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.
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In this week’s Invitational contest, Week 22: Write a caption – as many as 25 total – for any of the pictures appearing in Gene Weingarten's June 1 Substack column, The Gene Pool, at GeneWeingarten.substack.com, or type bit.ly/inv-week-22.
How to format your entries: Begin each caption only with the letter on the picture – as in A. [your caption] – so that the Empress can sort the captions by picture. If you have more than one caption for a particular picture, still start EVERY line with the letter name (not "Picture A," just A. Don't break the line (i.e., don't push Enter) within a single entry, or else it will fall apart in the sort.
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, June 10. Results will be posted in The Gene Pool on Thursday, June 15. 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.
