The Questions and (un)-Answers game

[supertramp]

A: Sheep invented us for their amusement.

Q: What's a lesbian?

[watty]

A: The third cousin, twice removed, of a thespian.

Q: What is the main ingredient of tea?

[vix84]

A: The ashes of a cremated television.

Q: How do you make someone smile?

[Tiggrscorpio]

A: Take a frowning person and stand them on their head.

Q: How do you make ice?

[umgaynow]

A: You have to check into a hotel for an illicit rendezvous...then you must go out in the hall in just a towel and some scuffies...just past the second candy machine but before the condom trolly you will see a large machine...inside the machine are tiny Ice Gnomes, when they hear your footsteps coming they start making ice...then when you lift the lid of the ice machine it opens a little ice slide for the gnomes and they slide out of sight so you can't see them...that's what that chunka-chunka noise is, the gnomes flying off the bottom of the slide

Q: If you were a monkey what kind of monkey would you be?

[Artemis]

A: One of the ones with a typewriter, working on Hamlet.

Q: Why, if the moon is spherical, do the edges of its disc reflect just as much light towards us as the centre?

[watty]

A: It's the after effects of herds of cows jumping over the moon throughout the years, it dents the surface air particles so they bend inwards.

Q: How long does it take to run a marathon?

[Patches]

A: depends on altitude and attitude: at high altitudes, take the amount of time water needs to boil and at what temperature, then multiply by the stupidity factor of the participant, divide by the number of remaining brain cells and time it takes for the amblance to arrive at the scene through the second biggest planned traffic jam in the city's history and wait for the paramedics to determine if the body should be immediately released to next of kin, or donated to science to further research on the abject supidity of the human race.

Q: Why do we drive on parkways and park on driveways?

[Artemis]

A: It depends on the method you employ. A computer-generated simulation of the battle of Marathon can run in a few minutes, accelerating through the boring bits; a tabletop recreation with miniature soldiers can be played out in 2-3 hours. A life-size re-enactment, with authentic armour, weapons, clothes, supplies, and permission from the Greek government to stage a pitched battle on their land, can take many months to prepare and execute, and the lawsuits resulting from 'friendly stab' fatalities can drag on for years afterwards.

(Edit: drat, posted a moment too late. Next poster, answer Patches' question, up above.)

[Krazy Dreamer]

A: Believe it or not this acually has to do with the children's game "Simon Says." Most people don't realize that Simon was actually a real person, well more of a prankster really, and a traffic cop which made for a deadly combination. One day he was directing traffic when he held up his hand and shouted "Halt!" to the incoming traffic. Of course the cars thought they were supposed to stop, and did, after which Simon jeered at them, "Simon didn't say!" It took several months and several pranks later before Simon was demoted to a desk job, but by then the damage had been done. So not only are parkways now used for driving and driveways used for parking, poor little VW bugs have their engines and their trunks (or boots) in the wrong places.

Q: What would happen if someone were to paint the White House pink?

[tarebear]

A: the new "pink house" will get a signed petition from the Blue is for Everyone Movement about the government discriminating against certain colors just coz the silk pink thongs are back in fashion.

Q: does money grow on trees?

[Emms]

A: Only in Australia.

Q: Why does the moon hit your eye like a big pizza pie?

[watty]

A: A pizza pie placed directly on each eye for 10 minutes a day, while relaxing to soothing rap music, is the perfect cure for eyebags.

Q: Where do polar bears go in summer?

[Emms]

A: They float adrift the open ocean on make-shift life-rafts that have been fashioned out of naive yet sweet Harp Seal pups.

Q: Is Elvis dead?

[JustSkipIt]

A: Elvis was last seen singing at the Hi-De-Ho burger in Lubbock, Texas.

Q: How much does the average house weigh?

[Emms]

A: about as much as a sack full of gold doubloons

Q: how many sweaters can a moth eat before it dies of "moth-ball" asphyxiation?

[Artemis]

A: You'd think it'd depend on the size of the moth and the size of the sweaters, but curiously, it doesn't. Scientific studies have shown that moths only eat sweaters with an arm length (shoulder to wrist) exactly 22.4 times their own wingspan, and thus consume a constant amount of moth-ball relative to their metabolism per sweater. This applies even to giant moths like Mothra, who only eats sweaters big enough to be worn by Godzilla (which is why the big G is so pissed off - he's cold-blooded, and Tokyo Bay is not warm this time of year). Research has indicated that a moth will therefore consume sixteen and one half sweaters (the left half, in 87% of cases) before expiring of the cumulative effect of the mothballs. Statistical anomalies are suspected to be the result of moths with inadequate mathematical skills, or broken measuring equipment, who cannot tell how big a sweater is.

Q: Why is there always, always, always a pickle in mass-produced hamburgers?

[ambercissism]

A: Gherkins, eaten in India with salt or lemon juice for 3,000 years, came to Europe during the Renaissance. Along with their crunchy texture, pickles add a primary sour taste which has been enjoyed with lettuce since the Roman era.

Q: Which came first, the egg or the chicken?

[Artemis]

A: The chicken. In fact, the egg never came at all, and had to attend to itself later on with a vibrator, once the chicken had fallen asleep. The relationship continued for some time - the chicken blithely ignoring the egg's dissatisfaction, and the egg clinging to the hope that the chicken would improve itself - but ultimately they broke up after the egg found sexually-explicit SMSs to a loaf of bread on the chicken's mobile phone. The chicken had a one-night stand with the loaf of bread, but she stopped returning his calls; the egg later moved in with a tub of yoghurt.

Q: Who decided which diagonal slash character was 'slash' and which was 'backslash', and why?

[oneyedchicklet]

A: The Slash sent a note out to all the other keys on the keyboard. He was telling them all he loved them. The BackSlash being the considerate one, wrote back and meant to say "Back at you Slash". But sneezed as he was typing and left out the "at you" part. So everyone thought his name was BackSlash.

Q: How does a Magic 8 Ball always know what to say?

[Artemis]

A: Given the popularity of billiards-based games, a great number of 8-balls are manufactured each year, so many so that, purely by weight of numbers, a marketable number of them are psychic. Rigorous double-blind testing picks out the extra-sensory 8-balls from their mundane counterparts, and they are separately packaged and sold. The testing standards used to be more lax, but were tightened after a string of lawsuits from owners of defective 8-balls which predicted that Betamax would become the dominant form of VCR technology. The Magic 8-Ball Company (formerly the Dutch East India 8-Ball Company) is now protected from lawsuits brought by dissatisfied 8-ball owners; interestingly though, they are currently threatened with bankrupcy by a string of costly anti-discrimination actions take by mundane 8-balls.

Q: Why do coopers make barrels, not chicken coops (and who, if anyone, does make chicken coops)?

[JustSkipIt]

A: Chicken coops are not made. They're actually found in nature. You've seen people throw aluminum beer cans out of their windows right? Some people even dump off washers and dryers in vacant lots. Whenever something metal is tossed from a window, it starts to take root. In 8 months (or 19 good rains, whichever comes first), it will grow into shoehorn. It takes 9 months (and applicable rains) to become a letter opener and continues growing until at 37.6 months (on average) it is a chicken coop.

Q: If a chicken and a half lays an egg and a half in a day and a half. How long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all the seeds out of a dill pickle?

[Emms]

A: That number is contingent on the rate that the mule can stuff the seeds back into the pickle once they’ve been kicked out by the monkey’s wooden leg. If the mule at the other end did his business before the race started the answer would be precisely half the amount of time it takes the chicken and a half to lay three dozen eggs.

Q: Why does Ani Difranco have to be so damn hot?

[tarebear]

A: it has to do with the alignment of the earth to the sun relative to the position of venus with mercury... the closer the ratio created with the distance of the earth to the sun to the angle created by venus and mercury relative to earth, the hotter she is.

Q why do we have nose hair?

[watty]

A: Nose hair is a remnant of the days of our ancestors (homo achtooitis) who sported hairs from their spouts/noses that were at least a foot long. These had sensitive taste nodes and were the main source of taste, smell and pleasure for them. One of their favorite activites was grooming and licking each other's nose hair. Unfortunately with the onset of the ice age, they started getting colds and flus and every sneeze caused hundreds of nose hair to fall out. The homo achtooitis quickly evolved into our proper ancestors, homo erectus.

(okay, that was pretty gross, sorry.)

Q: Who invented chocolate?

[Artemis]

A: Aliens. It has long been suspected than the South and Central American civilisations had contact with extra-terrestrial life, as demonstrated by their mastery of monumental architecture, those big drawings you can only see properly from the sky, and the presence of the engineered genes for soccer supremacy that allow them to compete sucessfully, despite not possessing the advantage of Sir Isaac Newton's Steam-Powered Telekinetic Football Skill Enhancers, which spread from Britain to other European teams during the industrial revolution.

Anyway, chocolate. What the Mayans, Aztecs, Incas and so forth did not realise was that their mysterious benefactors were in fact evil masterminds, whose plan was to slowly gain the trust of the Earthlings, then introduce them to chocolate, which would make them slow and lethargic, thus all the easier to round up and put inside plastic bubbles, for the amusement of their alien offspring (Human-In-A-Bubble is the number one ranked holiday gift on Mars, Venus, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and is only second among the gaseous entities of Neptune's upper atmosphere because they're not very well-adjusted, and prefer to give their children Do-It-Yourself Cow Inverters).

While some early chocolate-eaters were abducted and sold to alien children on a test basis, the venture was unsuccessful overall, as the Conquistadors arrived and trashed the place before the aliens got back. The aliens, fearing the hostile reactions of their shareholders in the Human-In-A-Bubble Consortium, left Earth and declared that further testign had revealed that humans were unsuitable for use in bubbles, due to our foul language, which could be picked up and repeated by impressionable alien children. The surviving Mayans et al were left confused, and with the secret of chocolate.

Interestingly, the spread of chocolate across the world since that time has again drawn the attention of the Human-In-A-Bubble Consortium, which has fallen on hard times ever since they realised that, if they're not going to make Humans-In-A-Bubble, they're in for tough times businesswise. A general harvest was planned for 1997, but we were saved by our tendency to swear, which the shareholders are still wary of. It is a little-known fact that, should our chocolate consumption ever exceed our curse-per-day rate, human civilisation is doomed.

Q: Why does is always rain after you put the washing out to dry?

[umgaynow]

A: I'm sure you've heard the expression Nature abhors a vacuum...well, as it turns out, she's not too crazy about clean fresh laundry, curlings irons, convection ovens and those little electronic nose hair trimmers...most gadgets and their eventual products really...all stemming from a failed adolescent romance with Ron Popeil

Q: If what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas...then how do they manage to export anything, from souveniers and quickie celebrity marriage/divorces (Yes, Britney, this means you) to those stupid What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas commercials?

[tarawhipped]

A: All of the nuclear testing in the Nevada desert created a warp in the space-time continuum, which caused everywhere, everyone, and everything to become a little bit Vegas.

Q: If pi = 3.14159, what does cake equal?

[tarebear]

A: extra year's membership at the local gym you don't really go to anyways.

Q: why is New York called The Big Apple?

[watty]

A: New York was first discovered by ancestors of Steve Jobs.

Q: Why do I need to go to India tomorrow?