* * * * *

                               The joke's on me

Gregory came over last night (okay, technically this morning but really, if
it's before 5am, it's last night, but since it's technically today I'm
posting it here) and we all went out to IHOP (International House of
Pancakes) [1] for dinner (yes, we keep strange hours). While there we told
very bad jokes.

As we were leaving, I told the following joke: “A long time ago two guys
decided to build a house on the side of a mountain. During the design, they
figured they would need 100,000 bricks to build the house and ordered that
many. When the bricks arrived, they started. At the end, they found they had
one brick left over. What did they do with that brick?”

“I don't know,” said Gregory.

“Threw it off the side of the mountain,” I said.

“Wha?”

“That's the punchline,” I said.

“That's like your other joke,” he said. “Why is an orange?”

“What?” I said.

“Why is an orange?” asked Gregory.

I, for the life of me, couldn't remember ever telling that joke. “I don't
know. Why?”

“Because motorcycles don't have windshields,” Gregory said.

“That was my joke?”

“Yes,” he said. “You wrote it in one of columns [2].”

“I did?”

“Don't you remember?” asked Spring [3], “this exact same joke came up a few
years ago and we checked it.” I have a hardcopy of all my columns (what's on
my site [4] is only about a third of the columns—the rest range from “eh” to
“burn it. Burn it all to Hell! I never wrote such trash!”). “It was there,”
said Spring.

“I certainly don't remember it,” I said.

And I certainly can't find it.

The only thing that's even remotely close is this bit from the “High tech
brings low-down tricks, big mess” column of April 27^th, 1988 (which isn't
online by the way):

> Shut up! Let me get back to my column. Now, where was I? Ah yes, the
> cafeteria … the cafeteria is okay, if you like institutionalized food. So
> what if the pizza is schizo? I don't mind, as long as the psychotic chicken
> is kept in the straightjacket.
>
> What if it was 7–1?
>
> I liked it better as 7–2. And I also like 5–10 records.
>

But that's it. I can't find any occurances of “oranges” or “motorcycles” in
any of my columns.

I may have to let Spring look for it.

[1] http://www.ihop.com/
[2] http://www.conman.org/people/spc/writings/murphy/
[3] http://www.springdew.com/
[4] http://www.conman.org/people/spc/writings/murphy/

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