I’m sending these rather bawdy limericks along after receiving a few requests for a raunchier selection. I’m nothing if not a people pleaser, so here they are. That’s right, you know who you are!!
I normally don’t like to write about politics. Years ago, that’s all I was interested in, but finally common sense prevailed. Today my post will be a little political but coming from a completely new direction. I’m going to talk today about presidents and some of the statistics and trivial facts that aren’t readily known.
We’ve has 47 presidents (counting Grover Cleveland twice).
The average age of our presidents at the date of Inauguration was 56.23 years.
The average life expectancy of the presidents has been 72.2 years.
George Washington wanted Americans to address him as “His Mightiness the President.”
While he was president, Franklin Pierce was arrested for running down an elderly woman in his carriage. He was later found not guilty.
President Warren G. Harding exercised regularly by playing ping-pong.
Herbert Hoover was the first president to have a telephone in his office. Earlier, presidents who wanted to use the phone had to use the one in the hall.
Grover Cleveland, 22nd president, was the first one to leave the country while in office. But he didn’t go far. He sailed into international waters 3 miles off the United States coast and did a little fishing and then returned.
Andrew Jackson, known for his colorful language, apparently taught his pet parrot to curse. When Jackson died in 1845, the parrot was brought to his funeral. It swore at him through the entire service.
It was so cold at Ulysses S. Grant’s inauguration that the canaries that were supposed to sing during the inaugural ball froze to death.
I’ve been an animal lover all of my life. I’ve had all sorts of pets from ferrets, snakes, dogs, cats, and the list goes on and on. Today I thought I’d share with you some odd and trivia type facts on the animal kingdom. With this started . . .
A group of apes is called a shrewdness.
A group of alligators is called a congregation.
The blue whale has the largest penis of any organism on earth (8-10 ft).
The female barkfly has a penis, which is used to extract sperm from the male barkfly’s vagina.
A group of cockroaches is called an intrusion.
Boars can ejaculate continuously for up to 7 min.
A severed cockroach head can survive for hours.
The decapitated cockroach can live for weeks before it starves to death.
Fleas can survive for up to 100 days without a meal (without sucking your blood).
Cats are more popular pets and dogs.
The canine nose has more than four times as many scent receptors as the average cat nose (and more than 14 times as many as the human nose).
A dog on average has 42 teeth, compared to 30 teeth for domestic cats.
Cats can be left-handed.
Each year nearly 4,000,000 cats are eaten in China as a delicacy.
Electric eels generate enough electric charge to kill a horse or a human.
I think that’s enough for today and I’m sure you learned more than you ever cared about knowing of the weird and wonderful world of animals.
As I stated on so many occasions, I am a rabid science-fiction fan. I’ve been reading science fiction material since I was a kid when I found a copy of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in a box of trash near a neighbor’s home. While admittedly there’s a lot of crap out there calling itself science-fiction, the classics remain the classics. Two days ago, I started reading the Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov again. As a young man I read it the first time but to understand it at that age was difficult. I’ve read the entire series three times since and every time I find more things I missed. As I began to read it again my thoughts came back to Isaac Asimov himself and the fact that he was not only an incredible writer but also wrote many outrageous and bawdy limericks. I thought I pass a few of those along to you today because he really knew how to craft limericks. Here are a few . . .
I have what I think is a healthy sense of humor. It can be bawdy at times, unfunny at times, but well used at all times. I love people who can make me laugh and I love making others laugh. It’s one of the few joys I have, and I try to use it as often as possible. I have a new appreciation for standup comedians since I now have one in the family. Being funny all the time is extremely hard work but it’s really worth the time spent. It’s been said that laughter is the “best medicine” and while that is true it also serves many other purposes. The following paragraph was written by George Orwell the well-known author of 1984. It makes for some thought-provoking ideas. Every aspiring comedian should read this before each show. Enjoy . . .
“A thing is funny when – in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening – it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution . . . Whatever destroys dignity and brings down the mighty from their seats, preferably with a bump, is funny.”
Eric Arthur Blair
Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His work is characterized by lucid prose, biting social criticism, and a total opposition to totalitarianism.
Here’s a well-known fact, I’m not a poet. I know a few people who have that skill and like it or not it is a rarity. I’ve tried over the years to read almost all of the more famous of the poets from this country and it leaves me uninterested and unmoved. I write a lot but when it comes to poetry my mind slides right into confusion. All of my poems (and there are a few) tend to be rude, abrasive, and at times erotic and funny. I’ve never been able to wrap my head around serious poetry because I just don’t have it in me. That being said, today I’ll offer up a sample of poetry and you can judge for yourself just how good it is. Let’s get started . . .
“Let me ask you one question,
Is your money that good?
Will it buy you forgiveness?
Do you think that it could?
I think you will find,
When your death takes its toll,
All the money you made
will never buy back your soul.”
That little bit of poetry was written by an often-criticized poet, Bob Dylan, in 1963, from his song, Masters of War. As with most of his musical lyrics, they’re still as good today as they were then. I’ll pass on one more small piece of wisdom with one of his quotes, ” Money doesn’t talk, it swears.”
George Chapman (1559–1634) Was an English dramatist, translator and poet. He was a classical scholar whose work shows the influence of Stoicism. Chapman is best remembered for his translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.
I thought I would offer up a few of the oldest limericks I’ve found so far. After reading a few of them I quickly discovered that the sense of humor then was a touch bawdier that many recent ones. Our ancestors probably needed something a little more attention getting in their humor. I’m sure many of them had very little to cheer about.
1882
There was a young sailor from Brighton
Who remarked to his girl, “You’re a tight one.”
She replied, ” ‘Pon my soul,
You’re in the wrong hole.
There’s plenty of room in the right one.”
1870
A young woman got married at Chester,
Her mother she kissed, and she blessed her.
Says she, “You’re in luck,
He’s a stunning good fuck,
For I’ve had him myself down in Leicester.”
1868
There was a young lady of Ealing
And her lover before her was kneeling.
Said she, ” Dearest Jim,
Take your hand off my quim.
I much prefer fucking to feeling.
1871
There were three ladies of Huxham,
And whenever we meets’em we fucks’em,
And when that game grows stale
We sits on a rail,
And pulls out our pricks and they sucks’em.
I hope to post many more of these. I live to keep the tradition alive and well here in the 21st century.
“Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) was a writer, philosopher, and intellectual. He wrote nearly fifty books, both novels and non-fiction work, as well as wide-ranging essays, narratives, and poems. He is well known for his 1932 work, A Brave New World. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times and was elected Companion of Literature by The Royal Society of Literature in 1962. Huxley was also a humanist and pacifist.
Sixteen years ago, I was a lonely bachelor living with two ferrets and a cat. Part of my routine at that time was to explore the internet, read blogs, and participate in selected chat rooms. It was about that same time I serious became interested in blogging but was really unsure just how to get started. One of my favorite blogs at the time was called gutrumbles.com. The gentleman that ran that blog was Rob Acid-Man Smith. He captured my imagination immediately because he was brutally honest, totally outspoken with absolutely no filters, and had a great sense of humor. I exchanged emails with him for a time, learned a lot, and I was hooked. That day he became my blog-father. To say he upset a large number of people over the years was an understatement, but he did it with humor and a whole lot of truth. After reading his blog for almost two years I decided to give it a try myself.
My four years of blogging on my first blog were eye opening. I was brutally honest and voiced my opinions loudly and crassly. I spent most of my time complaining about politics, religion, and any other topic that piqued my interest. It was great fun, and the responses were more than just a little interesting. I actually received a number of death threats from idiots around the globe. That was enough to convince me I had more to say and to hell with the critics.
But as with all things age tends to mellow a person. I decided to discontinue that first blog and then created Every-Useless-Thing. Hoping against hope that I could mellow my opinions down a little and make the blog something more than a bitch session. I’ve been doing Every-Useless-Thing now for approximately eleven and a half years and ten months ago I felt myself slipping and losing my edge. A lot of it had to do with my medical issues but it was more than just that. Anytime I felt myself slipping in the past I returned to gutrumbles.com to reinvigorate me. Gut Rumbles continues today at Rob’s request even though Rob passed away in 2006. It was and will always be my “Happy Place”.
Today after that lengthy and boring explanation I’m going to repost an article from Acid-Man’s blog. Hopefully you’ll read his thoughts and then understand where I’m trying to come from. I hope you enjoy a little of Acid Man, because I always have. If you want some good reading, go to his blog and read some of his archives. Here he is!
I have a Southern accent. I drop the “g” off the end of gerunds, so I say talkin,’ climbin,’ smokin,’ and runnin’ instead of speaking standard American English the way Dan Rather does as he lies his ass off on the CBS Evening News.
I say y’all. I have ‘druthers. I know how far yonder is. I know how to see ’bout that. Whatchadoon is a real word to me.
That’s the reason I don’t like to talk on the phone. I sound like a goddam hick. I AM a goddam hick, but I am educated and I can communicate well when I want to. Where I live, everybody understands me just fine when I say, “Whatchadoon? I’d ‘druther ya not go ’bout it that way. Lemme show ya sumpin. Thadded be better, doncha think?” That’s Southern English and it works well in person-to-person communication.
Try that shit over the phone when you’re talking to a yankee. I doesn’t work. The yankee gets all nasal, I talk Southern and the next thing you know, we may as well be from foreign countries. That’s why I would prefer to write to someone I don’t know. I can appear to be halfway intelligent on paper.
I’ve done a lot of thinking about this communication gap. I COULD be like the BC and talk like a yankee at work and sound like the biggest hayseed on the farm at Quinton’s football games, but I’m not a chameleon, able to change my skin color and blend into the scenery the way she can. Everything that woman does is an act and she wears many masks. I’m not built that way. Like Popeye, I am what I am and that’s all that I am.
Sometimes, that’s not the right way to be. Honesty is not always the best policy.
