[Brian Allgar]

This one looks promising - and being an epic, it's up to a magnanimous 8 lines! (Can't say I think much of the example, but that's where we come in.)

Albert Einstein: “I’m a giant whose shoulders you’d have stood on, if you could stand.
I’ll give you a brief history of pain with the back of my hand.”

. . . vs. Stephen Hawking: “And while it’s true that my work is based on you,
I’m a supercomputer — you’re like a Ti-82.”

This week: Write a short “rap battle” between any two characters, real or fictional, as in the example above, which quotes two couplets from a video. By short, we mean one or two rhyming couplets per character — so four to eight lines total. As for what counts as rhyme, the Empress might be a wee bit more lenient than usual, but don’t go “rhyming,” say, “stakes” and “blades,” as does one of the Epics. E-mail entries to losers@washpost.com or fax to 202-334-4312. Deadline is Monday, Oct. 29; results published Nov. 18 (online Nov. 15). No more than 25 entries per entrant per week. Include “Week 993” in your e-mail subject line or it might be ignored as spam. Include your real name, postal address and phone number with your entry

[Roger Slater]

The example actually serves up a very atypical rap line, metrically speaking, since it doesn't have four strong beats (as far as I can tell). I think the ideal lines would be tetrameter (or heptameter with a good four-beat dipodic counterpoint).

Note also that Pat Myers wrote in her blog (I can't find the link just now) that she will slightly relax her strong preference for perfect rhyme, but not to the extent that you might find in typical rap songs. I take that to mean that your imperfect rhymes should be particularly flashy and funny.

I'm finding this competition to be harder than I would have expected. It's also annoying that the deadline comes before the US election, but the results are being judged after it. I wrote two different versions of one of my entries, covering either eventuality.