Last week I was with my friend David, who likes bad puns (something we have in common). We were discussing space flight and the possibility of colonizing Mars, and I pointed out a certain irony.<\/p>\n
At which point David said “That makes sense, because Mars is irony.”<\/p>\n
Which is true — Mars is red because it contains iron. But it was also, as those of you who pun will know, a signal that our conversation had left the realm of substantive discussion, and had entered a Pun War — a strange sort of combat in which all that matters is how outrageous a pun you can make. The contest generally continues until somebody comes up with a pun that can’t be topped.<\/p>\n
“I was merely testing your mettle,” I said.<\/p>\n
“How elementary!” he replied. “Maybe we should table these puns.”<\/p>\n
“I’m willing to do that,” I said, “for a small fee.”<\/p>\n
At which point he gave in, for David recognized that “Fe” is the symbol for iron in the periodic table of the elements.<\/p>\n
The next day I was relating this episode to my friends Craig and Lisa, and their fifteen year old daughter Dana happened to be there. As I got to the punchline I started to worry that perhaps this was all going over Dana’s head.<\/p>\n
“Did you understand that?” I asked her.<\/p>\n
“Of course I understood that,” she sniffed. “After all, I’m fe-male. And you know what that means, don’t you? I’m Iron Man!”<\/p>\n
I happily conceded defeat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last week I was with my friend David, who likes bad puns (something we have in common). We were discussing space flight and the possibility of colonizing Mars, and I pointed out a certain irony. At which point David said “That makes sense, because Mars is irony.” Which is true — Mars is red because … Continue reading “Pun Wars”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12793"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12793"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12793\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12798,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12793\/revisions\/12798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}