A blogsite offering entertaining oddities since January 2020 at the rate of 30x/month. There are now over seventeen hundred posts in these four years. Images -- poetic (including song-lyrics), photographic, and computer-simulated -- are drawn from daily life as well as from poems and wordplay grouped by topic on our parent blog "Edifying Nonsense". The poetry displayed is all original (as are the song-lyrics), although portions evolved through rigorous editing on a collaborative website.
August 28, 2022
AUG 28, planet-saving verse: summer air quality
August 27, 2022
AUG 27, organic brain poetry: frontal meningioma
Authors' Note:
Meningioma is a not-uncommon slowly growing benign tumor within the cranium. Pressure on adjacent portions of normal brain induce neurological symptoms. When the tumor is located in the frontal cortex, neuropsychiatric manifestations may include bizarre thoughts, frequently paranoid, and unrepressed behavior. Fortunately, the tumors, when suspected, are readily diagnosed on neuro-imaging studies, and surgical therapy is often curative.
Brain tumours account for only a small portion of patients suffering such neuropsychiatric symptoms; however, medical practitioners frequently hope that such a correctable cause may be discovered.
August 26, 2022
AUG 26, American satire (prolongation): taking the fifth
August 25, 2022
AUG 25, duplication: fuddle-duddle
fuddle-duddle: an infrequently used (re)duplication, voiced dismissively in dealing with opinions that the speaker rejects.
In 1971 Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, father of current PM Justin Trudeau, unleashed a minor scandal by using unparliamentary language in the Canadian House of Commons. A portion of the ensuing brouhaha, deftly sidestepped by Trudeau, revolved around whether he had actually spoken or merely mouthed the inappropriate words.
Web discussion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuddle_duddle
August 24, 2022
AUG 24, patients and their maladies: intermittent claudication
August 23, 2022
AUG 23, Canadiana: compassionate use
Growing marijuana seems to be a major activity on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, centred in the city of Nanaimo (nuh-NAHY-moh). Exemptions from restrictions on the substance are given for certain medical conditions, termed compassionate use; however, the criteria appear loosely applied, and overlapping recreational and medicinal use of the substance underlies the region's laid-back attitude.
It is unlikely that Nanaimo will successfully challenge the dominance in limericks currently held by Nantucket. The island of Nantucket has been the setting for a number of limericks; the most famous clean one deals with a crotchety old man whose daughter rips off his poorly hidden cash.
August 22, 2022
AUG 22, funny bones: olecranon (elbow) fracture
August 21, 2022
AUG 21, classic palindrome: 'dogma: I am God'
You can review these illustrated verses in a wider context by proceeding to 'Reversing Verse: Limericks About Classic Palindromes' on the full-service blog 'Edifying Nonsense'.
August 20, 2022
AUG 20, singable satire: Neil Young sings "COACH the NESTLINGS"
SONG with UKULELE CHORDS
COACH the NESTLINGS
August 19, 2022
AUG 19, curtained verse: foul-mouthed Phil
The resultant marked increase in opacity of the pondwater's surface doesn't seem to bother dabbling fowl like ducks, whose omnivorous eating is targeted primarily at vegetable matter. Night herons, on the other hand, eat a diet of various small creatures, aquatic and terrestrial, ambushing them while standing near the edge of the water. I presume that a dense cover of duckweed would complicate attempts by Phil (as well as his colleagues, although he tends to hunt alone) to grab a meal of small fish (fries or minnows), if he was so motivated.
August 18, 2022
AUG 18, Italian loanwords: cicerone
You can review our entire poetic outpouring about Italian loanwords by proceeding to a post on our full-service blog 'Edifying Nonsense'; click HERE.
August 17, 2022
AUG 17, palinku (poetic novelty): Canadiana
In this post, we continue with a novel form of poetic wordplay. Inspired by Japanese haiku poetry, this new form is used for a terse verse with a total of 17 syllables displayed on three lines. Unlike its earlier analogues, this cross-cultural haiku-like concoction does not mandate the precise distribution of the syllables among the three lines, but does stipulate that each word in the poem be included in a palindromic phrase or sentence in English (i.e. one that can be read either forwards or backwards).
To help the reader discern the origin of the lyrics, each palindrome (generally occupying one of the three lines of the poem) has been color-coded.
You can view all our verses of this type if you proceed with a single click to our more encyclopedic blog "Edifying Nonsense". Click HERE. (Or if you prefer, you can stay on this particular blogsite and look for the offerings for the 17th day of each month -- there are now more than 60 of these.)
August 16, 2022
AUG 16, waterfowl: habitat restored (Crab Bank)
placard on site |
pelican take-off |
August 15, 2022
AUG 15, American satire (prolongation): FBIer
Author's Note: FBIer is a term that is occasionally used to denote an employee of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. The search in question in the above verse was carried out by warrant after a federal judge had been persuaded that a crime hae been committed in the premises, in this case a south Florida golf-club. Apparently, as subsequently shown, negotiations for the return of the unlawfully sequestered documents had gone on for months, and a subpoena had been issued. (See, also, our verse 'Classified (Espionage Act)'.
We hope that you enjoyed this verse. You can find 40 more on this topic in 6 collections on our full-service blog 'Edifying Nonsense'. Click HERE to start!
August 14, 2022
AUG 14, STD-poetry: the 'gon-dom' and the condom
August 13, 2022
AUG 13, birdlore: cattle egrets
You can view an encyclopedic collection of illustrated poems on this topic by proceeding to the post 'Poems about BIRDLIFE' on our full-service blog "Edifying Nonsense". Click HERE.
August 12, 2022
AUG 12, poems about parasites: order of fleas
August 11, 2022
AUG 11, defining opinion: holdout
Our blogpost "Defining Opinion" on the topic-based blog "Edifying Nonsense" shows a selection of similar verses submitted to OEDILF (the online Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form). You can see all of these on one visit by clicking HERE.
August 10, 2022
AUG 10, a brief saga (American satire): Mar-a-lago, the dacha
August 9, 2022
AUG 9, origin of "bloggerel": part #1 -- song-lyrics and poetry
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 provide editing or post-submission modification. Not surprisingly political and social satire are major elements in AmIRight's table of contents. As I (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 volunteered his writing talents arduously in that regard. After a few years we had contributed some 150 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 bizarre lyrics) posted on our current blog "Edifying Nonsense".
August 8, 2022
AUG 8, reptiles: update on anole coloration
During the first week of May, 2022, with spring seriously underway in the Carolina Lowcountry, little lizards were out doing their thing in our yard (I presume that's hunting for insects, looking out for potential mates, and patrolling their territories to keep out intruders).
Harking back to previous reference on this site to anoles, I came across the following illustrated verses:
Events around our yard 'today' (May 3, i.e. taking down an old fence) made it a good day for further observations of green anoles and their remarkable penchant/ability to change colour, even though biologists insist that they are not true chameleons.
'Ollie' the green anole, looking greyish on old post |
'Ollie', posing again, in our backyard, on Ocala anise branch, 2 minutes later |
a different creature, ('Ollie's cousin?) climbing down crepe myrtle, few minutes later, 100 feet away |
You can review photos and illustrated herpetologic verses in a wider context by proceeding to 'Verses about Reptiles (don't worry! no snakes)' on the full-service blog "Edifying Nonsense".
August 7, 2022
AUG 7, pluralia tantum: 'dependent' -- cooking ingredients
Grandpa Greg asked us to pass on this messa
ge: "You can view the entire collection of verses about 'pluralia tantum' by clicking HERE."
August 6, 2022
AUG 6, death and the afterlife: dining in Heaven
August 5, 2022
AUG 5, mythed opportunities: dryads
August 4, 2022
AUG 4, binomial phrases: rhyming pairs
To review our poetic effusion about binomial phrases proceed to our blog 'Edifying Nonsense', click HERE !
There is also an entire collection of lyrics to patter songs, somewhat older material, dedicated to various kinds of word-pairs, that provides more didactic material and an extensive series of examples, and allows you to sing these expressions for your own enjoyment, or for that of others around you. Click HERE !
August 3, 2022
AUG 3, toxic vignette: digitalis toxicity
Digoxin, a cardiac glycoside derived initially from the garden plant digitalis (foxglove), has been used to treat chronic congestive heart failure and to control the heart rate in atrial fibrillation. During the author's professional lifetime, there has been a major reduction in the death-rate and in the incidence of hospital admissions for digoxin poisoning, also known as digitoxicity. This improvement is due to more judicious assessment of factors, e.g. decreasing kidney function, that may result in increasing blood levels of the drug, but also to limitation of the drug's use as alternatives have become available.
Review all our poems of toxicologic interest by clicking HERE.
August 2, 2022
AUG 2, reprehensible modern history: Franco-German conflicts
Cannes (KAN): French town on the Côte d'Azur, famous for its luxury hotels and villas, and for its international film festival
Worms (VORMZ): German town (sometimes pronounced by anglophones as WUHRMZ) of about the same size as Cannes and Limerick, famed for its production of liebfraumilch