Archive for the ‘writing’ Tag
*****
“Never miss a good chance to shut up.” – Will Rogers
- Sean Connery once polished coffins for cash.
- There are 27 moons orbiting Uranus. (pun intended)
- More than 29 years after the Japanese surrendered in World War II, Lt. Onoda Hiro was discovered in the Philippines. He refused to surrender until he was ordered to do so by his commanding officer.
- In Sri Lanka, nonverbal signals for agreement are reversed from those in Western countries. Nodding your head means “no” and shaking your head from side-to-side means “yes.”
- A person can’t be a sumo wrestler in Japan unless he weighs more than 154 pounds and is taller than five feet seven inches.
*****
“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” – Winston Churchill
- President. James Garfield was shot by an assassin in 1881. Six doctors attempted to treat the wounded president, but several probed the wound with their bare fingers, introducing a fatal infection into his body.
- Lloyds of London Paid out $3,019,400 in insurance claims to the families of the victims who perished in the Titanic disaster.
- Ermal Fraze invented the pop-top aluminum can in 1963, he received U.S. patent number 3,349,949 for the design.
- Approximately 75% of what we think we taste is actually coming from our sense of smell.
- Couples married in the first three months of the year tend to have higher divorce rates than those married in the later months.
*****
“Doing nothing is better than being busy doing nothing.” – Lao Tzu
Here we go again with another rainy and gray day. Spring really wants to make an appearance but for some reason she’s having difficulties. The sun shines brightly for 2 hours a day broken up into 15-minute segments. The problem then becomes when you have a “freezing your ass off” moment every time a cloud goes by. Truthfully Mother Nature is really starting to piss me off.
Now let me get back to the subject. A few months ago, I purchased a pile of old used books which appear to have once been library books. I have books from libraries all over the country. One in particular is a book of limericks (mostly clean) written by some well-known authors and celebrities. See what you think.
By: Lewis Carroll
His sister named Lucy O’Finner,
Grew constantly thinner and thinner,
The reason was plain,
She slipped out in the rain,
And was never allowed any dinner.
💥💥
By: Ogden Nash
It was an old man of Calcutta,
Who coated his tonsils with butta,
Thus, converting his snore
From a thunderous roar
To a soft, oleaginous mutta.
By: Oliver Wendell Holmes
The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher
Called a hen a most elegant creature.
The Hen, pleased with that,
Laid an egg in his hat,
And thus did the hen reward Beecher.
💥💥
By: Rudyard Kipling
There was once a small boy in Québec
Stood buried in snow to his neck.
When asked: “Are you friz?”
He said: “Yes, I is,
“But we don’t call this cold in Québec.”
💥💥💥
As you can imagine I read hundreds of limericks a month but even I was taken by surprise when I read these four. Just goes to show you that even celebrated writers and authors have a real bitch of a time writing limericks. I’m sure that if of you took a few minutes, you could write better stuff than this. Only one of these four showed me something interesting and that was the one by Oliver Wendall Holmes. Read it carefully and see if you spot his clever efforts.
LIMERICK WRITERS RULE!
Is it just me or is the media using the term “genius” way too often. It seems that if your successful at anything you’re a genius until the novelty wears off and then your back to being a regular schmuck like everyone else. Real geniuses are a rarity, and they bring their own baggage along with them. They are usually a genius in a specific area but in other areas not so much. I went to college with a guy who could pick up a #2 pencil and in mere minutes, completely copy works by Michaelangelo. It was effortless and left many of us absolutely amazed. What most people didn’t know was that he was something of a recluse. He hated groups of people and was barely able to attend classes. Many times, he would complete wonderful projects at his apartment and then contact his fellow students to deliver them to the teacher. He was unable to speak before groups of more than 2 or 3 without panicking. Was he a genius? Yes! Was he happy? I don’t honestly know.
I decided to checkout a few well know geniuses to get a better feel about how they handled their gift. Here are a few facts.
- The eccentric English chemist and physicist Henry Cavendish (1731-1810) had no appropriate instruments for that purpose, so he measured the strength of an electrical current in a direct way. He shocked himself with the electrical current and estimated the pain. He still managed to live to be nearly 80 years old.
- The first person to work out the manner in which a telescope handled light according to strict scientific principles was the German astronomer Johann Kepler. His eyesight was so bad, however, that it was useless for him to try to use a telescope himself.
- Thomas Edison, who bordered on being totally deaf, do not think of the phonograph in terms of music and entertainment. He was interested in the business and educational potential of the invention.
- Henry Ford in 1921 proposed that milk be made synthetically. His disregard for dairy cows as being inefficient and unsanitary stemmed from unpleasant experiences on his father’s farm. Milking had been an exasperating and disagreeable labor.
- Charles Dickens believed that a good night’s sleep was possible only if the bed was aligned from north to south. In this manner, he thought, the magnetic currents of the earth would flow straight through the resting body.
- Geniuses require powers of concentration. But even that can be carried too far. In 1807, the mathematician Johann Karl Frederich Gaus was caught up in a problem while his wife lay sick upstairs. When the doctor told him his wife was dying, Gaus waved him away and never looking up from his problem, muttered, “Tell her to wait a moment till I’m through.”
- Louis Pasteur, whose work on wine, vinegar, and beer led to pasteurization, had an excessive fear of dirt and infection. He refused to shake hands, and he carefully whipped his plate and glass before dining.
- Sigmund Freud never learned to read a railway timetable. It was necessary that he be accompanied on any journey.
BEING A GENIUS IS NO BARGIN
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 . . .
***
World War II
A lady of doubtful nativity
Had an ass of extreme sensitivity.
She could sit on the lap
Of a Nazi or Jap,
And detect Fifth Column activity.
🪖🗽🪖
Don’t dip your prick in a WAC
Don’t ride the breast of a WAVE.
Just sit in the sand
And do it by hand
And buy bonds with the money you save.
🪖🗽🪖
There was a young lady from Beaman,
Who was known as a sexual demon.
“These soldiers,” said she,
“Mean nothing to me,
For what I really like is the semen.”
🪖🗽🪖
A female Nazi from Bredo
Advances her sinister credo,
By displaying her charms
During air raid alarms,
Inflaming the warden’s libido.
***
“Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.”
by John Wain
***
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.
*❤️*
NATURAL
by Me, Age: Old
Out of the corner of my eye
A bird sails quietly by.
A flash of golden sunlight,
And I have bird shit on my thigh.
***
SMILE, I DID INCLUDE SOME NATURE
‘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.
EMILY
***
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said;
“For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”
Quote of the Day
“When the grasshopper gathers strength to hop, it does not
know where it will land. So, it often is with poets.”
Gerald Brenan
🤪🤪🤪
Joke of the Day #1
At a local college dance, a guy from America asks a girl from Sweden to dance. While they are dancing, he gives her a little squeeze, and says, “In America, we call this a hug.” She replies,”Yaah, in Sveden we call it a hug too.” A little later, he gives her a peck on the cheek, and says, “In America, we call this a kiss.” She replies,”Yaah, in Sveden we call it a kiss too.” Towards the end of the night, and a lot of drinks later, he takes her out on the campus lawn and proceeds to have sex with her, saying, “In America, we call this a grass sandwich.” She says, “Yaaah, in Sveden we call it a grass sandwich too, but we usually put more meat in it.”
☘️☘️☘️
Limerick of the Day
There was a young lady from Fort Kent
Who said that she knew what it meant
When men ask her to dine,
Gave her roses and wine –
She knew what it meant, but she went!
🤡🤡🤡
Joke of the Day #2
Bad Bernie was in prison for seven years. Today he got out and his wife and son were there to pick him up. He came through the gates and jumped into the car. The only thing he said was, “F.F.” His wife turned to him and answered, “E.F.” Out on the highway, he said, “F.F.” She immediately responded simply, “E.F.” He repeated it once again, “F.F.” She again replied loudly, “E.F.” “Mom! Dad! What the hell is going on?” Bernie quietly answered, “Your mother wants to eat first!”
🤗🤗🤗
Wisdom of the Day
Conventional wisdom is to wisdom what junk food is to food.
Quote of the Day
“If the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way.”
Chinese Saying
🤪🤪🤪
Joke of the Day #1
A little boy goes to his father and asks, “Daddy how was I born?” The father answers, “Well, son, I guess one day you were going to find out anyway. Your mom and I first got together in an Internet chat room. Then I set up a date with her via e-mail and we met at a local cybercafe. We sneaked into a secluded hotel room, where your mother agreed to a download from my hard drive. As soon as I was ready to upload, we discovered that neither of us had used a firewall. Since it was too late to hit the delete button, a little Pop-up window appeared nine months later that said, “You’ve got male.”
☘️☘️☘️
Limerick of the Day
There was a young man from Missouri.
Who screwed with astonishing fury,
Till taken to court
For his vigorous sport,
And condemned by a poorly hung jury.
🤡🤡🤡
Joke of the Day #2
A man from Texas buys a round of drinks for everyone in the bar as he announces that his wife has just produced a typical Texan baby boy weighing 20 pounds. Congratulations shower from all around, and many exclamations of “Wow!” are heard. Two weeks later the man again returns to the bar. The bartender says, “Say, aren’t you the father of the typical Texan baby that weighed 20 pounds at birth ” “How much does the baby way now?” The proud father answers, “15 pounds.” The bartender is puzzled. “Why? What happened? He already weighed 20 pounds at birth.” The Texan father takes a slow sip from his beer, wipes his lips on his shirt sleeve, leans over to the bartender and proudly announces, “We had him circumcised.”
🤗🤗🤗
Wisdom of the Day
Pornography is the attempt to insult sex.
Quote of the Day
“Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.”
Kahlil Gibran
🤪🤪🤪
Joke of the Day #1
A 75-year-old man went to his doctor’s office to get a sperm count. The doctor gave the man a jar and said, “Take this jar home and bring me back a sample tomorrow.” The next day, the 75-year-old man reappeared at the doctor’s office and gave him the jar, which was as clean and empty as on the previous day. The doctor asked what happened and the man explained, “Well, Doc, it’s like this. First, I tried with my right hand, but nothing happened. Then I tried with my left hand but still got nothing. Then I asked my wife for help. She tried with her right hand, but nothing happened, then she tried with her left, but still nothing happened. She even tried with her mouth, first with the teeth in, then with the teeth out, and still nothing happened. We even called up the lady next door and she tried with both hands and her mouth too but there was nothing doing.” The doctor was shocked. “You actually asked your neighbor?” the old man replied, “Yep, I did, and no matter what we all tried we still couldn’t get the lid off that goddamn jar.
☘️☘️☘️
Limerick of the Day
An erotic neurotic named Sid,
Got his Ego confused with his Id.
His errant libido
Was like a torpedo,
And that’s why he done what he did.
🤡🤡🤡
Joke of the Day #2
An old couple had been married for 50 years. They were sitting at the breakfast table one morning when the old gentleman said to his wife, “Just think, 50 years ago we were sitting here at this very same breakfast table together.” “Yeah, you’re right” she replied. The old man said, “but as I recall we were sitting here stark naked 50 years ago.” “Well,” Granny snickered, “what do you say, should we strip?” So, the two stripped to the buff and sat back down at the table. “You know, honey,” the little old lady said, “my nipples are as hot for you today as they were 50 years ago.” “I wouldn’t be surprised,” replied Gramps. “One’s in your coffee and the other is in your porridge.”
🤗🤗🤗
Wisdom of the Day
Leisure is the mother of Philosophy
everyuselessthing.com 