Punslingers

Ted Trautman on the O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships:

“The inveterate punster,” Leacock wrote, “follows conversation as a shark follows a ship.” What is missing from the Pun-Off, then, is this conversation; onstage, we inveterate punsters are forced to play only with the words we can find inside ourselves, rather than lying in wait for a punworthy moment in the course of normal dialogue. Hence the excess of gimmes like “philosophers Kant hold their liquor,” as opposed to a more organic, transcendent play on words, as when I misremembered the color of a friend’s car years ago and he told me that “it must have been a pigment of my imagination.” Or when a friend interning for a congressman confessed that he snuck a glance at John Boehner’s crotch in a Capitol restroom and I declared him the Peeker of the House. Such turns of phrase are unlikely to appear in any serious writing I attempt down the road, and yet the elation they produce is among my favorite feelings: a credit to their author and a gift to anyone with the wit and good sense to enjoy them.

B. is a mighty punster whose lines are often delivered with a deceptive blandness that means the non-language-attuned may miss them altogether. One I remember particularly fondly, as we traveled by boat in Costa Rica and an enormous flock of seabirds came into view: "One good tern deserves another!"

"Six working Colossi"

Courtesy of my father, a very good letter at the FT (in response to this piece on the top-secret room-sized computing machine named Colossus, invented by Tommy Flowers - site registration required):

A rebuild of Colossus can be seen by the public at The National Museum of Computing in Block H at Bletchley Park. Block H also happens to be the world’s first purpose-built computer centre and housed six working Colossi in the 1940s.

Before his death in 1998, Tommy Flowers took a great interest in the rebuild of Colossus, which began in 1994, and visited us to give his thoughts, reminiscences and moral support.

The rebuild took 14 years and in the Colossus Cipher Challenge two years ago it once again broke a Lorenz coded message in three hours and 40 minutes. However, a German using a laptop broke the code in just 47 seconds and won the challenge.

Tony Sale,
Head of Colossus Rebuild Team and Trustee of The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park

"Tight-buttoned, non-bulbous, turgid and with no sign of ribbing"

The National Vegetable Society's Annual Championships.

Record-seeking

"Right now, I’m going for 'most apples split in a minute in midair with a samurai sword.' So I’ll practice that in the yard.

"Tempting little rectangles"

The Spam cook of the year.