After writing this blog for so many years, I tend to write and read everything six times trying to correct my many mistakes. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be the norm for other people to edit themselves, even those who are magazine and newspaper editors. It’s commonplace in everyday advertisements to see misspelled words, bad grammar and a general lack of concern for accuracy. It appears that our education system may be partially responsible for some of these issues, and it drives me effing crazy. Here are a few examples of “malaprops” collected from grade school, high school, and college examination papers. What do you think?
The American colonists won their Revolutionary War and no longer had to pay for taxis.
The air is thin high up in the sky, down here, it’s fat.
The flood damage was so bad they had to evaporate the city.
A horse divided against itself cannot stand.
The U.S. Constitution was adopted to secure domestic hostility.
Columbus discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic.
Brigham Young led the Morons to Utah.
Socrates died from taking a poison called wedlock.
The police surrounded the building and threw an accordion around the block.
To prevent head colds, use an agonizer to spray medicine into your nose.
Here’s one of my favorites:
Achilles’ mother dipped him in the River Stinks until he became immoral.
I’m about to do something I promised myself I wouldn’t ever do. Today I’m going to post three truly lewd and disgusting limericks. This is to appease a small number of readers who’ve been begging and bugging me for months to print some filth. It’s not something I want to do but I will do it albeit with a slight twist. As you read these three limericks you may notice a large number of asterisks. It’s part of the twist for you to determine the missing letters. That’s the best I can do for all you pervs out there, so enjoy.
It’s a cold and miserable day here in New England and my motivations have evaporated. I’ve been surfing the web for an hour, and something occurred to me. Regardless of how well you explain something, you’re wrong. There are just so many freaking so-called experts on every topic, who knew? That last statement was as sarcastic as I can make it without losing my mind. Never let it be said that Americans don’t have a high opinion of themselves as well as an innate ability to criticize new ideas at every turn. Social media is fine but it’s a double-edged sword. You can get your ideas out there whether they are well thought out or just plain stupid and then the backlash comes. I never really understood just how stupid I was until all of these so-called experts came out of the woodwork to explain things to me. I ‘ve always felt in my heart that many of our fellow citizens are idiots filled with misinformation and conspiracy theories but thanks to social media they now have the freedom to send their bullshit to the world and to further verify what idiots they are.
It’s nothing new because know-it-all’s have always been in the background spewing their thoughts and nonsense to the world. Here are a few samples from our illustrious past.
“Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You’re crazy.” – from workers whom Edwin L. Drake tried to hire on his project to drill for oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859
“The concept is interesting and well formed, but in order to earn better than a “C”, the idea must be feasible.” – stated a professor of Management at Yale University, commenting on the term paper by Fred Smith which earned only a “C”. The paper outlined a plan for a reliable overnight delivery service. Smith went on to create the Federal Express company in 1973.
“A cookie store is a bad idea. Besides, the market research reports say America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you make.” – an unidentified response to Debbi Field’s plan to start Mrs. Field’s Cookies.
“If I had thought about it, I wouldn’t have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that say you can’t do this.” – a statement from Spencer Silver on the work that led to the adhesives for the 3M Post-It notepads.
“We’ve got to pause and ask ourselves: How much clean air do we need?” – a statement from Lee Iacocca, former chairman, Ford Motor Company
“Everything that can be invented has been invented.” – a statement made by Charles H. Duell, commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899
I love finding odd facts. Her are a collection of fifteen interesting and somewhat puzzling tidbits.
60% of sports related injuries occur during practice.
Golf may be considered a benign sport, but can carry a risk of injury and death, most often from lightning, power lines, heart attack, and heatstroke.
Experts estimate that more than 21 billion diapers are dumped into US landfills each year.
Adolf Hitler suffered from chronic flatulence.
Omorashi is a fetish subculture in Japan dedicated to arousal from the feeling of having a full bladder.
The average human will spend three years on the toilet during his lifetime.
The most germ laden place on the toilet isn’t the seat or even the bowl: it’s the handle.
Feces in the water supply causes 10% of the world’s communicable diseases.
Women are up to five times more likely than men to have urinary incontinence problems, primarily due to the trauma the body experiences during pregnancy and childbirth.
More Americans choke on toothpicks than any other object. Toothpicks injure approximately 9000 people every year.
Thanks to the technology like TV screens in grocery stores and airports, cell phone videos, and digital movie libraries, the average American sees 61 minutes of ads and promotions each day.
A bezoar is a ball of swallowed fiber or hair that gathers in the stomach and get stuck in the intestines.
Ancient Romans used human urine as an ingredient in their toothpaste.
A mummified hand has been on display in City Hall in Munster, Germany for 400 years. It belonged to a notary who falsely certified a document, and had his hand chopped off as punishment, then displayed as a warning.
The world’s oceans contain enough salt to cover every continent to a depth of approximately 500 feet.
Now that the NFL season has come to a close for me, I can mourn for a few months until the baseball season starts. Then I’ll have yet another team that will tease me and disappoint me like they’ve done for 20 years and offering nothing in return. After the letdown of the Steeler loss, I decided that posting today would be a real crap shoot. Since I’m something of a science nerd, let me lay some interesting facts out for you that you may have not heard of before. No more sports postings for the foreseeable future. Let’s get started…
7% of licensed drivers in the United States are 16 and 17-year-olds, and they are responsible for 30% of all automobiles fatalities.
The driest place on Earth is Calama, in the Atacama Desert in Chile. Not a drop of rain has ever been seen there.
Using cesium atoms, the clock at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., will gain or lose only one second in 300 years.
The lowest point that a person can get on this planet, unless he/she descends in a submarine, is where the Jordan River enters the Dead Sea – 1298 below sea level.
In terms of the resources he will use in his lifetime and the pollution he will cause; one citizen of the United States is the equivalent of approximately 80 citizens of India.
Modern archaeologists have not yet agreed on how large a crowd the Coliseum in Rome could hold in its glory days. One authority estimates 50,000, but about 45,000 is the generally accepted figure.
An acre of typical farm soil (to a depth of 6 inches) has a ton of fungi, several tons of bacteria, 200 pounds of protozoa (one celled animals) and 100 pounds of yeast.
To provide a modern person with all of life’s necessities and luxuries, at least 20 tons of raw materials must be dug from the earth each year.
There are 2,500,000 rivets in the Eiffel Tower.
The English astronomer Edmund Halley prepared the first detailed mortality tables, in 1693. Life-and-death could then be studied statistically, and the life insurance business was born.
Well, it’s Sunday and the Steeler game has been canceled until Monday due to weather concerns. It’s a little annoying but not all that surprising for anyone who’s ever been in Buffalo during the winter. In my previous life as a regional manager for a national chain I was assigned stores in Buffalo and Niagara Falls. I swear to God that every time I made a trip there during the winter, I ended up getting snowed in and spending an extra day or two in order to give the citizens time to clean up the snow, open the roads, and allow me to fly the hell out of there. Buffalo is a nice town (sarcasm) but not a place I’d like to spend any extra time in. I’ve been to Niagara Falls and unfortunately if you’ve seen one waterfall you’ve seen them all. With that being said and since my day has been interrupted, I thought I’d get a little silly. Everyone seems to love the limericks I post so I offer you a few odd ball limericks today. These are tongue twister limericks written by a gentleman named Lou Brooks in 2009 in a book of the same name. Enjoy . . .
❄️❄️❄️
Nosy Rose got closed in a closet of clothes,
The clothes closet closed on Rose’s red rosy nose,
She tweaked on her beak,
For over a week,
Rose’s nosy red nose now hangs close to her toes.
🌨️🌨️🌨️
Walt walked and talked on his wife’s walkie-talkie,
Walt’s wife’s walkie-talkie made Walt’s talky-talk squawky.
Wide awake while Walt walked,
Was what Walt was while he talked,
While Walt’s wife walked her way to Milwaukee.
Two of these should be sufficient. Trying to get a computer program to type these as I speak is ridiculous. Here’s a description of my day in a nutshell.
As I was preparing this post, I decided midsentence to step away from poetry for a day or two and to return to one of my favorite things which are limericks. I have quite the collection of limericks of all types and unfortunately, I have hundreds that I really can’t post on this blog, no matter how much readers continue to request them. I’ve picked out a few random samples from different historical periods and I’ll post them over the next few weeks. Here is my history by limerick . . .
“The poet is a reporter interviewing his own heart.”
Christopher Morely
***
Poetry at times can be beautiful. It can bring tears to your eyes and joy to your heart but as with anything it also has the ability to become something dark and disturbing. I try to make a point of reading samples of poetry from as many poets as I can. Some of the most touching poems are not about happy moments running through fields of flowers with birds flying around, but of deep sadness and pain.
On a regular basis I make purchases from thrift bookstores on eBay. A book arrived at my home recently and I knew reading it was going to be extremely difficult. It’s a selection of poetry written by young people who have had to deal with divorcing parents. The book istitled “broken hearts… healing”, Young Poets Speaking Out, compiled and edited by Tom Worthen, Ph.D. I just finished reading the first half of that book and it forced me to deal with the pain I caused to my own son. Many years ago, I ended a twenty-year marriage and caused a great deal of pain to a young man that we adopted (at age twelve) from a number of state-run foster homes. He deserved better than we were able to give him at the time, and this book brought it all back with a vengeance. Here are two poems that brought tears to my eyes.
TUG OF WAR
Nobody has the life I have,
I can’t imagine if the whole world did.
My parents don’t even talk,
They get to ask who wants us and when.
It is like me and my two sisters are in the middle of everything.
So I hope you don’t have the life I have,
And if you do I’m sorry.
by Beth, Age 11
***
WHERE IS MY DAD?
He comes around like he cares,
but when I was young he was not there.
He has a new family and a wife to love dear,
when I was around he made me feel weird.
When I was alone crying in my bed,
was he there, no, it was mom instead.
When I look at my friends with their moms and dads,
As I worked my way slowly through the public school system back in the 1960’s I received little or no information or exposure to poetry. It was mentioned in passing in some classes but there never was any serious time devoted to it. It just seems to me that making some poetry (not just the classics) available to younger students might just motivate them to either read more poetry or to write their own. A gentlemen named Richard Lewis, a lecturer on children’s literature and creative writing, apparently agreed with me. In cooperation with UNESCO, he traveled through eighteen English speaking countries around the world collecting poetry written by children between the ages of five and thirteen. Three thousand poems were collected with the best 200 published in his book, “Miracles” published in 1966. I’ve picked out two samples to give you some idea of just how talented many of the youngsters can be when expressing their thoughts in a poetic fashion.
THUNDER
by Glenys Van Every, Age 9, Australia
I hear
the drummers
strike
the sky.
***
SUMMER
by Margaret Bendig, Age 10, United States
Inviting, rippling waters
Waiting for little toes
Hurry, go get changed!
***
After reading a few pages of these poems I had a minor epiphany. These children were not trained in poetry but as they wrote their poems many of them began to look very much like free-verse haiku’s. Having no set restrictions on the length of lines and syllable counting allows the young poets freedom to truly express themselves.
Of course, being the irreverent SOB that I am I decided to write this haiku of mine and take it down a road not normally traveled. It contains some reference to nature but also just a touch of my humor. It’s a poetic mortal sin to write them this way and I’m sure it will tweak the noses of a few people. It’s always fun at times to make some people a little crazy.
‘The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps . . . so that something
that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in.”
Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
Well, welcome back to 2024. I hope you enjoyed the last post concerning Mr. Poe because I certainly did. I thought today I would begin talking about haikus. The current requirements for haikus are a first line with five syllables, a second line with seven syllables, and a third line of five syllables. When I first discovered the haiku I thought the rigidity of this design didn’t make a lot of sense. The more I learned about haikus the wiser I thought I became. Here are two examples of haiku’s written by a gentleman from Japan who is considered the father of haikus, Matsuo Kinsaku (1644-1694). He began writing haikus under the name of Basho in 1672. In Basho’s humble opinion a haiku should be created using a minimum of words to paint a mental picture for the reader. Basho included descriptions of nature in most of his haikus but wasn’t limited to a fixed syllable count. I’m all for free-verse haiku’s but I still find the nature requirement of Basho a bit restrictive. Here are couple of samples of Basho’s haikus published in the 1680’s. See what you think.
Spring rain –
under trees
a crystal stream.
***
On the dead limb
squats a crow –
autumn night.
The structure of haikus as mentioned above were created by two poets, Sokan (1458-1546) and Moritake (1472-1549). In Basho’s opinion their works were terse but failed to adequately evoke nature. Three hundred years later a haiku school, the Soun, was opened celebrating Basho’s free-verse approach. The haiku should be based on content not on the number of syllables in each line. With this I whole heartedly agree.
Here is a little something I discovered recently. It’s shows the form of a free-verse haiku but was simply published as a standard poem. References to nature are gone offering a more interesting take on life, love, and people.
we are the dreamers
we are the dancers
life is the music
love is the song.
For all of you Star Trek fans out there, this was written some years ago by Leonard Nimoy and was included in his book of poetry “A Lifetime of Love” published in 2002.
everyuselessthing.com 