So many of us San Diegans are thrilled by the new Denny Sanford Elephant Valley at our Safari Park. The elephants, the most gargantuan animals living on earth, trumpet their new home, where life for them is better than ever. They roam in a vastly increased space, festooned with clusters of plants, large boulders, and hidden water features, with plenty of room to search for resources. In Elephant Valley, elephants can be elephants, and visitors can get closer to them than ever before.

To augment the joy our city is experiencing about Elephant Valley, I share a selection of my favorite elephant jokes:

My two favorite elephant singers are Harry Elephante and Elephant Gerald.
What weighs three tons and wears glass slippers? Cinderelephant.
What do you get when you cross an elephant with an alligator? An elevator.
What do you get when you cross an elephant with a rhinoceros? Elephino!
Why did the elephants get kicked out of the pool? Their trunks kept falling down.
Why are elephants so wrinkled? Have you ever tried to iron one?
What game should you never play with an elephant? Squash.
What is the hardest elephant to see? The elephant in the room.

Have you ever owned a white elephant? Before you swivel your head no, remember that nowadays the expression white elephant means an object that nobody seems to want, like a huge, polka-dotted, out-of-style couch or Porta Potty shot glasses.

White elephant trumpets back to the albino elephants once considered sacred in Siam (now Thailand). These creatures were so rare that each one born became the property of the king and was not permitted to work. When a subject incurred the king’s displeasure, the angry monarch would bestow as a gift one of his white elephants. The enormous appetite and utter uselessness of the beast would plunge the “gifted” man into financial ruin.

In classical Greek mythology, Artemis is the goddess of the hunt and the wild. Like Elephant Valley, the Artemis II Spacecraft launch and journey to the moon and back shows us what we human beings can accomplish when we work together. NASA’s Artemis program seeks to return humans to the moon for the first time since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, with a long-term goal of establishing a permanent base on the moon as a stepping stone to human exploration of deeper space. On Friday, April 10, the crew executed a “picture perfect” splashdown off the coast of San Diego. They had traveled farther into space than any other human beings and included the first woman, the first Black person, and the first Canadian to go to the moon.

The moon is our nearest celestial neighbor. I’m over the moon about moon words. Have you ever wondered why the words lunatic and lunar begin with the same four letters? Etymology supplies the answer. Lunatic derives from luna, Latin for “moon,” which when it is full, is said to render us daft — moonstruck and loony.

We keep time with the moon. Monday began as Old English for “moon day,” and month, again from Old English, is the duration between full moons, the time it takes our lunar satellite to complete its voyage around our planet.

A honeymoon is an early harmony in any relationship, especially marriage. Here we come to the juncture of “honey” and the long-ago way of saying “month”: moon. The first month of marriage is often the sweetest, but just when the moon is full and bright, it begins to wane as can sadly happen with matrimony.

The opportunity to read an explanation about the phrase once in a blue moon comes along once in a blue moon, when pigs fly, and hell freezes over. A blue moon is the second full moon in a single month, a phenomenon that occurs, well, once in a blue moon, on average once every 2.7 years. The expression has nothing to do with the actual color of the moon.

Some of us distill or drink moonshine (“illegal liquor”) or babble moonshine (“nonsense”). Some of us moonlight with a second job that we perform at night. Others of us moon over a desired lover. Then there’s that other verb to moon. I’ll leave you to figure out how that act got its name.

Moving right along to another body part, that whitish crescent at the base of each of your fingernails (none on your toenails) actually has a name — lunule or lunula, French-Latin for “little moon.”

I close with a three bits of looney humor:

Scientists got tired of watching the moon go around the earth for 24 hours. They decided to call it a day.
Have you ever dined at the restaurant on the moon? The food is great, but the place lacks atmosphere.
How does the Man in the Moon trim his mustache? Eclipse it.