Style Invitational Week 1472: Counterfeit facts
Tell us fake trivia about money, the financial system, etc. Plus Part 2 of our mulligans on 2021's contests.
by Bob Staake for The Washington Post
If you’re not yet getting this newsletter by email (or if you got dropped because you didn’t expressly opt in since we moved over to Substack): By all means …
▲ Contrary to popular myth, John D. Rockefeller did not give a dime to every person he met; however, he did offer each of them a spoonful of his tapioca pudding.
— In 2015, several PriceWatercloset executives were forced to resign after the revelations of wild nights of triple-entry bookkeeping.
It’s time once again for another chance to misinform the world with satirically bogus trivia! We’ve done animals, vegetables, probably minerals, cars, clothes, the military, fashion, some two dozen areas of not-really. So for Week 1472: Tell us some fake trivia about money or the financial system, as in the examples above. And if you’re not quite good enough to win, you could win this weird glitter globe from Tokyo!
And we have the results of Part 2 of our do-over contest: The compendium of 18 different contests from 2021 includes “first drafts” of famous lines, like “Yesterday, December 7, 1941: A crappy day we’ll never forget, amirite?” and new sports like “The poll vault: The bar for voting in Texas just got a lot higher.”
In my weekly supplementary column, The Style Conversational, I’ll share some classic ink from a wide variety of our earlier fictoid contests. And there’s a last-call invitation to this Saturday’s (Jan. 22) Loser Post-Holiday Party (proof of booster required). It’s still going to be just a couple dozen people in a large room, much more intimate than our usual Loser parties. There’s a link to the Evite right in the Convo.
LINKS TO …
This week's Invitational column, Week 1472, and results of Week 1468
No-paywall entry form for Week 1472
This week’s Style Conversational column
Still running -- deadline Monday night, Jan. 24: It’s our annual Tour de Fours neologism contest. This year your word or phrase must contain the letter block BIDE, together but in any order. See Week 1471 here; see the no-paywall entry form here.
More ways to enjoy The Style Invitational and be part of the Loser Community:
Join the Style Invitational Devotees group on Facebook and the Devs will anagram your name every which way.
Also on Facebook, the Style Invitational Ink of the Day page presents one classic entry as a colorful graphic that's easy to share. "Like" the page to get it regularly on your news feed, or to scroll through the archives. bit.ly/inkofday.
And we're now on Season 2 of the You're Invited podcast, half-hour episodes with host Mike Gips and various Invite luminaries. Catch all 18 episodes at bit.ly/invite-podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.
— Pat Myers, Empress of The Style Invitational, pat.myers@washpost.com (or just reply to this email)
*That's Loser with a capital L; named for the runner-up prizes emblazoned "LOSER," the community of regular Style Invitational entrants now proudly calls itself the Losers. If you enter the Invite, you're a Genuine Loser. But not (necessarily) a loser.
in early 2021, Yellin discovered a congressional charity donation pot worth $586,000 and directed it to uncovering those influenced by gifts and lobbying. Publicly, Congress pretended to be proud of their donation but their personal social media feeds revealed another story.
I can't log in to the winners of this week's contest as an ad for your paper comes up and there is no way to X it out. Come on folks!