Jump!

Time flies, and here is author Michael Chabon celebrating the 50th anniversary of the publication of Norton Juster's fable, The Phantom Tollbooth:

I am the son and grandson of helpless, hardcore, inveterate punsters, and when I got to Milo getting lost in The Doldrums where he found a (strictly analog) watchdog named Tock, it was probably already too late for me. I was gone on the book, riddled like a body in a crossfire by its ceaseless barrage of wordplay—the arbitrary and diminutive apparatchik, Short Shrift; the kindly and feckless witch, Faintly Macabre; the posturing Humbug, and, of course, the Island of Conclusions, reachable only by jumping. Puns—the word’s origin, like the name of some pagan god, remains unexplained by etymologists—are derided, booed, apologized for.