Gary Barwin asks:


Here's our solution:

Q: "What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?" —Bertolt Brecht

A: The hole hovers in Swedenborgian space.

A still from Vertigo (a film irreparably marred by Kim Novak's clownishly painted on eyebrows). --- June writes: That's what Laura Palmer's mother said when SHE saw the white horse!

Q. And, after all, is not eating well what the culinary arts are all about?
A. Yes, it is.
Q. That was actually a rhetorical question. Aren't you supposed to be on break?

—humorist, playwright, neologist, palindromist, parodist, and wit Jonathan Caws-Elwitt

"I was surprised anybody had answered my rhetorical question."
—David Farris, Lie Still, 2004

Q: Why can't we see peels of thunder?

A: Because they're the same color as the sky. —Jeff Hawkins

Q: How many beans make five?

A: It’s something of a trick question.  The answer is "one."  One legunimous pod contains five seeds.

Note that this riddle is a corruption of "How many beans make fava."  Again, the answer is "one," though admittedly it's one very broad bean.

Carly Simon's song "You're So Vain" doesn't identify its subject, yet actor Warren Beatty has asserted that it's about him.  Beatty's assertion begs a question: if anyone takes "You're So Vain" personally, is he or she technically correct?

The answer is Yes!  According to Hugh Everett's "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics, every possible quantum vanity is realized.  In the many-branched tree of parallel universes, each and every vain human being is the true subject of Carly Simon's song.

This is very comforting! Imagine being vain enough to think YSV was about you, but finding out it wasn't. The very world might cease to revolve around one.

Technical question: Does Everett's theory still hold for values of "a" (a = age of vain individual) that are < Y (Y = years elapsed since song was written)? In other words, was Simon farsighted enough to build infinite references to unborn vain people into her song? 

Similarly, I note the problematics around individuals who were alive when the song was written but not yet vain, their vanity only to develop later on. In their case, I hypothesize a "critical vanity threshold," or CVT--the discrete moment at which someone's vanity has matured to the point where Simon's song begins to refer to him or her.

Q: What's more pedestrian than a painting of a bowl of fruit?

A: A painting of pedestrians.

(Thanks, Mike!)

Jonathan suggests a painting of the backside of a crosswalk signal.

Q: "Everything can't be Kafkaesque, can it?  I ask myself this over and over, even though I know it's a rhetorical question." —William Keckler

A: Yes, everything is indeed Kafkaesque, except at the antipodes, where everything is reversed.

Gary Barwin adds: ... & then as summer school.

Courtesy of William Keckler:

QUESTION: If Roman augurs read entrails, does that mean libraries once had guts?

ANSWER: YES, parchment was indeed made from intestine.

Our burned-out flatbed scanner delayed our mention of how tickled we were to see our rhetorical question mark appear in Martha Brockenbrough's hilarious Things That Make Us [Sic].

Things That Make Us (Sic): The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar Takes on Madison Avenue, Hollywood, the White House, and the World

The nuns in The Sound of Music ponder, "How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?"

We found the five-step answer in the poem "To Catch a Cloud: Homage to Magritte," anthologized in Rising Tides: 20th Century American Women Poets (1973):

1. Begin with an unruffled lake
2. Wait for a cloud to pass over
3. See the cloud in the lake
4. Reach down and pinch the lake's skin between thumb and forefinger
5. Raise it as you would a silk handkerchief

From Dr. Boli's Encyclopedia of Misinformation:

Don't miss Dr. Boli's "Prognostication Engine," which you can print out and build yourself.

Read about the Prognostication Engine and print your own full-size version.

The nuns in The Sound of Music ponder, "How do you solve a problem like Maria?"

We found the answer in a volume by Eliza Marian Butler entitled The Saint-Simonian Religion in Germany (1926):

The "solution of Maria's problem" is her "conversion to the Protestant faith."

By Linzie Hunter.  Via ffffound.

"We speak often of rhetorical questions, but never about another figure of speech of equal importance: the rhetorical imperative."
—Geof Huth