Deduce, You Say! Puns

After a good dinner and a bottle of wine, they retire for the night, and go to sleep. Some hours later, Holmes wakes up and nudges his faithful friend.

"Watson, look up at the sky and tell me what you see."

"I see millions and millions of stars, Holmes," replies Watson.

"And what do you deduce from that?"

Watson ponders for a minute.

"Well, astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Astrologically, I observe that Saturn is in Leo. Horologically, I deduce that the time is approximately a quarter past three. Meteorologically, I suspect that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow. Theologically, I can see that God is all powerful, and that we are a small and insignificant part of the universe. What does it tell you, Holmes?"

Holmes is silent for a moment. "Watson, you idiot!" he says. "Someone has stolen our tent!"

So I came across a word today in my reading that I had heard before and was able to deduce it's likely meaning based in the context it was used, however, to be safe, I looked it up anyway and while reading the book definition came up with what I hope is an original pun (phrase)...

Context: When someone is giving you a hard time you can say, "stop basting my Lamb, you lamb-baster"

lambaste - criticize (someone or something) harshly

A young man comes up with a great idea for a new shipping method. He designs everything himself, hires people to create models, and deduces that he can use old fashioned boating technology to increase shipping speeds by up to 350%. This is obviously a great innovation, so he calls up a former Business professor from college and gets into contact with a manufacturer. The manufacturer makes the man come in and present his design to the board of directors, so they schedule a meeting in two weeks.

At the meeting, the board is blown away. The man’s charisma, design, and equations all point to a massive innovation in shipping. The company is poised to make a huge profit. Construction starts immediately.

On his flight back, the man happens to sits next to his old buddy from high school, Jimmy. Jimmy tells the man that he has just blown the farming world wide open. His new GMO potato produces five times as much energy and has been the talk of the world. Jimmy says that all the news outlets have been reporting potatoes to be the next big superfood, and his design is poised to make him millions, if not billions of dollars. Jimmy pitches the man for the entire plane ride, and convinced him. They hop on the next flight back to visit the board of directors once again. The board is shocked. Both ideas stand to make billions of dollars for the company, but there is one slight problem.

The CEO says to the man, “we know you have these two ideas. However, we can only allocate enough resources to make one of them profitable. I recommend you take some time off and really decide which of these ideas you want our company to produce. We can schedule a meeting in a few weeks if that works for you.”

The man says right back to the CEO, “I’m going to take a walk and clear my head. This is a big decision” and walks right out of the room.

Not even five seconds later the man comes back into the room and says “I’ve made my decision. Let’s go with the shipping method.” This shocks the CEO, who says “are you sure?? This is a billion dollar decision and you only took five seconds to think about it.”

The man looks back at him and says “well, in this business time is money— so I decided to make my decision schooner rather than tater”