More Play With Words

Last March, I gathered up the best examples of puns and wordplay that flowed across my Facebook page in 2015. Another good crop developed last year, but (everybody could use a good chuckle, right?) here are my best from the year before, 2014:

Jan. 10: So, we're talking a mega-crossover with the Star Wars franchise for the final Hobbit movie. They won't let us use any of the major Lucas characters in Middle Earth, but they'll let us have the Wookie.

He would be the Tolkien Chew.

Jan. 28:  I think my favorite mixed metaphor will always be “you’re beating your head against a dead horse,” but I just ran across one that’s almost as good: “There are four ways for habitual wallflowers to come out of their shells….”

March 7: If you have twin redheads in high school, is the one who was delivered second when they were born the beta carrot-teen?

April 3: I think I need a visit from my Auntie Oxidant and Auntie Depressant.

April 21: Hot new arcade game: Gwhac-a-Mole.

Cute furry rodents pop out of burrows briefly and you try to bean ’em by lobbing overripe avocados at their heads.

May 8: That was the last time my old girlfriend tried to give me directions while I was driving. I just couldn't stay with a woman who kept getting all Siri-ous on me.

May 17: While I was waiting in line for our usual allotment of savory tarts at the PSU Farmers Market this morning, I noticed a young man in line ahead of me was wearing a T-shirt with an elaborate schematic of an “Abdominal Clamp,” duly labeled. The tart seller asked, “Is that a caliper?” and then corrected himself: “No, it’s a vise.” Whereupon I chimed in, “Does that make you a member of the Vise Squad?”

May 18:  What this country needs are more effective weapons of mass instruction.

May 26: Over lunch at the Goose Hollow Inn, I noticed a young woman wearing a Tee-shirt that pictured the Sellwood, the Ross Island, the Hawthorne, the Morrison, the Burnside, the Steel, and so on. I briefly considered whether to tell her she might be getting too big for her bridges.

June 14: Today's mail brought a flyer from Chamber Music Northwest offering “advanced” general admission tickets for the Club Concerts series. What does that mean? I can’t buy them if my IQ is under 140?

July 15

“I have to finish this book so I can return it to the library,” Carole said about Jo Nesbø's The Devil’s Star. For the past few days she’s climbed into bed while trying to complete it. She added, “It’s the climax but I keep falling asleep.”

I knew I really shouldn't have, but I said, “That’s what she said.”

July 23

Just got a spam ad in my email for “Burial Insurance . . . No medical exam required. . . .”

What, do people try to collect on it right away?

July 26

One of the health benefits of working from home, according to the article I'm editing, is no longer being exposed to so many germs that come with working “in close corridors” with many other people.

That’s almost right.

Aug. 14

As the Shakespearean actor asked, while showing his dinner guest around the wine cellar, “Que syrah, sirrah?”

Yeah, I fully expected to get some booze from the peanut gallery for this one. . . .

What, you don’t think that was a corker?

Aug. 17

Holsteins tend to view everything in black and white. But to survive and prosper, they need to learn to appreciate the graze.

Aug. 19

". . . use these rapport-building tips to encourage conversion and illicit loyalty."

Just what are we marketing here?

Sept. 9

I see a "haunted maize" on Sauvie Island is searching for performers on Craigslist. Sorry . . . I only work for sweet corn cobs.

Sept. 14

Unstable metaphors department: “Whoever gets big traffic holds the strings of the consumer’s wallet in their hands.”

I have to wonder whether a woman or man wrote the above. . . .

Oct. 15

Everybody in the wholesale block . . . was glancin' to the mailhouse clock.

Oct. 20

So my longest-running book group is going to be reading and discussing Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, next month. You might say we're going to have a man-to-Mann talk.

Nov. 7

Ernie drove a Model T that ran on 100% biofuels.

It had a horn that went “a-RU-gula, a-RU-gula.”

Nov. 20

During book group, Melanie said she and her husband were in a downtown Seattle hotel last week when the windstorm killed the power: no lights, no hot water, no TV or Internet. We all expressed surprise, because good hotels would typically have backup power from generators.

“Degenerates,” I grumped.

Nov. 23

There’s a line of window signs on the RingSide Fish House in the Fox Tower that read: “Live Maine Lobster . . . Alaskan Halibut . . . Northwest Wild Salmon  . . . Hand-Crafted Cocktails.”

As opposed to what? Out of the can?

Dec. 1

“Just another Cyber Monday. . . . feels like Stunday. . . .”

Dec. 8

As the pirate captain was wont to say, “ARRRS longa, vita brevis.”

Dec. 24

Don we now our gray apparel. . . .

Dec: 30
He only ever thought about ways to get his hands on his elders’ money. In short, he was an heir-head.