JumpStart by Robb Armstrong for October 25, 2020

Not exactly Jeff Dunham…yet…

Nobody trusts a loudmouth tur…er, uh…tortoise.

As I understand it, the set of tortoises is a proper subset of the set of turtles. So all tortoises are turtles, but not all turtles are tortoises.

That’s the one thing I wish I had learned as a kid. I would have, but there was no one around to teach it. I would have had so much fun with that!

She’s no Edgar Bergen.

All tortoises are turtles (Testudines), but not all turtles are tortoises.

She could wear her mask.

“Box turtles” were very common in rural New Jersey when I was a kid, and we usually kept a couple of them during the summers; they tame very easily, and would take food from our fingers. They live on land, and never voluntarily go into water, although they can swim quite well; we would verify this by putting them in a deep puddle, and watching them churn manfully back to dry land, like an amphibious tank. Since they are actually tortoises, I’m curious why you never hear them called “box tortoises”.

Terrapin?

she’s no Terry Fator either. He was a riot at the Mirage in Vegas, back in 11 B C (Before Covid)

I have a friend who found a box turtle and took it to the vet—who said it was so old that it had been here when Mark Twain was writing about the Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. She had a small fountain she kept stocked with small goldfish and leafy stuff for it and it lived there for decades, finally dying at about 130 years old.

She was pretty good until the punch line.

One of the benefits of masks …

Tortoises do live a long time, but so do turtles.