I'm still trying to work out whether (1) ballard's remarkable cascade of mixed metaphors was itself a joke, or (2) eru's comment was poking fun at it, or (3) both comments were intended entirely straight and it's just coincidence that the density of metaphor mixture is so high.

Both comments make perfectly good sense taken "straight". I'm leaning towards #3, with apologies to ballard and/or eru if I missed their joke.

(My father was in a meeting once when someone said "Let's not beat about the bush. | When all's said and done, | at the end of the day | you just have to take the bull by the horns." At which, at least the way he tells it, everyone else nodded sagely while he desperately tried not to laugh too loudly.)

My father-in-law who himself was a director in a large international company told me about a game they used to play in meetings: bullshit bingo. You have to make up your cards ahead of time and then mark off the squares as you hear buzzwords.

That was an actual game at some MIT presentations. Eventually the speaker noticed.

I'm not a native speaker. And, I spent too much time with managers, recently.

So I wish it could have been 1 and 2, but for me it's 3.