Any day is a good day for limericks whether they be bawdy, funny, or cute. Anything to make us smile a little is certainly worth the effort. Since we’ve all loved our years of school and our family pets, here are four related limericks and they’re relatively child friendly as well.
I thought I’d continue with another installment of interesting questions created to assist us in self-evaluation. These installments have made for some lively discussions with my better-half after we discovered some surprisingly different answers. I hope you have a partner or spouse to discuss them with. It can be quite enlightening.
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If you knew your child would be severely retarded and would die by the age of five, would you decide to have an abortion?
Do you find it hard to say “no” when you regularly do favors you do not want to do? If so, why?
If you began to be very attracted to someone of another race, how would your behavior differ from what it would be toward someone of your own race?
Would you rather spend a month on vacation with your parents or put in overtime at your current job for four weeks without extra compensation?
Would you like to know the precise day of your death?
Would you accept a guaranteed, lifetime allowance of $50,000 per year (adjusted annually for inflation) if accepting it meant you could never again earn money from either work or investments.
What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about?
Do you ever spit or pick your nose in public? What about cleaning your teeth with a toothpick?
A close friend asks, and genuinely wants your opinion about something, but your opinion is one that he is likely to find quite painful. For example, your friend is an artist and asks your honest estimate of his chances of being successful. You think he is an atrocious artist who hasn’t the slightest chance of success. What would you do?
Do you have a favorite sexual fantasy? Would you like to have it fulfilled?
I just love reading and listening to news and current events, not for their overwhelming truthfulness but for their misleading and sometimes stupid inaccuracies. Once upon a time the news was reported by actual journalists who dug up the information and submitted it to highly capable editors to keep things as accurate as possible. Unfortunately, these days we have a huge selection of news readers and talking heads with nice hair, big boobs, all handsome and beautiful, who all get their stories as reported to them by the general use wire services. They’re lucky if they can pronounce some of the words properly. Here are a few of my favorite headlines that are both ridiculous and ludicrous.
LARGER KANGAROOS LEAP FURTHER, RESEARCHERS FIND
ALCOHOL ADS PROMOTE DRINKING
CHILDS DEATH RUINS COUPLE’S HOLIDAY
QUEEN MARY HAVING BOTTOM SCRAPED
ILLITERATE? WRITE TODAY FOR FREE HELP
SURVEY FINDS DIRTIER SUBWAYS FTER CLEANING JOBS WERE CUT
SCIENTISTS SEE QUAKES IN L. A. FUTURE
MAN SHOOTS NEIGHBOR WITH MACHETE
I think these headlines have helped make my point. Pay close attention to all of those alleged reporters as you watch their multitude of news programs and opinion pieces!
For most of my life I’ve loved the winter and snow and cold weather. That being said this may have been the worse winter ever with continual losses of electric power, telephone coverage, and internet and that doesn’t even include my fractured ankle and finally being exposed to Covid-19. As global warming continues to wreak havoc on the weather patterns, there’s no normal anymore. Maybe it’s time for me to move further north and live above the arctic circle. The snow, ice, and cold remain consistent there.
Here are a few items of weather-related trivia that you might find interesting.
The Antarctic ice is forced out over the Ross Sea – a large inlet into Antarctica – in a layer hundreds of feet thick. It is called the Ross Ice Shelf (see above) and it’s area is about that of France.
At the height of various ice ages of the last million years, as much as thirty percent of all the land of the planet was covered with a thick layer of ice.
The first mention of an iceberg in world literature did not come until 800 A.D. An account of the travels of the Irish monk, St. Brendan in the north Atlantic, three centuries before, appeared around then and mentioned having sighted a “a floating crystal castle”,
An iceberg larger than Belgium was observed in the South Pacific in 1956. It was 208 miles long and 60 miles wide – the largest ever seen.
The temperature can become so cold in eastern Siberia that the moisture in a persons breath can freeze in the air and fall to the earth.
The most recent ice age reached it’s peak in 16,000 B.C., and it wasn’t until 8000 B.C. that the ice began it’s final retreat. In 6000 B.C. the Great Lakes were clear, and for the first time in 25,000 years Canada began to lose its ice cover. It was not until 3000 B.C. that the ice retreated to its present location; by then human beings were establishing cities throughout the Middle East.
After reading all of that, maybe this wasn’t such a bad year after all.
I’ve been trying for days to post something but these damn storms are screwing up almost everything. Our power and internet returned today after 24 hours of silence and I wanted to post before the next catastrophe arrives.
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It feels good to be back to some semblance of normalcy. My first post-op inspection revealed my poor fractured ankle is on the mend. The doctor assures me that only five more weeks of a walker and wheelchair and I should be good to go. That news eases the pressure a little and makes getting back to this blog a little easier. I’ll be happy to provide a few limericks today to make you smile as little.
Born: December 10, 1830, Died: May 15, 1886 (aged 55)
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I’m something of a fan of serious poetry and an even bigger fan of those bawdy limericks I post so often. I guess I’m simply a fan of creative people who aren’t afraid to bare their souls to us. I’ve noticed over the years that creative types are a breed all their own. Many are looked upon as being a little strange or weird which has always seemed unfair. Being strange or weird for me is a badge of honor. Let me share the following with you.
Emily Dickinson, whose poetry thrills millions today, fantasized about the earth and sky and heaven itself, but left her home state, Massachusetts, exactly once, and that was to visit her father in Washington DC. She became such a recluse that she would not stay in the same room with her guests but would speak to them from an adjoining room.
Only seven of her poems were published in her lifetime. After her death in 1886, over 1,000 poems were discovered in a bureau. They were subsequently published, but often after word and punctuation changes were made by overzealous editors. A definitive edition of her works did not appear until the 1950’s.
As with all artists and other creative types, you never seem to get the recognition and fame you deserve until you’re dead.
I’ve had more time to contemplate things and myself over the last few years than I ever thought I would have. Many years as a workaholic kept me running at an insane pace leaving very little time for self-evaluation and concerns of conforming to meet the expectations of others. As busy and crazy as my life was at the time, I always looked for a way to separate myself from the crowd. It was done without a lot of thought, and I paid a price for all of my more stupid decisions. I always felt that I had to be different and regardless of the consequences I pursued that end. Overall, it was worth doing because I learned a lot about myself and about many of my closest family and friends, they gave me a steady drumbeat for most of my life of “your being weird” or “get with the program”. One of the phrases I hated the most was “That’s the way we’ve always done it.” That was like “fingernails on a blackboard” for me. For you youngsters, check with your parents if you want to know what a blackboard is. I’ve spent the last few weeks, bedridden with a fractured ankle with plenty of time to reflect on things. I must be doing and saying something right because my ever-present bodyguard, my cat Lucy, has been agreeing with me on everything. I thought in fairness I would search out a second opinion and who better to ask than my favorite smartass, Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
“Your conscience is a nuisance. A conscience is like a child. If you pet it and play with it and let it have everything that it wants, it becomes spoiled and intrudes on all of your amusements and griefs. Treat your conscience as you would anything else. When it is rebellious, spank it – be severe with it, argue with it, prevent it from coming to play with you at all hours, and you will secure a good conscience; that is to say, a properly trained one. A spoiled one simply destroys all the pleasure in life. I think I have reduced mine to order. At least, I haven’t heard from it for some time. Perhaps I have killed it from over severity,”
Being stuck in this house and this bed is driving me crazier than usual. Now that the Cov-19 has come and gone I still have a twenty-pound cast on my leg. I’m still limited by some door sizes which are too small for this freaking wheelchair to get through. Let me apologize, I immediately start to whine and feel sorry for myself when things aren’t going my way. It’s just human nature I suppose. I decided I would find a few items of trivia to help breakup your day. These are a mish-mosh of items collected totally at random. I hope you enjoy them.
An Egyptian papyrus, dated at approximately 1850 B.C., gives us the earliest record of a method to prevent pregnancies. It required putting into the vagina a concoction of honey, soda, crocodile excrement, and some sort of gummy substance.
Between the mid-1860’s and 1883, the bison population in North America was reduced from an estimated 13 million to a few hundred.
Not a single bank existed anywhere in the thirteen colonies before the American Revolution. Anyone needing money had to borrow from an individual.
After twenty years as a faithful unpaid servant of the Duke of Windsor, Walter Monckton was rewarded with a cigarette case on which his name was engraved – and misspelled.
In the seventeenth century, and principally during the period of the Thirty Years War, approximately sixty million people in Europe died from smallpox.
A conventional sign of virginity in Tudor England was a high exposed bosom and a sleeve full to the wrists.
If all of the water vapor in the Earth’s atmosphere were condensed at the same time, there would be enough water to cover the United States (including Alaska and Hawaii) with twenty-five feet of water.
The British erected in London’s Trafalgar Square a statue of U.S President George Washington, whose armies overthrew British rule in the colonies.
When John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, it was not a federal felony to kill a President of the United States.
For fear he might conceal a joke in it was one reason why Benjamin Franklin was not entrusted by his peers with the assignment of writing the Declaration of Independence.
I haven’t been posting much in recent weeks due in part to my broken ankle and my inability to walk. I won’t drag this out because other people’s medical problems are truly uninteresting to most everyone else. Here is my short version of events.
Ankle Surgery – 2 days in hospital
Returned home to discover my better-half diagnosed with Covid-19
2d day I was also found to be positive for Covid-19
A total of 12 days of isolation for us both accompanied by all of the fun Covid symptoms.
Now that Covid-19 has been dealt with we can once again try to get back to some kind of normal.
Thats the extent of my whining, bitching, and complaining about this run of bad luck. I’m still not very mobile but on the bright side, in four or five more weeks I should be back to what I once thought was normal. Hopefully my blogging will increase as well.
Now that I’m laid up with this broken ankle, I thought I should delve into the medical profession for a few items of trivia. Unfortunately, most of my conversations these days are with doctors, nurses, hospitals, and those lovely insurance companies. I should mention that as a young kid I was bullied for almost a year which makes me very aware of people who bully others. I understand that medical folks are only trying to do good, but really their job is all about being gentle bullies and I tend to react badly at times. It makes me a little crazy. I’m sure that somewhere in one of the many medical computer files some well-meaning person has noted next to my name, “A-Hole“. So, sit back and enjoy some medical trivia from a proud, card-carrying A-Hole.
The Egyptian mummy was a standard drug of European pharmacology until the eighteenth century. Despite criticism within the medical profession, doctors prescribed mummy powder as a cure for internal ailments. Portions of many embalmed Egyptian dead were swallowed before science and common sense rendered the practice obsolete.
Sigmund Freud turned down a $10,000.00 fee in 1920 to spend six months in New York treating patients in the morning and lecturing in the afternoon. He calculated that he would return to Vienna poorer than when he left so he declined.
Opium was frequently used as a painkiller by Army doctors during the US Civil War. By the end of the war, according to conservative estimates 100,000 soldiers had become addicted to opium, at a time when the population of the entire country was only 40,000,000.
In the eighteenth century, there were American slaves who were physicians. They treated not only other slaves and free blacks and whites as well, until restricted by law to serving only the black community.
Approximately 3500 men were practicing medicine at the time of the American Revolution. Only about 400 had an actual medical degree. Of the much larger number of women who practiced, even a smaller number had any formal training.
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