Are my brain cells firing?

There are times when I am listening to someone speak and they will interject a parenthetical “pardon the pun” and go on. For my part, sometimes I mentally smack my forehead when I realize I had not caught it. Ever now and then, I will be reading and there will be a real parenthetical “pardon the pun” and I will usually go on because there is no reason to stop reading. However, sometimes the phrase surprises me because I am not aware of a pun. I will go back and it I still don’t get it, I will have to force myself to not linger forever trying to identify that pun.

Here’s one in a recent blog post: Digital downloads cost $8.99 on Amazon (free from Limewire or a friend), CDs average $10.50, but vinyl LPs sell for a whopping $14.00 a pop (pardon the pun).

So, where is the pun? I don’t get it. Is my mind a plodding one, wandering in a blogging world?

UPDATE: Okay, I’ve got it.  After someone remarked that he could not see a pun either,  I thought some more about it and considered perhaps the pop referred to pop music – or maybe a paternal parent was forking over the cash. I went back to the post from which this came and in the paragraph above was a reference to a 15-year-old’s remark that music  “sound(s) better on vinyl, even with the crackles and pops and hisses.”

On the pun scale, I give it a “hiss”.

the dog has been fed

“the dog”  . . . .”the dog”?  For crying out loud; he’s not “the dog”, he is Sydney and he gets fed every morning and evening. Today it was rice and browned ground beef and chopped up chicken and dog food for ‘sensitive stomachs’ all mixed up and microwaved. Now he is outside and I am waiting for him to come in, settle down and sleep. We have been through this out and in process several times this morning. Now he is in – again – and staring at the opposite end of the sofa. We have walking around on some afghans . . . circling . . . and down in a curled up position, although his head is still up, not yet resting on paws. YES! Houston, we have head on paws. We are a go for nap . . . we think.

Are you wondering about the punctuation in the first part of this post? Well, I am. I am fairly certain that we were taught to put punctuation outside of quotation marks in circumstances where the quoted section was not actually the complete sentence. I am confusing myself; I am going to research this. Not that doing this will get the house cleaning or get any food cooked, but I think it’s important.