I’ve often seen this riddle referred to as a classic, supposedly instrumental in the death of Homer (from pique):
Q: What we caught we threw away, what we could not catch we kept.
A:
Fleas.
Huh? And I say again, HUH? How does that answer make ANY sense? Ever since I first heard of it, I’ve been trying to understand it, but failed. Someone help me see what I’m obviously missing!
You have fleas. They’re driving you crazy, but the little buggers are hard to catch. The ones you catch, you throw away (albeit after you crush they little heads); but most of them are too fast, so you still have 'em.
Here’s another:
Q. What does no man want to get, yet no man wants to lose?
It’s a joke. Here, I’ll explain it to you. 
[spoiler]The fleas that we picked off ourselves and out of our clothes, that we “caught”, we crushed between our fingernails and killed–“threw away”–and the fleas that we couldn’t catch, i.e. that were too fast for us, we kept–in other words, we were stuck with them.
It helps if you know that people used to get fleas, which lived in their clothing and in their body hair.[/spoiler]
Okay?
Q. What does no man want to get, yet no man wants to lose?
I know this one—but I don’t know how to do the Spoiler thing.
So the answer is: Una cabeza despelada
Next riddle: How do you do the Spoiler thing?
Type {spoiler}text{spoiler} replaceing the { and } with [ and ]. For more information, click on the link at the bottom of this page that says “vB code is On”.
Correction: [/spoiler].
What’s a “despelada”?
Well, try “depilada” or something in between…
Attempting spoiler now:
a bald head
Ok, I’ve been suspecting this for awhile but now I’m convinced. I don’t trust the spoiler tags. That spoiler in the OP obviously says something (noting the first reply, it probably says “fleas”), but with all my uber mouse skills, I can’t see it. I’ve noticed this about alot of spoilers lately but for awhile I thought it was just a new (and annoying) SDMB trend of having a blank spoiler.
Cisco, it has a single word at the lower left corner. I found it a little tricky getting it to show up. Try left-clicking over the whole post, that may help.
Hit Ctrl-A (or your equivalent of Select-All) to show spoilers.
Hey, nice trick, Guano!
Here’s the answer to the above:
SPOILER
The next row is
1113213211
Starting with the second line, every line describes the line before it. In writing, it is:
One One
Two Ones
One Two One One
etc.
etc.
Sorry, that should have been in the other riddle thread. The instructions were here, and I forgot to switch back!
If you’re having trouble highlighting the spoilers, just double-click (or triple-click) the spoiler box, and everything in it will be highlighted.
What browser are you using? In Opera (and maybe a few others) highlighting spoilers won’t let you view them. You have to highlight it, push ctrl-c (for copy) then open notepad and paste it there.