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 you're a new Loser, and 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.
---
In this week’s Invitational contest, Week 39:
Choose a line from a song written by Bob Dylan, then pair it with your own rhyming line, as in the examples in the Week 39 Invitational at GeneWeingarten.substack.com, or type bit.ly/inv-week-39. Dylan himself does not have to have rhymed that initial line. Your line may be either the first or the second line of the couplet.
Most of Dylan’s lyrics are conveniently online at bobdylan.com/songs. Be sure that the song you're using is credited to Dylan rather than another songwriter. Sometimes, clicking a song title in that index will lead you to a blank page; in that case, you can Google the title and find the lyrics that way.
IMPORTANT FORMATTING NOTE: Please put BOTH the Dylan line and your rhyming line ON THE SAME LINE -- i.e., don't hit Enter between them. You can put a slash between the two lines if it seems necessary. We'll turn the entry back into two lines when we run them, but this will allow the Empress to sort all the entries alphabetically, so all the "How many roads" couplets will be grouped together.
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 4 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday, Oct. 7. Results will be posted in The Gene Pool on Thursday, Oct. 12. 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.
