suckle :: be suckled

Today I was worrying that my fur hat was getting wet in the rain when it occurred to me that it had previously been a fox that probably got wet all the time.  Given a choice between the states of “wet” and “hat,” I realized, it probably would have chosen “wet.”

Tonight at dinner we were telling jokes and it came to me that lately I’ve been encountering the sort of faulty logic that follows the same lines as “this fur will be spoilt in the rain since it’s now a hat” and think that my favorite part about it is that second between the thought and the squint that your face makes when you notice that all the pieces aren’t tied together in order or at all.  The following are some sequences of things and combinations of words that play on our reflexes to link things that rhyme, on our tendency to isolate one part of a sentence to focus on, and other places in language where logics of mirror image, of reversal, of progression, and of deduction fail.

1) Solve the following:

My friend’s mother told her that for graduation she could have a trip to Laos, where she would be able to harvest red ant eggs to eat and milk her own silk worms. So what is harvested when a silk worm is milked? What do cows drink?

Who is buried in Chaucer’s tomb?

2) Rank for creepiness:

us drinking cow’s milk :: cow drinking breast milk? breast milk ice cream? cow eating beef? cow eating spam? us eating spam? taking a buttermilk bath? canines :: molars?

3) Jokes and possible answers and followup jokes:

what’s black and white and re(a)d all over? a zebra reading a newspaper. what colors is a frog reading a newspaper? black and white and green? how do you confuse a frog? put him in a round bowl and tell him to take a nap in the corner. how do you confuse a frog? tell him to do anything. how do you confuse anything? put it in a bowl.

4) A joke from Sofia Annis

Two penguins are standing on an ice flo looking at each other from some number of yards apart. One says to the other: “You look so much like you’re wearing a tuxedo.” The other replies, “Who’s to say….that I’m not”