Oh My God; Can't ANYBODY Stop Me? - Best Loftus Wordplay of 2017

As threatened, here are the worst puns and wordplay concocted by yours truly in the calendar year 2017 (except for the one on October 2, which must be properly credited to my best friend from grade school) . . . . 

Jan. 25: She went to art school to study Japanese graphic novel writing and drawing, and graduated manga cum laude.

Feb. 7: Okay, so Betsy DeVos is sworn in . . . but will she really do anything about grisly, bare attacks in our schools?

Feb. 22: Carole [searching for the comics in today’s Oregonian]: There was no C section.

Me: It was natural birth.

[sound of man being whacked with a newspaper]

Feb. 25: My throat has gotten sore from coughing up stuff.

I guess you could call it a case of Grate Expectorations.

March 13: Carole and I went to a Portland Art Museum event last week where a docent talked about the new traveling exhibit of works by Rodin.

Our guide told us a lot about Camille Claudel, but I’m puzzled that she never mentioned the fight with Godzilla.

March 25: I applied for a job as a vendor at the farmers market, but failed the test. They asked me to wrap scallions, but I sprung a leek.

Apr. 3: The counterfeiters had produced a perfect copy. It was an exact replica of the real document in every way. US Treasury agents might not have nailed the perpetrators, except that their product turned out to be infinitesimally heavier than the authentic version.

After the indictments were handed down, a Treasury spokesman issued the following statement:

“A Phony Thing Happened on the Weight of the Form.”

Apr. 8: If a large group of chickens suddenly crowd tightly together, that would be a cluster flock, right?

Apr. 9: We didn’t have enough items to rest hot dishes on our table, so we made the rounds of estate and garage sales in a game of trivet-al pursuit.

Apr. 16: There was a Rubicon Wrangler with the KQAC FM logo on its side parked across the street from the platform where we waited for a streetcar.

Carole: What does All Classical Portland need a jeep for?
Me: For driving the rugged Bach country.

Apr. 23: The priest instructed the architect that he wanted to baptize infants in marble receptacles decorated with angels, archangels, cherubs, and avatars -- but not the heavenly beings that perform priestly duties.

You see, he wanted to use only sans-seraph fonts.

May 2: When you're a barista, you can actually make more than you urn.

May 14: He had a lisp; his tongue couldn’t manage hard consonants. So even though his parents had named him Otis, whenever he introduced himself, it came out “Osis.”

He achieved knighthood, but he was a very poor fighter. The king made him the royal ferryman: he guarded the boat that carried people across the great torrent that cut across the kingdom.

So people became accustomed to referring to him as “Sir Osis of the River.”

June 9: It was only after I’d moved into the collective household that I noticed every other person there was drop-dead gorgeous. It dawned on my that I had become an ugly roomer.

July 31: After our final meeting with the oncology specialist who has guided Carole through chemo and surgery, Dr. Rebecca Orwoll (because she’s retiring next month to launch a new career as a teacher of English as a Second Language), we celebrated with frappuccinos. My wife winced when the frigid drink brushed her tonsils; I grabbed my nose and temples and feared a headache after my sinuses got chilled by a blast of cold liquid in my throat.

Carole said it’s hard to avoid stimulating the Vagus nerve when you drink a frappuccino. Worse, I added, “What happens in the Vagus doesn’t stay in the Vagus.”

Aug. 2: The watering hole on the African veldt was the best place to catch braking gnus.

Aug. 5: He claimed to have concocted an entirely unique line of aromatherapy drugs that could cure a variety of ailments, but to me it was just a lot of non-scents.

Aug. 22: I find it hilarious that most of the recent spam Facebook friend requests I’ve seen from pulchritudinous young women flashing deep cleavage or a similarly vertiginous canyon in their derriere cut by a thong include a little box along the left margin just below the main cover shot that reads: "Photos: nothing to show."

Could it be . . . just possibly . . . an actual case of . . . FAKE NUDES?!!!

Sept. 16: Sometimes, people set you up for a joke that you couldn't possibly have imagined. This morning, a Facebook friend posted the following:

“Conversation today. Neighbor said she’d read a book titled How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.
“So I said there’s another book title How Shakespeare Became Bacon. Y’see, cannibalism was widespread in England in those days, and poor Will, y’see, he got waylaid by some fierce rough boys, and . . . ”

after which I could not help but comment:

“And then there was the period when he became DeVere-ly suppressed -- I mean, severely depressed.”

Sept. 18: Herb had heard that his new renter would be moving in with a massive statue of Ba’al . . . and that turned out to be an idol roomer.

Sept. 21: Another dei . . . Another dolor. . . .

Sept. 23: Could we go Dutch on this?

I’m feeling a bit phlegm-ish today.

Oct. 2: I was startled to open the menu at this sushi bar and read the word “tapas.” But Ron assured me my wife would be unhappy if she learned we had been hanging out at a tapas-less bar.

Oct. 9: “I am sorry,” the female entomologist said to the male bug expert, “but I do not engage insects with men I do not know.”

Oct. 16: The research team at Dr. Felsham’s chemical testing facility made the collective decision not to take on the potentially lucrative but also politically dicey contract.

Clearly, it was a yellow lab.

Oct. 19: I don’t like to have anything to do with brokers. They’re always taking sell fees.

Oct. 19: I got an email whose header reads: “Desperate Asian Girls Looking for Dates!”

Why don’t they substitute mangos? Though not as high in Vitamin A, thiamine, and niacin, they have nearly twice the amount of Vitamin K, twice as much folate, five times the amount of dietary fiber, and many multiples more Vitamin C and E.

Oct. 23: It looked like a nice, suburban McMansion, but it was haunted by the ghost of a nanny who had died a horrible death there:  The Phantom of the Au Pair

Oct. 30: Chuck, a veteran member of the kitchen crew responsible for cutting up the fresh fruits and vegetables before they went into the salads and entrees, made an especially credible witness on the stand any time his employer -- an uptown restaurant -- became the defendant in a legal matter accusing it of poisoning diners.

He became known by his colleagues as the “Sue Chef.”

Nov. 10: I tell ya, I got the greatest straight men on the web. I figured it might be months before I got another opportunity like my DeVere crack a month or two ago.

But this morning, a friend commented on his FB page, “So I went to buy some expectorant and there were 46 choices. What’s up with that?”

. . . and what was there for me to say but: “Isn’t it amazing what people will try to hock these days?”

Nov. 22: Seymour spent long hours in the lab, trying to isolate and alter the sections of the human chromosome that would enable the breeding of workers unimpeded by the growth of hair on their heads.

He was hoping to market his own brand of dis-tressed genes.

Nov. 26: Herb enjoyed the peculiar practice of shredding a dollar bill from his weekly income and sprinkling it over his steak and potatoes.

He referred to this as “garnishing my wages.”

Nov. 27: I often feel very spiritual whenever I enter the fresh produce section of a supermarket. Perhaps it may be due to the lettuce spray.

Dec. 18: Harve and Sukey hated the cold and dark of winter.

So they started their own holiday tradition which they called . . . “Belize Navidad!”