One of the hazards of staffing a Frequently Asked Questions booth is that all too frequently the questions come with such lack of (i.e., im) becility that many of our volunteers suffer breakdowns, some of them automotive in nature, others of the dreaded Foggy Mountain variety.

For example:

• I notice that Winnie the Pooh is always pictured wearing a red shirt, but he never wears any pants. Why?
• How long do you have to be dead before paleontologists start digging up your bones?
• Excuse me, is this seat taken?
• Is it true that E=MC² means “Einstein: one medium w/double cheese?”
• What is Raw Data? Can you get it with Remoulade?
• Is it true that Schroedinger did time for animal cruelty?
• Where can I find gloves for a snake (and, please, I don’t mean mittens.)
• Really, what is the strike zone?
• Why did Julius Caesar allow anchovies in his salad?
• Excuse me, is this bag of gold taken?
• Did the first astronaut to take his dog for a space walk have little plastic bags with him? A follow-up: Are those bags now floating around in space?
• Is it true that the only word in the English language that rhymes with orange is burnt sienna?
• Are “Why is everything so hard?” and “Why is nothing easy?” the same question? Follow up: What’s the answer?
• If an idle mind is the devil’s workshop, is an idle elbow the devil’s china cabinet?
• If one thing leads to another, that means you’ve now got two things. Do those two things lead to four things? What about eight things? What about sixteen things? What about thirty-two things? What about…
• Excuse me, is this gawumpie taken?
• Motivational speakers make a big deal out of saying “The early bird gets the worm.” They neglect to say, however, that the early worm doesn’t get the bird. Shouldn’t someone be telling worms “Better late than ate?”
• The law says that if I’m a beggar I can’t be a chooser. What if I beg for one thing but somebody gives me another thing. The next guy comes along, I beg for this other thing, but he gives me the first thing I begged for. Now I’ve got two different things. You see where I’m coming from? Not only must I choose, but aren’t those two things going to lead to another? Another what? Is it just me or is this world cracked?

In the meantime, our volunteers left behind some perfectly good answers to questions that haven’t been asked yet.

• Because.
• Romulus and Remus, aka The Rome Brothers
• The term trapezoid originated with Edmund A. Zoid, a Trappist monk who liked to bite the heads off of triangle-shaped cookies that his mother, Cookie Zoid, sent each month to the monk house, hoping he would share with the other trapped monks. He also popularized the term “point taken” which actually first appeared in his memoirs as “point eaten.” Trapezoid, by the way, is the only word in the English language that rhymes with crappazoid (although, oddly, the pazoid is silent).
• A real banjo has exactly five strings.
• Heavy traffic on the road to Mandalay. Better take the Parsippany cutoff. Stop the car. Get out. Cut off your Parsippany. Get back in the car. Drive like the wind, grasshopper.
• I said because.
• A real banjo player has exactly five cents to his name
• I get it, I just don’t want it.
• Bix Beiderbecke did it with a cornet.
• No, the dead man was not dead before the sixteen men stood on his chest.
• The tardy bird gets the gawumpie.

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2013-2016, all rights reserved.