Hey, Loser!  You must be a paying subscriber to The Gene Pool to enter The Invitational.  (Sorry, but our lunches aren't free either.)  Either monthly or yearly is fine (and your subscription also lets you participate in the Gene Pool chats and Q&As. We'll know by checking your email address against our list of subscribers (low-tech, but manageable), so if the email address you gave above can't be the one you gave Substack, let us know below in the field where we ask for your name. 

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This week's contest:  At this link (or type in bit.ly/grandfoals-2023) is a list of the winning "foal" names from Week 16 of The Invitational. “Breed” any two names from the list and name the “grandfoal” to humorously play off both parents’ names, as in the examples in this week's Gene Pool (or type bit.ly/inv-week-18).  This is a wordplay contest, not anything about the actual horses.

As in thoroughbred racing, a name may not exceed 18 characters including spaces, but those characters may include punctuation and numerals. You may run words together to save space, but we strongly favor names that are easy to read (capitalizing the individual words helps).  DON’T name a foal a third name right from the list; such an entry never gets ink.

IMPORTANT FORMATTING DIRECTIONS

Please write entries in the A x B = C format like this: 

Horse A x Horse B = Your Foal Name 
Don't number them, don't put little doohickeys in front of them, don't put the foal name on a separate line. DO spell the names as they appear on the list.

Include as many as 25 entries in the area below where it says "Your answer." It's best to copy them in from another document so you'll have them if your computer suddenly dies or something, or if you click to submit the form and something goes wonky.   

 Note: Your auto-reply confirmation might be missing formatting, with everything squished into one big blob of text,  but it seems that it's nothing to worry about;  the entries have been coming out fine on this end.

If you don't get a confirmation within a few minutes that you've sent your entry -- you've searched your email filters (e.g., Updates or Promotions in Gmail; and good ol' Spam) and there's nothing -- don't just send it over and over!  Feel free to contact the Empress at myerspat@gmail.com and she can check if it got through (put something in the subject line that refers to The Invitational).  She might not get back to you immediately but  promises that you won't miss the deadline.