The Style Invitational

Week 615: Airy Persiflage

"We'll be boarding today by SAT scores -- lowest scorers first, please."

This week's contest is a nifty little tie-in with Gene Weingarten's "Below the Beltway" humor column in today's Washington Post Magazine. In it, Gene interviews a standup comic named Dave George, who gets paid to make jokey announcements over the PA system at, of all places, Dulles International Airport, such as the one above. Here's the deal: You write some more jokes you'd like to hear in an airport announcement. And Dave, who works for Independence Air, will actually announce -- and videotape passenger reactions to -- the funniest ones that don't concern safety or security and are not horribly tasteless or risque. (These are not necessarily the same criteria that the Empress will use, however.) We hope to show the video on http://washingtonpost.com/ .

Winner receives the Inker, the official Style Invitational trophy. First runner-up gets a genuine black plastic welder's mask, complete with that window thing that flips down, donated by Russell Beland of Springfield.

Other runners-up win a coveted Style Invitational Loser T-shirt. Honorable mentions get one of the lusted-after Style Invitational Magnets. One prize per entrant per week. Send your entries by e-mail to losers@washpost.com or, if you really have to, by fax to 202-334-4312. Deadline is Monday, June 27. Put the week number in the subject line of your e-mail, or it risks being ignored as spam. Include your name, postal address and phone number with your entry. Entries are judged on the basis of humor and originality. All entries become the property of The Washington Post. Entries may be edited for taste or content. Results will be published July 17. No purchase required for entry. Employees of The Washington Post, and their immediate relatives, are not eligible for prizes. Pseudonymous entries will be disqualified. The revised title for next week's contest is by Russell Beland.

Report from Week 611, in which you were asked to give "Jeopardy!"-type questions to any of 12 answers, most of which contained fairly intellectual references. But as you'll see below, the winning entries often ignored their academic origin. Here's a key to some of the erudition: The French scholar Peter Abelard fell in love with Heloise, the girl he tutored; her uncle eventually had him castrated. The islets of Langerhans are in the pancreas. The ballet "Le Sacre du Printemps" ("The Rite of Spring") caused a riot upon its premiere. Marginal utility is the economic concept of the added worth of one more unit of a product. Montaigne was a 16th-century essayist. The Babinski reflex makes toes curl upward. Sappho was the famous ancient poet from Lesbos. 6.02 x 10²³ is the number of molecules in one mole of a chemical substance. William Faulkner set several works in fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Miss.

Second runners-up: Answer: Sappho and Her Lyre. Question: What are the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy's code names for Hillary and Bill Clinton? (Peter Jenkins, Bethesda; Joseph Romm, Washington)

First runner-up, winner of "Star Trek" Barbie and Ken: Yoknapatawpha Mall: Where do you go when the fetid stench of a humid night hangs on the lip of the sky like a cold sore and magnolia trees shimmering with a patina of regret reach for the sky with the power of a generation lost and the weight of your ancestors throttles your soul so hard that you need Tylenol? (Jeff Brechlin, Eagan, Minn.)

And the winner of the Inker: Bob II, Chapter 4, Verse 9: What is: And the guards said unto Pilate: "Where wouldst thou want this killing done?" And he saith unto them: "Out there, upon Highway LXI"? (Barbara Turner, Takoma Park)

Honorable Mentions:

The Isle of Wight & the Islets of Langerhans :

What two things will I be really interested in when I'm 64? (Mary Ann Henningsen, Hayward, Calif.; Katherine Hooper, Jacksonville)

Which territories were exchanged by the treaty ending the Celtic-Pancreatic Wars? (Fred S. Souk, Reston)

What are two places where Jimi Hendrix didn't perform at his best? (Tom Witte, Montgomery Village)