Come Dine with Me Puns

Back in the before times, when sit-down restaurants existed, I used to order boneless cheese sticks and would just throw the word "boneless" in front of any appetizer with 100% corniness. The purpose of this isn't to make a good joke. It's not a good joke. The purpose is to make my dining companions catch some cringe splash damage and want to crawl into a hole and die out of embarrassment for my being horribly corny.

But there is a real, deeper purpose that I've discovered entirely by accident. People, especially young people, are so self-conscious and worried about saying or doing something embarrassing that it taints a lot of social gatherings. They go to a restaurant and are afraid to speak up even when their order is blatantly wrong. They'll tip well even when the food took an hour to arrive and the server has disappeared into the corn stalks behind a baseball field. It takes 2 hours of hanging out together before some friends finally stop nitpicking themselves, uncomfortable in their own bodies and brains, feeling perpetually judged, and begin to relax. These are the kinds of people who go to sleep every night replaying cringey moments from high school. Their last thought of the day is when the Burger King girl said, "Enjoy your meal!" and they said, "Thanks, you too."

It takes 2 hours and/or a lot of booze before they're comfortable enough to take conversational risks and truly reveal themselves. But if I come right out of the gate with a really dumb joke, then we can cut to the chase. There's less danger because someone in the group already shot themselves in the foot, right off the bat. They pulled a pin on the cringe grenade and then jumped on it.

You cringe at my dumb joke and then we're over the hump. Someone has already done something pretty stupid, so go ahead and order the hubcap of nachos and a massive chocolate shake because nobody is going to judge you poorly while they're all judging me.

In terms of price negotiations (haggling), there is a psychological concept called "anchoring". You throw out the first number and all subsequent numbers are compared to that number. This is the same idea. We've already set the humor standard pretty low at "boneless cheese sticks", so you can say the dumbest shit you want and, as long as it's not worse than my cheesy joke, it won't matter.

This is why, when you were a teenager and your dad took you and some friends out, your dad made corny jokes. He knew they were corny jokes. You and your friends un

Watching Come Dine with Me with my SO, the contestant is cooking Seabass and she starts telling me about her love for seafood.

I, on the other hand, am not so keen. So I told her 'I'll bass on the seafood thanks."

She wasn't impressed, but I was, so it's fine.

So, my wife and I decided to move this freestanding shelf thing to our dining area. However, we have wood floors, so pretty much anything that's put there (table, chairs) has to have these felt pads on the bottom so it doesn't scratch up the floor. Even if this won't get moved around much, if at all, I felt better about putting the pads on the bottom of this shelf as well, just in case.

My wife has been bugging me to do it for a while, but you know, laziness. Finally, earlier tonight, I cut the felt sheets to size, stuck them on the shelf, and put it where it belongs. When I was done, I called my wife over. "I'm in bed!" "It'll be quick, I promise!" groan "You don't even have to come downstairs, you can see it from the hallway outside the bedroom door!"

Finally she came out, with a "this had better be good" look on her face. I pointed to the shelf, and proudly declared that "I felt up this rack!"

Worth it.

They're an older couple and Bud (RIP) loved to mess with his wife. We all sat down for dinner one night, but in order to get into the dining area you had to go down a single stair. Bud's wife said "Watch the step"... as we all fill our plates, Bud is still standing there. His wife said, "Come on Bud, it's time to eat." to which he followed with "You told me to watch the step!"