Ben Tripton, the exiled scout leader, answers questions about his controversial scouting concepts.

An old man turned ninety-eight
He won the lottery and died the next day
(He had immediately spent all his winnings on a cryogenic chamber so he could be frozen and brought back to life when they discovered a cure for his deafness, but he died in a fire because he didn’t hear the smoke detector and was reduced to ashes, unsalvageable for cryogenic freezing.)

It's a black fly in your chardonnay
(You served white wine so people wouldn’t notice if aphids landed in it.)

It's a death row pardon two minutes too late
(You were sentenced to death for murdering the person in charge of setting the clocks at the Governor’s office.)

It's like rain on your wedding day
(You moved the wedding outside because of an irrational fear that the sprinkler system would kick in.)

It's a free ride when you've already paid
(You bought the ride for your wife by selling your watch, and she bought you a watch chain by selling her ability to take rides.)

It's the good advice that you just didn't take
(The advice: you should be more open to suggestions.)

A traffic jam when you're already late
(You are a traffic copter reporter.)

A no-smoking sign on your cigarette break
(Your job is hanging no-smoking signs, and these are just the ones you were going to hang after your break, but you didn’t realize that until your break was over.)

It's like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife
(You need the knife to ward off your boss from the cafeteria, who’s breaking into your home to reclaim all the spoons you’ve stolen from work.)

It's meeting the man of my dreams
And then meeting his beautiful wife
(Why would it be at all ironic for me to meet the man of Alanis Morissette’s dreams? Or this guy’s wife? Maybe the wife IS Alanis Morissette. And they’re happily married. But when the three of us start talking, I mention Alanis’s tendency to switch from a second-person narration to first-person, and it’s a big turnoff for the man, so he leaves her.)