It's The Invitational's 'foal breeding' contest!
Our biggest wordplay game lives on at The Gene Pool. Plus: Come and picnic with the Czar and Empress in May.
“Breed” Armstrong with Power in Numbers and name the foal Lance A Lot
Vigorish x Low Expectations = Vigorish-ish
Sgt. Pepper x Low Expectations = Norwegian Wouldn’t
We’re back on (the) track! As it has every year since 1995 with its most popular wordplay contest, The Invitational — now on Substack at The Gene Pool — invites (it’s what we do!) you to “breed” any two of 100 racehorse names to make a “foal” name that cleverly incorporates both parents’ names. Deadline for Week 16 is Saturday afternoon, April 29; you can submit up to 25 clever names (no unclever ones, sorry).
And we have our first set of neologisms in our Substack era; these are formed from any of 20 “hives” from The New York Times’s Spelling Bee word-find game. Check out the definitions for “Naycay,” “Potatomato,” and this week’s second-place finisher, one that The Washington Post never would have run.
Finally, we have a save-the-date (which is Saturday afternoon, May 20) for the Losers’ annual Flushies potluck/awards/songfest — which both the Empress and the Czar (Pat Myers and Gene Weingarten) plan to crash this year in Potomac, Md. Gene hasn’t been to a loser event since 2004, so we’ll have to find him some epaulets or something.)
Check out The Gene Pool here, and be sure to subscribe to it (click the “subscribe” button there) — even for one measly $5 month — so you can enter both this week’s contest and the “grandfoals” follow-up in a couple of weeks. Lots more to link to from the Invitational itself.
Now, Pun for the Roses! Click here to get to the stud barn.