Enter Week 94 of The Invitational: Asterisky Business

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In this week’s Invitational contest, Week 94:

In a Q&A riddle or other fairly short form, write a joke that requires hifalutin or specialized knowledge to understand, as in the examples in the Oct. 17, 2024, Invitational at GeneWeingarten.substack.com or directly here.

While one or more inking entries may be incorporated into a future "Barney & Clyde" comic strip, do not write your joke as a four-panel script, as we'd asked you to do in an earlier contest. Just tell us the erudite joke, followed by a brief explanation, just enough for readers to get the point.

How to format your entries: We’re NOT exhorting you as usual to submit each entry as a single line. Just write them up in some form we can figure out, including the explanation for your erudite joke (which should be concise, not a whole paragraph).

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.

Entry deadline is 9 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday, Oct. 26. Results will be posted in The Gene Pool on Thursday, Oct. 31. Entries will sometimes be edited by the Empress and/or Czar for space, taste and just better wording of the joke. Unfortunately, time doesn’t permit full consultations about every editing tweak.

Every entry will be personally read and ruminated on (ewwww!) every week by either the Czar or the Empress or, when there's time, by both of us.

Tell us the name you want to be credited as, along with the town you live in; e.g., Joe Blow, Bendover, Miss. (this is the format we strongly prefer).
In the event you win and you would like the Unfabulous Prize mailed to you, please enclose a mailing address. U.S. addresses only; if you're from out of the country, you'll have to settle for Glory. *

If you have ideas for the headline for the contest results and/or the subhead above the list of honorable mentions, submit them here (no more than 10 each). Feel free to search through the All Invitational Text file at NRARS.org to see whether we've used that headline already. (If you don't have anything for this category, just skip it.)

This is also the place to let us know if the email address linked to your paid subscription is different from the one you gave above, and we wouldn't recognize it. (If your name is part of your email address, we can find it that way. We're still doing things with actual human fingers!)

Your answer

We used to ask you to leave them here, but we're not seeing them ... So: don't! Instead, feel free to send any questions, comments, complaints, general chat, arrangements for bribes, etc., directly to the Empress at myerspat@gmail.com. To submit questions, etc., in advance to The Gene Pool, please go to bit.ly/genepool-question . Gene would like to get lots and lots of questions! You can also submit public questions for Pat, either Invite-related ones for the Empress or grammar-type ones for Pat the Perfect.

A copy of your responses will be emailed to the address you provided.

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