CONTENTS of the Personal Blog "DAILY ILLUSTRATED NONSENSE" (D.I.N.) -- a historical perspective

 

SONG LYRICS: Starting in 2011, we had contributed parody song-lyrics to "AmIRight", the most extensive website publishing this type of doggerel on the internet. That website offers authors the advantage of immediate publication, but does not support rigorous editing or post-submission modification. Not surprisingly, political and social satire are major elements in AmIRight's table of contents. As I (Dr. G.H.), was still personally in sober professional practice at that time, I attributed the submitted works to a pseudonym, and Giorgio Coniglio, a registered practitioner in that field (originally a funky-minded domestic rabbit) volunteered his writing talents arduously in that regard. 

 After a few years, we had contributed over 100 singable entities, but the intense polarization in American society threatened to disrupt the enjoyment previously experienced by AmIRight's cadre of volunteer writers. You can find some of those earlier songs (with familiar tunes, but one-off, bizarre lyrics) re-posted on our current blog "Daily Illustrated Nonsense". During the regrettable period of the COVID-19 pandemic, we developed a few more satiric songs, but in the recent year, we have done substantial editing and organization on this pile of material; also, our song-writing efforts have again extended beyond political satire to other areas of interest. 

There are now about 200 song-lyrics displayed in posts on "D.I.N." under the headings of "singable satire", and "brief saga", the latter being our jargony name for poems composed of at least three limerick-like stanzas. These verses have also been definitively set to music, with chord indications targeted for performance with ukulele accompaniment in slides on our secondary blog "Silly Songs and Satire". A good number of these have been tested by presentation at open-mike sessions at ukulele jams. 

POETRY: Giorgio and I turned our attention in 2016 to poetry. (To be honest, a handful of  poems had been edited and published earlier as "filler" in medical journals).  We found a "home" for most of our recent poetic inclinations at OEDILF (the Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form), a  collaborative website, that insists its mission was to create a dictionary with a definitional poetic "tribute" written to every meaning of every word in the language. To ensure this goal is approached in orderly fashion, OEDILF has gradually widened a narrow alphabetic window starting at A-, so that after almost 20 years of effort, limericks are being submitted for dictionary key words starting with the letters up to I, but no further. Acceptance of verses for publication involves mandatory adherence to strict rhyming and scansion, and the use of grammatically correct, standardized language appropriate for the part of the English-speaking world from which the author hails, modified by specific website requirements. 

  Topics that we found appealling for creative endeavours include medical and health issues and terminology, Canada and Canadianisms, wildlife and nature, wordplay and foreign languages, among others, influenced primarily by our life-experience.  The rigorous editing process at OEDILF involves polite acceptance or indisputable rejection of colleagues' suggestions, with eventual approval by 4 other members, then further intervention by an assistant editor, and may take anywhere up to a year or more. To date (2025), we have 850 verses accepted, and that status is indicated on the slides displayed in "D.I.N." About 100 additional poems are in the works; a  portion of our terse verses of this type may never be submitted to OEDILF as they would remain outside the alphabetic range for many years. 

   Our personal take on the format for submitted verses provides our colleagues at OEDILF some difficulty, as we are prone to extend our poems, albeit with limerick-like structure, to more than the customary 5 lines (we ourselves have called these longer verses "limerrhoids"), and there are now more than 300 of these variants. The average length of our OEDILFian poems, rather jarringly, is therefore seven lines. As a particular writing vehicle ("brief sagas"), we have developed about 50 poems that consist of 3 or more limerick-style stanzas, and these have been highlighted as well on "D.I.N.". Brief sagas support the concept that all limerick-style verses can, and perhaps should be, sung.   

 

  The ancillary inclusion of illustrative photos or computer art, and the merging of these multi-media concoctions are in no way related to OEDILF; they are the concepts and creations only of your blog's contibuting authors. Moreover, we should mention that we have also created and blogged a variety of other poetic formats, (not in the purview of OEDILF), that includes Shakespearian blank verse and haiku/senryu.

WORDPLAY: Like most wannabe writers and editors we love words. They are the basis of many of our song lyrics and poems.  You will find a fair amount of defined wordplay on our blogs, including foreign-language borrowings, palindromes and anagrams. In certain cases we have gone to extremes, including "magic" palindromes, anagram wordplay-maps, bi-lyrical limericks, and spoofs on classic palindromes, etymology and grammar rules. Because these activities consume a lot of time and effort, we have often been drawn to describe and exemplify them in verse, posting those on the OEDILF site for editing and publication. And, although we are likely to have initiated a fair proportion of "new" word-manipulation-concoctions, we have not attributed them, as such material is lurking and waiting to be found among the letters and words, rather than "created".    

PHOTOGRAPHY: Dr.G.H. spent the latter part of his professional career dealing with the interpretation of low-resolution nuclear images in medical diagnosis. So, we have a deep interest in visual documentation whose technique renders the key features obvious. For spontaneous nature-photography on bicycle expeditions, the cell-phone-camera is an obvious choice for portability, although resolution at a distance is an issue. Most of our photographs have been obtained with an i-phone 13, whose "live" feature provides an incomparable advantage when the subject is moving. These photos enhance the "life-experience" nature of the posted material. 

On occasion, to make a point in a multi-media display, we borrow a relevant photo from the web, these are flagged by the term "web-photo", with colour coding of the text background, but space generally does not allow or mandate a full disclosure of the source (and, frankly the source of pics of old album-jackets or cable-TV-news stories is of limited relevance). The reader is asked to please check these out, where indicated, or to send queries to us. 

 Dr.G.H.