Conundrum of the [period of time TBA]

[capri0mni]

A childhood memory popped into my head, some time around midnight:

When I was little,* I had one of those genre books "Great Big Pop-up Books Of..." This was a pop-up book of riddles, and all the riddles were the silly punning, sort.

And this is one of two riddles that I remember from that book:

Q: What do you get when you cross a crocodile with a head of lettuce?

A: A man eating salad.



*Not sure precisely how little... But it was before our family moved from the suburbs of New Jersey (two hours?) north to the quasi-rural woodlands of the Mid-Hudson region of New York. So I must've been younger than six-and-a-half.

Comments

[smw]

I read this, first, to mean "a man who is eating salad", which is a pretty typical mistake on my part. I think you would've been entertained to hear the mental gymnastics I was going through trying to make sense of that. It involved boots, trying to find different ways to read words into "crocodile", and the phrase "ahead of let us".

[capri0mni]

I'm not actually sure that is a mistake... I think it's bizarrely humorous either way.

You combine a head of lettuce with a crocodile, and there's a chemical reaction-like "poof!" (of green smoke, naturally), and when the smoke clears, you either get a salad that bites back (must have raw radishes), or you find that the crocodile has been replaced by a human with a fine taste for raw vegetables.

The pun actually works either way (though I think my old pop-up book went for the toothy iceberg version -- more "pop" potential)

I'm curious about how the boots got into it...

[raze]

I shouldn't have found that man eating salad pun as funny as I did, yet I am currently sneezing the rest of the coffee out of my nose, so there you have it.

[capri0mni]

Hee! I'm glad... though I do apologize for the loss of good coffee...