Geopunnery

Evelyn at Georneys is hosting a book contest: you can win a copy of the recent book by Gillian Turner called "North Pole South Pole: The Epic Quest to Solve the Great Mystery of Earth’s Magnetism" by submitting your most side splitting, eye wincing, mind rending geology pun. I linked to a somewhat obscure mineral pun I devised a couple of years ago as a place holder, but it was not intended to be an actual submission. The comments have been pretty busy, but I wanted to come up with something original. The result actually takes me a while- I want to try to craft it into a relatively short set-up, and order everything for best comic effect. Here's my final submission:

A stone mason with a powerful phobia of indoor lighting was accused of misrepresenting the "black granite" he used in a counter top. He was charged with basalt, but when his condition came to light, the charges were dismissed due to lamprophyre.

Geologists have a perennial gripe with the phrase "black granite," which is like a furry fish: there ain't no such thing. "Charged with basalt" seems obvious, but I don't think I've ever heard this pun before. And I got a giggle out of "lamprophyre" interpreted as a phobia of indoor lighting. Lamprophyres are weird, obscure rocks that no normal person would ever need to know about, therefore, I'm very fond of them. My favorite was an outcrop near the eastern end of lake Nipissing in Ontario with awesome veins of barite, which has sadly been mostly obliterated by road construction.