As someone who’s crazy for limericks of all kinds, I thought I’d introduce a new contributor to this blog. The name is John Ciardi, and he was a close friend of Isaac Azimov, my favorite limerick author. They partnered up back in the 70’s and wrote a book of their limericks. It was a limerick war between the two as part of their competitive friendship. I’ve blogged many of Azimov’s limericks and I think it’s only fair to give Mr. Ciardi equal time. Here are a few of his gems.
I’ve spent most of my life obeying and enforcing the laws of the land. First, as a cop, and then as a private cop for companies throughout the country. I’ve always believed in what I did and felt proud as I dedicated my time and energy to something bigger than myself. That was ‘yesterday’ and unfortunately ‘today’ it’s become something less noble. I can’t praise our law enforcement officers enough because the job has become almost impossible to do. Between the bleeding-heart liberal judges and the thousands of attorneys doing their level best every day to muddy the waters of what’s right and what’s wrong, it’s no wonder the society is suffering.
Everyone seems to complain that the system is broken but no one knows or even tries to fix it. It’s much easier to just send cops out into the streets knowing that if they make one solitary move or say one solitary thing to a citizen, they’ll be ridiculed or worse within minutes. There are times when it’s justified but all cops don’t deserve that kind of ridicule. Our forefathers are a joke to many people these days, but they saw this coming over three hundred years ago. Read on.
Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804) & James Madison (1751-1836)
“The Federalist Papers”
“It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood, if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow.”
Today is the start of a better day than yesterday. Today I’m assured of at least another year before the cancer might return. A good doctor’s report makes for better days ahead. I can stop obsessing over this whole cancer deal until October when I’m due to be scanned again. So, what better way to pass the time than throwing some bad poetry your way. I wrote this many years ago during what I used to call the I-don’t-give-a-shit days. And believe me, I had plenty of them.
❤❤ It’s near in the mist. ❤❤ It watches and waits, as its urges flicker to life. A stroke of the hand, a kiss in the dark, and a seed is spilled near your wife. Some call it desire, others haven’t a clue, I see it near you!
Today is Thursday but it just feels like a dreary Monday. I was awakened at 4:30 am by my better-half who was preparing to leave at 6:00 am for a drive to Florida. She was accompanied by her daughter and two grandsons both under the age of ten (OMFG). She tried desperately to convince me to ride along but fortunately for me I had other plans today. My other plans consist of some quality time with my least favorite doctor, the oncologist. I’ve always thought that being a proctologist might be the worst job on the planet but after the last three years I’ve changed my mind about that. Being an oncologist has to be the worst. Their job is vitally important but dealing with cancer and death on a regular basis is grueling for both the patients, nurses, and doctors. I’m hoping for good news today as always when dealing with them. So while I sit here preparing myself for that visit I thought I’d post a few things about four truly dumb asses.
DEADHEADS A man in Orange County Municipal Court had been ticketed for driving alone in the carpool lane. He claimed that the four frozen cadavers in the mortuary van he was driving should be counted. The judge ruled that passengers must be alive to qualify.
LICENSE TO STEAL Two Kentucky men tried to pull the front cover from an ATM by running a chain from the machine to the bumper of their pickup truck. Instead of pulling the front panel off the machine, though, they pulled the bumper off the truck. They panicked and fled, leaving the chain still attached to the machine, their bumper still attached to the chain, and their license plate still attached to the bumper.
MADE FOR TV Guns For Hire, an Arizona company specializing in staged gunfights for western movies, got a call from a 47-year-old woman who wanted to have her husband shot. She was later sentenced to four years in jail.
OKAY, SO YOU’RE A MAN A 38-year-old man passed away in Pennsylvania a couple of hours after going to the home of a friend to see his snakes. According to the friend, the man had playfully reached into a cobra’s tank and picked up the snake and was bitten. Refusing a ride to the hospital, the man said, “I’m a man, I can handle it,” and instead went to a bar, where he had three drinks and bragged to patrons that he had just been bitten by a cobra. An hour later, he was dead.
I have to admit that my choice of reading materials is vast. I’ll read just about anything I can get my hands on at any given moment. With that in mind, I stumbled upon a book recently filled with euphemisms of all kinds. I’m going to start posting some of these euphemism lists over the next few months because they are hysterically funny. That being said, me being a man, I thought the first list would contain 45 nicknames for penises. Don’t worry girls the list for women’s vaginas is five times as long as the one for men and I’ll be posting that list as we go forward. Speaking for myself, I’ve never ever named my penis. It amazes me that so many men do. Let’s get started . . .
The Bazooka, A Bit of Hard, A Bit of Stiff, The Bone, A Boner, Captain Standish, The Cockstand, Coleen Bawn, Crack a Fat, The Cunt Stretcher, Fixed Bayonets, A Full, The Golden River, A Hard-on, The Horn, In Ones Best Clothes, In One’s Sunday Best, An Irish Toothache, Jack, A Lance at Rest, The Marquess of Porn, Morning Pride, Old Hornington, Old Horny, Be on the Stand, Be Piss Proud, Be Proud Below the Navel, The Rail, The Ramrod, The Reamer, The Rose in Ones Levi’s, The Roaring Horn, Roaring Jack, The Rock Python, The Spike, The Stalk, The Standard, The Standing Member, Standingware,, Stiff and Stout, A Stiff One, Stiffy, A Toothache, A Wood, A Woody . . . .
I’m pretty sure if I were making this list, it wouldn’t be as lame as these. It’s obvious to me that the guys who contributed to this list weren’t all that proud of their little (no pun intended) friend. One more fact for you. I will not be naming my penis in this post. He already knows who he is and needs no further introduction. I promise that if the day comes when I think it’s necessary to ID him, I’ll post it immediately.
I’m a lover of history, and I’m absolutely crazy about obscure historical trivia facts. I’ve collected quite a few over the years and I’m going to begin today with what I hope will be a number of postings with more of these little tidbits. Enjoy!
“Take this script,” Rudyard Kipling said to the nurse who cared for his firstborn child, “and someday if you are in need of money, you may be able to sell it at a handsome price.” Years later, when the nurse was actually in want, she sold the manuscript of the first Jungle Book and lived in comfort for the rest of her life.
After writing the runaway bestseller Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe was bombarded with hate mail. Out of one package that she received fell the ear of a slave.
The author of the best-known document in the United States, and perhaps in the world, published only one book. Thomas Jefferson’s answers to a set of 23 questions about the American continent, circulated in 1780 by the French emissary François Marbois, appeared as Notes on the State of Virginia.
Walt Whitman was dismissed from his clerical post in the Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior when the Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan, read a portion of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and deemed it “pernicious poetry”.
Heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney lectured on Shakespeare at Yale University.
The electric automobile self-starter, which was perfected in 1911 by Charles F Kettering, made it possible for women to drive without the companion previously needed for cranking the engine.
In the early 1860s, a New York firm offered a prize of $10,000 for a satisfactory substitute for ivory in the manufacture of billiard balls. The prize was won by an American inventor, John Wesley Hyatt, who devised for the purpose what came to be known as celluloid. It was the first synthetic plastic.
Somewhere out there in space, amid all of the junk, is the Hasselblad camera dropped during a spacewalk by the United States astronaut Michael Collins. It will orbit the earth indefinitely.
A manned rocket reaches the moon in less time than it took a stagecoach to travel the length of England.
In 1930, Ellen Church recruited seven other young nurses to work 5000 feet above the Earth. They were the first airline stewardesses, flying on Boeing’s San Francisco to Chicago route, a trip that, in good weather, took 20 hours and made 13 stops.
He was born at Besançon in France, near the border with Switzerland. His father, on the outbreak of the French Revolution, was appointed mayor of Besançon and consequently chief police magistrate. Charles was an influential French author and librarian who introduced a younger generation of Romanticists to the conte fantastique, gothic literature, and vampire tales. His dream related writings influenced many later authors.
This is the perfect day to load you all up with a few more interesting tidbits of totally useless information. It’s been raining here for almost 24 hours, my backyard is flooded with 3 feet of dirty water, and it’s sure as hell not feeling much like Spring. It’s either sit in my warm and cozy man-cave and post this information or blow up an inner tube and go out in the backyard and float around in the lake. So, here’s your latest installment of ?????
You can form the number 12,345,678,987,654,321 by multiplying 111,111,111 by 111,111,111.
Chicago’s O’Hare airport sells more hot dogs than any other airport in the world.
The “WD” in WD-40 stands for Water Displacement. The “40” came about because it took the creators that many attempts to get the formula right.
A United States green card is actually yellow.
A shark jaws are not attached to the rest of its skeleton; that great maw is held in place by muscles and ligaments.
In the early to mid 1800’s, a trip by Conestoga wagon from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh – a distance of about 300 miles – took roughly 3 weeks.
During a 60-year life span, an average tree will produce nearly 2 tons of leaves to be raked.
The working title of the Beatles hit “With a Little Help from My Friends” was originally “Bad Finger Boogie.”
According to Hollywood lore, silent film actress Norma Talmage started the tradition of stars putting their footprints in the cement at Grauman’s Chinese theater when she accidentally stumbled onto the freshly laid sidewalk in front of it in 1927.
The first American president to be photographed was John Quincy Adams.
Most people take about 23,000 breaths a day.
The first paper towel came from defective toilet paper. Someone at the Scott company saw a crumpled, seemingly ruined roll of TP and decided it should be sold as a kind of disposable hand towel.
First speed limit in the United States was set in 1901 in Connecticut at 12 mph.
Samuel Seymour was five years old when he was at Ford’s theater the night Abraham Lincoln was shot. He was the last survivor of that event. He died in 1956.
The former communist leader of Romania, Nikolai Ceausescu – also known as “The Giant of the Carpathians” – banned the game Scrabble because he felt it was too intellectual. He also believed that baseball was subversive.
I think that’s about enough for today. I hope you find these factoids interesting even though they are a bit obscure. These are just things you never realized you needed to know and you’re welcome!
I thought I’d start this post with a look-back to April 8, 1974. Being the baseball fan that I am, I’d like to remember “Hammering Hank”.
Hank Aaron Breaks Babe Ruth’s All-time Home Run Record
On April 8, 1974, Hank Aaron of the Atlanta Braves hits his 715th career home run, breaking Babe Ruth’s legendary record of 714 homers. A crowd of 53,775 people, the largest in the history of Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, was with Aaron that night to cheer when he hit a 4th inning pitch off the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Al Downing.
As a follow-up to that story, I like to make a comment about my hometown team. Just to let everyone know (including JB), the Pittsburgh Pirates still suck. They’ve taken sucking to a new level, and it pains me to even watch a game they’re playing. It’s the beginning of another season and I refuse to get my hopes up. Bring back Roberto Clemente, Bill Mazeroski, Dick Groat, Rocky Nelson, Dick Stuart, and Willie Stargell and then play some real baseball. I think I sound a little bitter but that’s all right, because “I am”. It’s time for that organization to start spending some money and getting some quality players or it’ll be another 30 years before we see a World Series appearance.
everyuselessthing.com 