The Offishial Fish-Joke Post

by Benjo

A reader sends the following joke my way:

Q: What do you call a fish with no eyes?
A: A fsh.

Goldfsh

The reader's implication, of course, was that the fish, having no eyes, cannot see that he has misspelled the word "fish". However, fishes cannot read, and therefore this joke is not funny.

Not one to be denied a good laugh, I took to Google, certain that there must be some good ichthyological humor out there. My search yielded two gems:

Q. What do you call a fish with two knees?
A. Tunyfish!

Q. What do you call a fish with cable?
A. Telefishion!

These marvelous, dare I say Shakespearean, jeux de mots inspired me to create my own. So, readers, I present to you my first original fish-themed joke:

Q: What do you call a clothes store run by a fish and a guy named Abercrombie?
A: Abercrombie and Fishtch!

* * *

I invite you, in the comments, to fry up your own fish-jokes! It's very easy:

1. Think of a word with a syllable that sounds like fish.
2. Think of a question whose answer has that word in it.
3. Substitute fish for the fish-like syllable.
4. Pat yourself on the dorsal fin, because you've just written a hilarious joke!
   

I close with the first, and I believe best, joke that I've ever written. See if you can find the fish reference in it.

Q: What kind of resting can be very intriguing?
A: Interesting!

Top Questions

by Benjo

The question I'm asked most frequently by my readers is:

What question are you asked most frequently by your readers?

Great question.

The second most common question is about HDMI cables. Namely:

Are all HDMI cables the same? Some cost like 10 times as much as other ones--but they sure LOOK the same!

They sure do. But they are definitely not all the same. Just one bit of proof that they're not all the same: different ones cost different amounts of money. And as everyone knows, you get what you pay for. With HDMI, if you're paying under $100 per cable, you're basically throwing away the money you paid for your TV. I happen to have spent a lot of time at Circuit City over the years, and have personally bought a TV before, so trust me--I know what I'm talking about.

Hello, Internet.

by Benjo

Let's get right to the issues. First up: gay marriage.

Let us be lovers; we'll marry our fortunes together.
- Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel (gay musicians)

The last week has seen an outcry among liberal Californians who are angry about the passage of Proposition 8, which bans gay marriage. Many of my readers have requested that this blog's first post be devoted to my thoughts on this important issue.

Now, in thinking about any ballot measure, we must carefully consider both its moral and legal implications. Having spent literally hours looking into both aspects, I can state unequivocally that gay marriage is both wrong and illegal.

I can personally attest to its wrongness: one time I put it as the answer to a math problem about the slope of a line, and to be sure, that test came back with more red ink than Ashley Todd's face. Astute readers will no doubt accuse me of logical fallacy in this explanation. To them, I submit: of course, gay marriage has changed since the days of grade school. Today, it is a problem not of algebraic slopes, but of slippery ones. To wit, if we start allowing gays to marry, society will take its cue from Simon and Garfunkel, who not only wanted America to let them be lovers--i.e., gay marriage--but also, to let them marry their fortunes.

For input on the legal end, I turn to my colleague Benjo Joben, who blogs about legal issues. Says Joben:

Benjo, you are absolutely correct to draw the parallel with fortune. In fact, the Supreme Court ruled on exactly these terms in the historic Schiavone v. Fortune case, 477 U.S. 21 (1986). I don't want to wade too deep in the findings--which involve mandamus, writ, statute, and a bunch of other really wonky stuff. But to put it in layman's terms: the Court ruled 6-3 that the slope was indeed slippery. The dissent, which has spurred a decades-long wave of activism aimed at overturning the ruling, argued heatedly that the Constitution contains no Slippery Slope Clause. But Justice Blackmun, writing for the majority, famously stated, "Would that we were a nation of spelunkers, my mind might be elsewise. But, as nature provides no carabiners, this slope is simply too slippery."

So there you have it. I don't know about you, but this is one fortune that I think we ought to keep in the cookie.