Devil Bunny Needs a Ham

Half of William Wright's latest post is about ham, and the other half is about a children's book called The Pigeon Needs a Bath. This juxtaposition of cured pork products with a 19-letter title of the form X Needs a Y made me think of -- what else? -- Devil Bunny Needs a Ham, the 1998 novelty board game from Cheapass Games. The game's underlying premise is as simple as it is compelling:

Now here's a weird little sync. When I was searching for the above image, one of the search results was this:

It's a game called Pairs, punningly illustrated with a picture of a pear. In William's post, he writes:

While looking at the definition on Etymonline, the last sentence mentions the term "Pigeon Pair".  This apparently is a term that applies to twins, but of the opposite sex, just like I have proposed with Faramir and Asenath.  The terms comes from the observation that pigeons tend to just lay two eggs, and usually hatch one male and one female. . . . Turtle Doves are a standard symbol of the Holy Ghost, with the famous Christmas song "The Twelve Days of Christmas" mentioning a pair of Turtle Doves.

He goes from pigeon pair to "The Twelve Days of Christmas." William focuses on the two turtledoves of the second day, but of course the most iconic line in the whole song is "And a partridge in a pear tree."

Even weirder: Yesterday, for some reason I can't remember, I was actually thinking about "The Twelve Days of Christmas," and particularly a mangled version sung by characters in Walt Kelly's Pogo, where the partridge becomes "a parsnip in a pan-tree." After writing the above, I decided to look it up. That's when I discovered that there are actually two mangled Pogo versions of "The Twelve Days of Christmas." In the earlier version, in the strip for December 23, 1952, the parsnip is in a pear tree -- and the strip features, of all things, a bunny singing about ham!