“We interrupt this tragedy to bring you some comedy…”

February 8, 2009
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Selected exchanges from Friday’s mental floss:

  1. What musical instruments are represented below?
    a)  P O
    b)  BA BA
    c)   ECLART
    d)  @ # $ %

    “What do you mean, P an’ O?”

    “John just gave us the answer, didn’t he?”

    “I did? Make me say it again.”

    “The answer to B is not sheep.”

    (Half the class) “D’oh!” (Furious erasing and crossing out.)

    “Since when is a sheep a musical instrument?”

    One genius did say, “Bagpipes!”

    Add together each of the defined words to get a whole new word.
    Example: to shout + what you say when you feel pain = yellow.
    a) A light brown color + to leave =
    b) Vehicle + an animal pal =
    c) A store’s announcement + a type of women’s clothing  =

    “What’s a pall?”

    “That’s pal.”

    “What’s a pal?”

    Furious waving to be the first one for c.

    “SignBra!”

    Wacky Wordy: What phrase is represented by the following?
    Look kool XtXhXeXrXoXaXdX

    “Look cool!”

    “What about the rest of it?”

    “If you look cool, you don’t need it.”

    For more mental floss, head on over to Brainscramble.com.

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    Random Featured Post

    Oh Raffle King, Oh Raffle King…

    (Sung — way off key, and sort of warbley — to the tune of “Oh Christmas Tree.”) I guess we need to talk about the King. On Wednesdays, after we go over the vocabulary homework, and discuss the words, I give them a vocabulary pretest. If they ace it (100%), they are exempt from the vocabulary portion of the Friday test. I used to have one of them flip a coin to decide whether or not I let them use their “cheat sheet” — the homework page we just went over and corrected — on the pretest. What they don’t believe when I tell them — even though it’s true — is that, on average, their scores on the pretest are lower when they use the cheat sheets, and fewer of them get an exemption. But they like to think it’s a security blanket, so I play along. Then I discovered the King. I would give you the URL of his creator’s web site, but he has some other, shall we say, inappropriate shtuff. (You can do a Google search if you really want to check it out.) So I took the liberty of “cloning” the King. If you click [...]

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    Mr. Coward has been teaching on the beautiful central coast of California since 1989.

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