sweasel.com

That’s $5 Million well spent! Good job Dan. Courage.

Well, you could always hope he’s:

Squealing from the Feeling….

Squeaking from the Freaking….

Oinkin from the Boinkin….

Anyone else want to contribute? 🙂

Heh. No poetry for me! Uncle B and I were listening to the local news earlier, and the newsreader droned, “A heartbroken woman from Essex…”

And we turned to each other and screeched, “it’s a limerick!!!!!”

I don’t know why the woman from Essex was heartbroken, but I’m pretty sure we’re going to hell.

My hatred of Dan Rather is only paralleled by my hatred of Walter Cronkite. They were both up to the same liberal shenanigans, but Rather just got caught because of the times. A pox on both their houses.

Screamin’ from the Reamin’? 😉

“Tonight was Dan Rather’s final night on the evening news. … Rather says now that he has stepped down as anchor for the CBS ‘Evening News,’ he wants to spend more time with his grandchildren. Sadly, his grandchildren would rather hang out with Peter Jennings.” –Conan O’Brien

What’s your urine telling you?

Don’t bother clicking. Other than “you’ve eaten a bunch of asparagus and beetroot, idiot”…not much.

Quackin’ from the Frakin’?

so outraged my infant sense of fair play, it pushed me down the first flight of steps from apolitical to proud poo-flinging ‘winger basement monkey

‘Twas NPR did it for me. From ’79 to ’85, I worked 7 days (2nd shift) a week. I had the odd day off here and there, but mostly not (I was not a “permanent” employee for most of that time, and had no choice). Well, you spend 56+ hours a week in a car and you hear a lot of radio. I remember them wringing their hands about Reagan & his ideas for the economy, their hushed public radio voices despairing every day about heartless Republican budget cuts, keening whining about “the homeless” (they were big then, remember?) and I had my big WTF? moment, wondering why I wasn’t seeing breadlines on every street. I *was* old enough to remember Carter’s gas lines a few years prior, as I schlepped off to my first few low-paying jobs, plus losing the only decent job I’d had – dumped after 3 months, due to the Arab oil embargo. I went winger & never looked back.

Few years later, I was working days and remember the first time I heard Rush. The thing that really hooked me was the “environmental whacko update” blues-riff-with-chainsaws. Finally, radio for me!

Brimmin’ from the rimmin’

Damn… Dennis Hopper is in the hospital….

Moanin’ from the Bonin’?

My leap off the cliff into winger nirvana came with my first paycheck – “Who is this FICA guy and why is he getting part of my paycheck?”

A heartbroken woman from Essex
Rented a porno from Netflix,
Wanted a romance
Instead she found bromance,
And decided she’d rather try phone sex.

(Will wrote most of that, but didn’t want credit for some bizarre reason.)

Droolin’ from the Rulin’?

Mrs P! You (and Will) have restored Uncle B’s faith in humanity. Or at least blog readers. He assured me somebody would fill in the last four lines for us…

I’m convinced that direct deposit greased the skids of our slide into big government, RSW. My first job(s), you got a little packet of moneys and written on the outside was how many moneys got peeled off for Uncle Sam. That pushes you to the right, hard.

Smilin’ from the defilin’?

If Dan Rather was next to me, I’d cough on him on purpose! Hopefully, he’ll get my flu.

Ohhhh noooo…you gots da pig flu, meester wolf?

Haha! That’ll teach you not to huff ‘n puff ‘n blow piggy houses down!

Dunno if it’s the pig kind. But I do like my bacon…mmmm…bacon(English or Ameeerican kind).

And they were asking to be eaten! Honest. It’s the fate of all pigkind.

A heartbroken woman from Essex
With conscience unburdened by ethics
Spent so long in the sack
With some bloke in her crack
It would rival Homerian epics

Sorry.

Essex, ethics and epics is so wrong…and yet somehow so very, very right. Well done!

Heh, that one’s better. I kinda suck at limericks. The only one I ever wrote was inspired by my biofluid dynamics class, and went like this:

There once was a man named Womersley
Who invented a parameter we need:
The ratio of velocity
To effects of viscosity
Explains the fluid profile we see.

Here’s my most memorable effort, Mrs P:

There was a young lady from Yale
Who need to pee in a pail.
And when she was done,
She started to run
And slipped in the pee on her tail.

Okay, it was a group effort on a car trip.

A heartbroken woman from Essex
Whose boyfriend was from Wessex
She found him with a lass from Surrey
And was filled with nothing but worry
But she called and he came when she spoke of Sussex.

Just trying to work in various counties, meh.

As geography lessons go, it’s a pome.

Jumpin’ from the Humpin’?

My favourite limerick, because it subverts the genre:

There was a young lady from Basingstoke
Who liked sexual intercourse rather a lot
But when she’d finished
She’d get out of bed
And break wind like an anti-tank gun

That there’s called an anti-limerick, David.

My fave:

There was a young woman from Hyde
Who ate a green apple and died.
The apple fermented
Inside the lamented
And made cider inside her inside.

My fave:

There was a young woman from Exeter
So pretty that men craned their necks at her.
And then the more brave
Would smile and wave
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
…the distinguishing marks of their sex at her.

Though my second favorite is entirely clean:

There was a young man from Calcutta
Who had the most terrible stutter.
For breakfast, he said,
I’ll have b-b-b-bread
And b-b-b-b-b-b-butter.

You’d think, having lived in Pawtucket for some years, I’d have other favorite limericks.

Well I don’t.

The limerick packs laughs anatomical
Into space that is quite economical.
But the good ones I’ve seen
So seldom are clean,
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.

Forget who wrote that one, but it floats through my mind on a regular basis. . .

Stoaty – I always thought it was Nantucket. 😉

Can’t Hark – Good ‘un.

My other 2 faves:

Cleopatra, who thought they maligned her
Resolved then and there to be kinder.
“If when pettish,” she said,
“I should cut off your head,
Would you give me a gentle reminder?”

A sleeper from the Amazon
Put nighties of his gramma’s on;
The reason that
He was too fat
To get his own pajamas on.

Another fave:

The conductor, with voice like a hatchet,
Observed to a cellist from Datchet:
“You have twixt your thighs,
My dear, a great prize —
An instrument noted for beauty and size —
And yet you just sit there and scratch it!”

But, of course, I like it for the extra middle line. I’ve always loved broken forms.

Day before yesterday, they read the ENTIRETY of The Hunting of the Snark on Radio 4. Uncle B and I sat on the patio and ate sammiches and listened to it. Many are the compensations of living in this place.

I would have liked to hear “Snark.” I memorized “The Walrus & The Carpenter” to amuse my 14-yrs.-younger sister when she was little. I still can do it (I think). My dad knew great chunks of Shakespeare, was always spouting Hamlet’s soliloquy.

I remember NPR running the BBC “Hitchhiker’s Guide” – saved my life during some looooong stretches of overtime. I loved it.

Oooooh!!! That would be such fun (“His intimate friends/Called him “Candle-ends./His enemies, “Toasted Cheese.”)

thankee, iamfelix. Love the sleeper from the Amazon–like Sweasel, I delight in broken forms. . .

I love all comic verse forms. Another anti-limerick:

There was a young lady from Bude
Who lived in a house in Bude
All her friends were from Bude
She worked in Bude
That crazy young lady from Bude.

Much fun can be had with double dactyls as well. Quite the cleverest I have seen in many a while:

Higgledy-Piggledy
Gay Caius Julius.
Tribune sojourning a
Long way from home,

Seeking distraction in
Nicomedophily,
Earned with his service a
Province for Rome.

A nice little ancient history lesson in two stanzas.

David Gillies!! Thank you!! Years ago, when in high school, I read an article about double dactyls, with some examples. Regrettably, I have remembered them with increasing imperfection in the intervening 40 years, to the point where in recent months I have been struggling to retrieve the name of the form. You are a savior!!!

Hunh.

Getting back to limericks. This thread caused me to dig out my copy of William S. Baring-Gould’s The Lure of the Limerick (1967)

He includes the following excellent form-pusher:

“The limerick, peculiar to English,
Is a verse form that’s hard to estinguish.
Once Congress in session
Decreed its suppression
But people got around it by writing the last line without any rhyme or meter.”

Don’t care what your particular political bent may be–that one GOTTA resonate!

The other fascinating thing about Mr. Baring-Gould’s book (well, OK, there’s tons of fascinating things–the other one I’m going to mention tonight) is that he attempts to trace the form back to a fine old English folk song. . .Sumer is i-cumen in:
“Ewe bleateth after lamb,
Low’th after calve coo;
Bullock sterteth
Bucke fartethe–
Merry sing cuckoo!”

Um. And so on.

But as we swing into Autumn, I am reminded of Ezra Pound’s take on that one:

Ancient Music

Winter is icumen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
Damn you, sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, ’tis why I am, Goddamm,
So ‘gainst the winter’s balm.
Sing goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm.
Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.

Mades wrote:

My fave:
There was a young woman from Exeter
So pretty that men craned their necks at her.
And then the more brave
Would smile and wave
…the distinguishing marks of their sex at her.

Madame..my favorite as well. We used to recite that during our drunken forays at the Alma Mater where I also added this to the repertoire:

There once was a man from Boston
Who drove around in an Austin
He had room for his ass
and a gallon of gas
But his testicles hung out..
..and he lost ’em.

Please continue this thread a la the Dead Pool with more spotted dick and canned haggis as awards. I may have missed Patrick Swayze and Teddy “Snorkel” Kennedy, but I got the 700 Limericks book from the B. Dalton $5 remainder pile and I can go toe-to-toe with any person alive.

..oh, bloody hell:

There was a homo from Khartoum
Who took a lesbian to his room
They argued all night
About who had the right
To do what, and with which..
..And to whom

Please stop me before I kill again.

CHMC: you’re welcome. Anthony Hecht, who along with Paul Pascal coined the term (and the form) was a gem. Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach has the capacity to send shivers up my spine, but for me it’s irretrievably mingled with Hecht’s Dover Bitch, which has to be one of the finest bits of poetic snark in the 20th C.. You can’t fully appreciate one without the other.

Hechtian parlour-game:
Dactylic dimeter
Say it three times then a
Dactyl plus one

Wrestling prosody
Into a straitjacket
Turns out to constitute
Most of the fun

As best I remember. . .

Higgledy piggledy
Marcus Antonius
What do you say to
The African Queen?

“Gubernatorial
Duties require my
Presence in Egypt–
Ya know what I mean?”

There was an old man from Khartoum
Who kept two dead sheep in his room.
“They remind me,” he said
“Of two friends who are dead,
But I cannot remember of whom.”

Willy built a guillotine,
Tried it out on sister Jean.
Said his mother with the mop,
“These silly games have got to stop!”

I remember this one from my college days…

There was a young couple named Bright,
Whose ****ing was faster than light.
They went at it one day,
In a relative way,
And came on the previous night.

Science humor. It rocks!

The porter shouted “Syracuse,”
Shook me hard and said, “Excuse.
If you weren’t going to LaCrosse,
This is where I’d wake you, boss.”

I could have sworn this was Harry Graham (“Auntie, did you feel no pain/Falling from that apple tree?/Would you do it, please, again?/’Cos my friend here didn’t see.”) but I’m having difficulty tracking it down. How spoiled we have become by the ease of Internet searches. . .now I have to track my prey through so many print books on my shelves.

There once was a fraud named dan rather
Whose living was made out of blather
Hoist on his petard
Lou-sy career charred
So obscure now he works as crap gather(er)

Broken from the pokin’?
Damning all the cramming?
Latchin’ onto “catchin'”

I saw one and immediately thought of this thread:

There was a young woman called Tuck
Who had the most terrible luck
She went out in a punt
And fell off the front
And got bit in the leg by a duck

One of my favorites:

There once was a man from Racine,
who invented a fornicating machine.
Concave or convex,
it could do either sex,
but OH! what a bastard to clean!

The other of my favorites:

There once was a lass from Fralee
Who was had by an ape in a tree
the offspring was horrid:
all ass and no for’ead
three balls and a purple goatee