THIS WEEK'S CONTEST
Week 659: Tell Us a Fib
(Bob Staake for The Washington Post)
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Who's Blogging  |
Lord,
it's
hard to
know the truth!
If Judas was good,
Is Satan just misunderstood?
Geeks around the world have been unnaturally excited that this is National Poetry Month, ever since a Los Angeles writer named Gregory K. Pincus invited readers of his blog (gottabook.blogspot.com) to write poems whose syllables per line match the Fibonacci sequence, that mathematical expresion of nature's elegance. The challenge quickly spread through the geek network and then the literary network, and then the geek/literary/potty network of the Losers, specifically Brian Barrett of New York, to the Empress. This week: Compose a six-line poem with the following number of syllables per line: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, as in the example above. In addition, because we are just more demanding here: It must be about a person or topic currently in the news, and two successive lines must rhyme.
Winner receives the Inker, the official Style Invitational trophy. First runner-up gets two repurposed alcohol-related items: an empty beer bottle that once contained some of the home-brew of Loser Ben Schwalb of Severna Park; it is labeled "Divorce Dark: Bitter, Expensive, Lasts for Years"; and (oh my, the Empress is so generous) a promotional plastic martini shaker labeled "GapBody Bra Bar, Fashion Week, Bryant Park."
Other runners-up win a coveted Style Invitational Loser T-shirt. Honorable mentions (or whatever they're called this week) 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 by fax to 202-334-4312. Deadline is Monday, May 1. Put "Week 659" 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. Contests 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 May 21. 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 Seth Brown of North Adams, Mass. The name for the Honorable Mentions is by Mark Eckenwiler of Washington.
Report From Week 655
In which you were asked to take any article appearing in The Post or on washingtonpost.com during the week, and use only the words appearing in it to write your own poem or other funny thing: This is an enormously time-consuming task, and not surprisingly relatively few readers took us up on the challenge. Also not surprisingly (because we've had luck with similar contests before), those who did tended to come up with very good results.
3 Leyland Chats Up Storm With Writers (Associated Press blog, March 26)
"You, writer, over there. The muscular one. Scratch my behind."
