Analogies That Don't Quite Cut the Mustard The line separating painfully bad analogies from weirdly good ones is as thin as a soup made from the shadow of a chicken that was starved to death by Abraham Lincoln. Here are some fine examples: The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Her artistic sense was exquisitely refined, like someone who can tell butter from I Can't Believe It's Not Butter. The knife was as sharp as the tone used by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) in her first several points of parliamentary procedure made to Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) in the House Judiciary Committee hearings on the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball would not. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River. The dandelion swayed in the gentle breeze like an oscillating electric fan set on medium. Her lips were red and full, like tubes of blood drawn by an inattentive phlebotomist. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up. Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any PH cleanser. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature beef. She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs. Her voice had that tense, grating quality, like a first-generation thermal paper fax machine that needed a band tightened. The painting was very Escher-like, as if Escher had painted an exact copy of an Escher painting. The sunset displayed rich, spectacular hues like a .jpeg file at 10 percent cyan, 10 percent magenta, 60 percent yellow and 10 percent black. [author and source unknown] Home / Humor and Whimsy