There He Goes Again . . . Puns and Wordplay from 2016

And the silliness runs on. These are some of the puns and plays on words that occurred to me last calendar year. . . . 

January 10: Faces-the-Sea was chief of a coastal First Nations tribe. One day he had the bright idea of building a breakwater in the bay to catch codfish that swam over it during high tide and would remain trapped behind it when the tide went out.

The tribe thought this dam would be a splendid and easy way to catch many fish, after the initial hard work of building the structure. It seemed as if it would work; the pool behind the submerged stone wall captured many cod.

But alas, the breakwater collapsed as the tide went out again, and all the fish escaped. In disgrace, Faces-the-Sea exiled himself from the tribe. The people agreed, it was a cod dam shame.

February 21: Although the King had a Queen for appearance’s sake, he preferred to spend his time with pretty young men. The Queen began to suspect the truth when she overheard him singing to himself, “I’m always chasing reign beaus. . . .”

February 28: I will never forget the time I worked with a playwright who was casting a new play. She loved my audition, but didn't really have a suitable role for me in the production ... until she got the idea of ripping several scenes out of another piece she was working on and inserting the character on those pages into the pending project.

You see, she was tearing me a part.

March 3: Joe wanted one of those smart houses -- you know, the ones where you can remotely control the HVAC, electricity, water, etc. -- and everything responded to his mobile except the faucet next to the microwave and range.

So he had everything but the kitchen synch.

March 14: Most nights when I take the dog out for her final walk, we hear a chorus of bullfrogs croaking on the Willamette.

It’s kind of a ribeting experience.

April 21: Hippocrates, a physician in the age of Pericles and often cited as the father of modern medicine, spent his entire life trying to deal with his patients’ problems with bowel obstruction. He wrestled with their ailments all his life but died without ever having learned that benign and malignant growths were the cause.

Historians of medicine refer to Hippocrates’s efforts as the Polyponesian War.

April 26: Once Harold had been diagnosed with Type II diabetes, his wife began to watch his diet much more closely. He could only have his favorite breakfast -- waffles with extract of maple tree xylem sap -- syruptitiously.

June 12: He flew a small plane from Nome west to Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula.

You’d have to say he was kind of over-Bering.

June 16: It’s a rare treat when somebody sets you up so beautifully and naturally for a good pun.

Tonight one of my book groups was discussing the recent biography of Marie Equi, a Portland physician, lesbian, and Socialist-Progressive who treated the poor, performed abortions, supported labor causes and strikes, and was convicted of sedition and imprisoned in San Quentin for protesting U.S. participation in the First World War.

One of the members of my group told us about going to see where her remains are kept, in the Portland Memorial Mausoleum.

She said, “Fortunately, I knew how to read a map, ’cause it was kind of cryptic --”

At which point I interjected (of course), “So to speak. . . . ”

June 30: Look, my mind is pretty fluid and strange in the early morning, is all I can say. It was about 6:35 a.m. when I was standing on the northbound platform of the streetcar line at SW Moody and Meade, when I suddenly got an image of a Dan Piraro cartoon scripted by Stephan Pastis. Picture this . . . Alan Ladd in chaps, cowboy hat, and six shooters, being serenaded by the Andrews Sisters singing “Bei mir bist du Shane. . . ”

July 8: Everybody was crazy about Bob’s sponge cake custard dessert. Nobody could figure out what made it so much better than everyone else’s. One day, Mary sneaked into his home when Bob was making a big batch for a charity sale and saw what he added to the eggs, sugar, condensed milk, evaporated milk, and vanilla: a couple of his own boogers!

After that, no one would touch Bob’s baked goods, because now everybody knew he was a phlegm-flan man.

August 7: Whenever he was enraged at anything, Herbert wrote about it in a special, separate journal.

He referred to it as his choler-ing book.

August 8: Last week I think I misheard the lyrics of a song being performed by a live band as referring to “the best years of our lies,” which I decided was a marvelous nostalgic/romantic sentiment.

September 2: The will stipulated that only blood descendants would be allowed to use the restroom off the great hall.

So it became known as the heir head.

September 4: I used to disdain wooden clubs in favor of longswords or broadswords only.

But more recently I’ve been brandishing out.

September 18: A guy tried to get me to invest in a startup that’s going to market a Japanese sauce that’s vinegar and citrus-based, and dark brown in color, but I could tell it was a ponzu scheme.

September 28: Pumpkin Spice? Was she the one that joined after Ginger or Posh left the band?

November 6: “Wonder where she’s going?” Carole asked rhetorically as we glanced at the tall, lean teenager winding her hair into a tight bun across the aisle of the streetcar. Ever since OBT moved its offices and school into our neighborhood last winter, we’ve grown accustomed to spotting ectomorphic ballet students ride to and from the facility aboard the streetcar. I’ve often checked their fares when I’m on duty.

“Probably not the same place he is,” I murmured, nodding toward the scruffy young man (but older than the girl) sitting right behind her, bent almost in half above his lap with eyes closed, several days’ growth of beard, greasy long hair flopping down over his forehead and eyes, and clutching a plastic yellow Bic lighter and pack of Camels.

“He doesn’t look like a prima,” I went on. “More like ‘corpse de ballet.’ ”

November 30: As the physician who examined the victims of the Boston Massacre remarked, “It’s beginning to look a lot like Crispus.”

December 20: We ended up going to a big party during which everyone stood around in lines all night.

That’s right: We hit the queue ball.