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Friends, I had another Bad Pun Brain Teaser contest on Facebook.. I will not reveal the answer here, but it is on my Facebook timeline. What I will do is pose the question and then reveal the prize I’ve made for the winner.

Ed was on a special blind date, with special instructions. He had a young, talking rubber tree in a pot that was easy to carry. As he walked toward his Blind Date rendezvous the tree kept saying to passers-by “Nice hat, Sweetheart” or “Have a wonderful day in that great-looking suit, fella” or “Heaven just called. They want you back, Angel.”

Ed’s date was easy to spot. She was at a table at the Alfresco Bistro and the lovely bonsai she had brought had just told the server, “You look dapper indeed, Sir.”

“Marcia?”

The young lady stood and said, “Hello, Edward. Very nice to meet you.” She gestured to the tree. “This is for you.”

Her bonsai said, “Yippee! I know I’m going to like you, Ed. And you can call ME Ed if you want. Two Eds are better than one!”

Ed smiled and said, “Thanks, Other Ed, I will.” He then placed the rubber tree next to Marcia’s chair. “I hope you like him, Marcia.”

In a smooth, Morgan-Freeman-reassuring voice the rubber tree said, “I can tell we’ll get along famously, my dear Marcia.” And Marcia smiled.

Friends, this scene may seem bizarre, but with the help of a Bad Pun it becomes something that happens all the time on blind dates. What were Ed and Marcia doing?

First correct answer will get an original drawing of the blind date scene, including the talking plants.

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Congrats again to Scott, and here’s a heads-up, Friends: I intend before the end of the month to conduct a Bad Pun Brain Teaser Contest on this blog! 🙂

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Here is a page with three prominent words. Each of the words may serve as both noun and verb. The three together, as verbs in the imperative, may serve as three simple instructions with optional complication: Puzzle [out truth through experience]; Play [with concepts and correlation]; Ground [your puzzling and playing with a goal-seeking algorithm]. The three may also be read as two ganging up on the third: PuzzlePlay Ground or Puzzle Playground. We’re going to squeeze these words for all they’re worth here.

I’m at a point in my journey as an artist where I feel everything I’ve done so far, and especially what I’ve done in the last seven years, has gained inertia and inevitability so that new work demands to be done independent of my will to do it, along a path I have less and less control in deviation. Example: I’ve been making crossword puzzle grids for months now. I’m not getting any better at making them, but something in the core of my art identity demands that I keep making them, night after night. Sometimes I use the grids to replicate the crossword patterns in the newspaper, so that I don’t mark up the newspaper to solve the puzzle, but this is happening less and less lately. And there’s a growing sense that soon I’ll be going 3D with resin or PVC, making cubes and other volumes that contain text-units (i.e. alphanumerics), and writing poetry more suited to three-dimensional space; hypercrostic poetry, if you will. Perhaps the hundreds upon hundreds of acrostic poems I’ve done have been merely preparative prelude to what I will be doing. It seems daunting/impossible to do what I’m describing, though.

True story: some years ago a friend of mine had a dream about me. In the dream I was painting three-dimensionally. –Maybe I’m just remembering her telling me about that dream, and now imagining what it would be like, best I can. (I don’t really have to imagine: Philip José Farmer described a means of doing so, as practiced by his protagonist Chibiabos Elgreco Winnegan, in his Hugo-Winning novella “Riders of the Purple Wage.” It is preposterous and wonderfully, wildly imaginative.)

Howbeit, here are the words to my unhyper acrostic:

Party’s dull–perhaps it needs some ZING
Ugly lull–small hope that most’ll linger
Ziggy Stardust’s not along–nor RINGO
Zebra stripes don’t translate to Urdu
Let’s a Maze–a labyrinthine BOON
Enter energy to knit a wound