The Advancement of Learning Puns

My boy, Arthur, is slow. He is the slowest child I’ve ever met. And I don’t mean mentally, he just doesn’t move quickly at all no matter what the urgency.

He takes an hour to get out of bed and stand up in the morning. He takes an hour to eat. When we go anywhere we have to tell him 20 minutes in advance because he takes that long to get his shoes on. His showers…we had to install an industrial sized water heater and hook it up to his shower exclusively because he would drain the tank and shower in ice cold water and started getting sick from it.

The worst part is that even if you help him out he doesn’t go faster. We can feed him and he’ll just swallow slower. We can wash him and he’ll just sit there for longer.

I’ve learned to live with it and be content because I know he won’t change. But my wife can’t take it. Just the other day she told me she was going to punish him to make him go quicker:

“I’ve had it with him! I’m going to start giving him timeouts and taking away toys for going so slow!”

“Honey,” I said, “it’ll never work.”

“Why not?!”

“Because you can’t rush Art.”

After many years of wandering, he finally arrived in a small village in the middle of nowhere. The people there believed in the same religion as he did, but they had no church; they had to go to the nearest one which was in a small town 25 km's from there. The priest took the initiative, asked the Church for support, and with the help of the local men they built their own temple. From there on, he was celebrating the Sunday masses, joining together men and women in Holy Matrimony, and saying prayers at the funerals.

Many years passed by like that.

At the end of an ordinary mass, in early spring, on a chilly Sunday morning he was just guiding the people out of the church, was about to close the gates when an unknown man stepped into the churchyard.

With his dirty and torn clothes, he stood before the priest and said:

• Priest, please be good and give me half a lemon! - the priest was a good man, and even though he thought the request was a bit strange, he went back to the rectory, took out a lemon, cut it in half, took it back to the man and gave it to him, who looked back to the priest with gratitude. However, the priest was curious. He asked:

• Son, why do you need this half of a lemon? - with a fright on his face, and before the priest could have said a thing, he rushed out of the churchyard gate and took off.

A week later, around the same time, when the priest was leaving the church, he found himself in front of the same man in the churchyard. The man said:

• Priest, please be good and give me half a lemon! - the priest was surprised by the appearance of the man and his strange request. Of course he was good, went back to the rectory, and brought the half lemon. Placed it in the stranger’s hand and immediately he asked:

• Here it is, my dear son, but please tell me why do you need this half a lemon? - the man was obviously frightened and immediately ran away but the priest was not sluggish either and ran after him. He wasn’t in a very good condition, he has never run so much and so fast before so he was out of breath by the end of the village, almost fainted. He thought the strange man might appear again next week, and it would be nice if he could keep up with him, so he spent his week working on his cardio. It turned out to be a good idea, because as he thought, the stranger entered the churchyard on Sunday. The priest didn’t even wait for the request, he was good, and brought the half lemon. He received these words from the man:

• Thank you

My sister teaches at a high school for children with learning and behavior disorders, and every year she hosts a skills summer camp.

2015 will be geology-themed, and we need help thinking of a fun name for the camp.

Previous years: 2014 Summer Scenarios: Little Egypt (Egyptian themed) 2013 Summer Scenarios (first year had no kitchy name, but it was zombie-themed)

Potential examples: Stone Throne, Rock Steady, Taken for Granite, etc.

During the live-in camp (boarding school), they'll learn survival/outdoorsmanship skills (fire starting, gardening, canoeing, etc.), and have geologists as guest speakers.

Any high school learning-friendly geology-themed blockbusters would be welcome suggestions, too--but I'll post that for the people over at /r/movies.

Thanks in advance!

Edit: Thanks to everyone who actually gave appropriate suggestions, and high-fives to those who just made rock puns. My sister selected Game of Stones.

We're a fairly advanced society, we need jokes with content that makes us think. All these easy laughs are making us dumber by the second, and we just keep rewarding them with upvotes that convince the lazy among us to keep churning out lazy jokes. Comedy is one of the only common traits things in every society and culture on this planet and we may not always agree with what is funny, it's very subjective, but no society or culture has no comedy. It's one of the most effective unifiers in all human existence. Of course it's just my two cents, but we really need to avoid cheapening it. There are 6500 spoken languages in the world and this is the most widely spoken, the least spoken languages of course being sign language. Someone once said "a world without laughter would be like a world without warmth, a dark hole in the ground filled with cold water." I know they mean well, but I think it's worse than that. There are three unwritten rules for how comedy should function in the world. We have to learn to follow them or we're doomed as a people, forever, however just like there are two butts in the word "assassin", there are two caveats to this dire situation with lessons learned from the best there is. One is the lesson we can take from Switzerland, I'm not entirely sure what makes them so good at integrating comedy into their lives, but their flag is a huge plus. The other is the lesson we can learn from farmers who know how to put what's important first, how to put in the effort into growing something, and they are always outstanding in their field. We get too caught up in standard modalities of thinking and none of us are totally all right, in fact most of us are at least close to half left. In closing, the absence of comedy when you really think about it, is fear. Fear of the ups and downs of life, much like a fear of elevators. And just like a fear of elevators, we all must take steps to avoid it. Thank you for your time.

Disappointed