma these children were experiencing would harm them irreversibly, psychologically and physiologically.  How my country’s policies were causing tangible damage that would statistically foreshorten the lives of these children and render them at greater risk for everything from diabetes to cancer.  

Later, working on the border, I would see the horrors of the “remain in Mexico” program, which deliberately fed these refugees to the hungry cartels to be kidnapped for ransom in full daylight and plain sight and by the truckload, and often terrorized, raped, murdered by cartel members who operated with complete impunity and very likely shared some of their bounty with US border patrols.  The second wave of child separation came with this perversity when the intolerable conditions on the Mexican border forced parents to pay to have their children ferried across the river, lest they perish in places like Matamoros, Reynosa, Nuevo Laredo.

These are the worst things I have ever seen..  This is what my own nightmares return to with this election.  –

Amy C.

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Thanks Amy. I now need to go sleep, just because.

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