I think I wasn't clear. I'm not trying to call this one person out for failing here… The tech reporter part wasn't my point. Even physicists don't have very good metaphors to use. My point is that any analogy I've heard fails to convey the strangeness inherit in the underlying math.
David Kaiser isn't even really a "tech reporter", he's one of the physicists behind the experiment described in the article, which addresses exactly what you're complaining about.