I don’t have a good puzzle to kick of this thread, but I do think it is time to start a new thread as it is better to not have so many pages to scroll through.
Anyone got one to start us off again?
A man enters a field and dies.
(I’m assuming this is where folk ask questions with only yes/no answers…)
Is it a mine field?
Did he enter the field of toxicology ?
Did he enter the field…
On foot?
In a vehicle?
By falling from above?
By tunneling from below?
In some metaphorical sense (like @pjd’s example of entering the field of toxicology)?
No
No
Falling from above
(I say, you chaps are good at this! 
)
Yeah, we already went through all of the old classics in the first few pages of the first iteration of the thread. You’ve got to come up with something new to hook us.
Sorry - I didn’t read through the entire set of previous
threads (at least I got this one started…)
Well, if nobody else has one, I have another tale of youthful folly that may work.
So: a woman asked me out on a date, and I turned her down, and this isn’t one of those stories where a guy cluelessly fails to realize that he’s being asked out; I understood her perfectly — sure as I knew exactly who she was, and sure as I’d known her for years — and I looked her right in the eye when she stood right in front of me to ask me that question and receive my just-as-perfectly-understood answer. Anyway, it wasn’t until months later that I found out that I’d turned her down when she’d asked me out on a date.
Can you explain my idiocy?
Was the incident you found out about later the same incident you’d described in the previous sentences?
Yes, it was.
Did she say, in so many words, that she was asking you to go on a date with her?
Did she invite you to do something with her that is generally understood as a date (going to a dance, dinner-and-a-movie, etc.)?
Did she invite you to do something with her that might or might not be a date, depending on the participants’ feelings and the way things unfold (coffee, going to a museum, etc.)?
Was it Opposite Day, April Fools’ Day, or some other occasion when the normal rules of language and social interaction are somehow altered? A situation / occasion where role-playing is expected?
Hmm. Let me take these in reverse order:
Nothing like that; I’d had every reason to think that she’d straightforwardly meant what she’d said, while also figuring that we were in a situation where the normal rules of social interaction and language were in effect.
It was both less and more general than that: on the one hand, she didn’t invite me to do anything in particular; on the other hand, she simply — and, “in so many words,” explicitly — put the offer out there to go on “a date.”
(I can’t recall her exact wording all these years later, but she intended to convey — and I correctly understood — that I could’ve replied by specifying “go to a museum” or “get coffee” if I’d wanted to accept “a date” on those terms.)
Again, no, she didn’t specifically invite me to do a dinner-and-a-movie thing with her, or for us to go to a dance together. But, in another sense, I correctly figured that I could’ve accepted the offer of “a date” by specifying ‘dinner and a movie’ or ‘a dance’.
Again, “a date” was the exact wording she used (and, yes, I knew that she meant ‘a scheduled romantic appointment’ rather than ‘a sweet and chewy fruit, to be enjoyed fresh or dried’).
Is there any trickiness in the phrase “turned her down”?
Is the reason why you turned her down relevant?
At the time you turned her down, would you, in fact, have been interested in dating her?
At the time you found out, months later, would you have been interested in dating her?
Is any other romantic partner (of either of you) relevant?
Is the age of either of you relevant?
No, I mean I refused the offer to go out on a date.
Did the date actually happen?
In light of your followup question — maybe? So:
I was coming off a bad breakup, and so wasn’t ready to date anyone.
Which brings me to this:
No to the first, and yes to the second.
We were both high schoolers.
No. Again, I have it on good authority that I was an idiot.
Did you respond with an ill-timed joke? Or with something that was mistaken for a joke?