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.

 In this week's contest: Reinterpret some actual headline (or a major part of it) by adding a bank head, or subtitle, as in the examples in runners-up above from the most recent Mess With Our Heads contest  in this week's Invitational at bit.ly/inv-week-12. (See the whole Gene Pool at GeneWeingarten.substack.com.)  The headlines may be from any publication, print or online, dated March 23-April 1, 2023. Include the source and date of the headline so we can verify it; for online stories, please paste that page’s URL after your entry.

If you're not familiar with the Mess With Our Heads contest, click on the paywall-free link in the instructions for further guidelines  (if you have a Washington Post subscription, you can type in wapo.st/conv1327).

How to format your entries:   1. We'll be running your main headline and bank headlines as two lines (if you get ink, duh). But for your entry, write the main headline and bank headline on the same line, with a slash or other obvious divider between them (e.g. "Bank head:") and even the URL (if you're copying one out) tacked on to that very same line. This will let the Empress shuffle all your entries so they don't show up on her list as one big block.

If a bunch of you don't do this -- and there are too many for the E to fix -- she just won't shuffle this week.

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 (at) gmail (dot) com and she can check if it got through.  She might not get back to you immediately but  promises that you won't miss the deadline.