Archive for Puns
A year ago, I posted this on Facebook: There are Cthulhu-related versions of various boardgames; see, for example, Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu. If there’s ever a Cthulhu version of that game about making another planet more livable, I hope they call it Terrifying Mars. And I added a comment suggesting that Terrafying would also be […]
At first I thought this line in a Verge article was a typo: “According to one cryptogopher working at Google,…” I also thought that cryptogopher sounded like a great superhero name. “Look, down in the ground! It’s Cryptogopher!” But it turns out that Filippo Valsorda describes himself as Cryptogopher @Google in his Twitter profile. I […]
I just finished reading Prof. Peter Schickele’s 1976 book The Definitive Biography of P.D.Q. Bach, which I’ve been glancing over occasionally ever since I encountered it on my father’s bookshelf as a kid, but which I had never read in full before. (Even reading just the titles of some of the PDQ Bach pieces—especially the […]
Edward FitzGerald’s translation of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat includes several verses making an analogy between clay pots and humans, and between the Potter and God. In a note, FitzGerald adds: This Relation of Pot and Potter to Man and his Maker figures far and wide in the Literature of the World, from the time of the […]
Philpotts (the cooperative’s dog) is a cross between an Afghan and an English sheepdog; first he chases the sheep, then he knits them into sweaters. (From Joanna Russ’s novel On Strike Against God.) I welcome suggestions for what other hybrid dog breeds might do, along similar lines.
Back in 2013, I posted a collection of puns that my uncle Dobe had sent me. Several of them had a format I particularly like: a brief situation setup, followed by a common phrase that, in this context, is a pun. My favorite example (listed on that page): “I wondered why the baseball was getting […]
A bear walks into a bar and says, “I’ll have a beer ……… and a whiskey.” The bartender says, “Why the big pause?” I had never heard that before, and I laughed out loud when I ran into it online the other day. Turns out it’s widely enough known that there’s even a song based […]
As for this tropical fruit: it lived a long and happy life. When it retired, it faced a quandary: it loved its house, but it also loved to travel. In the end, it put wheels on the house and traveled all over the place, having many wonderful adventures. And that’s the story of this old […]
My father told me a joke a couple of times when I was a kid that I could never entirely reconstruct later. I just found a version of it in a 1908 O. Henry story, “The Man Higher Up.” Partway through the story, a man named Alfred E. Ricks has been selling land in Florida […]
I thought I just heard US Rep Donna Shalala (D-FL) say on NPR that Donald Trump has an Oedipus complex. It gradually became clear that what she had actually said was “edifice complex”—which is pretty clever, but perhaps not a great choice of phrase for radio, where a slightly staticky signal could easily result in […]