JAN 5, amphibians: anurans - 'frog' vs 'toad'

Be sure to check out the whole collection of 'Amphibians' by proceeding to "Edifying Nonsense." CLICK HERE ! 

JAN 4, portraits of couples, Harris' hawks, brown pelicans

 

Enjoy illustrated verses about the brown pelican, Pelecanus occidentalis, by clicking HERE and HERE.

You can view these photos from our portfolio of 'Couples' portraits in a wider context on our full-service blog "Edifying Nonsense" HERE.

JAN 3, diagnostic imaging: DEXA (BMD)

Authors' Note:   DEXA, or Dual Energy X-ray Absorptiometry, is a simple standardized imaging test to assess bone mass in the context of osteoporosis. It actually measures bone mass in a peculiar form, i.e, mass per unit area (rather than volume) of tissue; differential attenuation (blocking by tissue) for the 2 photons of different energies is assessed for each spatial element in a planar field. The technique is however, excellent for serial tests in the same patient, and is now used  so widely that its results are regarded as synonymous with Bone Mineral Density (BMD).

 You can review all our verses on this intriguing topic by proceeding to a post on 'Edifying Nonsense' entitled 'Selected Topics in Diagnostic Imaging'. Click HERE!

JAN 2, waterfowl: great egrets, more pics

Great Egret: Shem Creek, Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina

Fabric art contributed by RCH

POEMS: Poetry appearing on this site was written (unless otherwise indicated) by Giorgio Coniglio, and for the most part contributed to the  on-line humour dictionary site OEDILF Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form). OEDILF has worked its way alphabetically from Aa- to Gr-, with the goal of accumulating a verse defining every meaning of every word in the English language. This co-operative project has in its 15 years of existence accumulated over 107,000 carefully edited limericks, with completion date estimated to be around the year 2065. In the past three years, Giorgio has contributed over 300 poems to the project; the site's accession number for the verses is indicated at the bottom of the relevant slides in our presentations.

PHOTOGRAPHY: The majority of photographic illustrations were obtained by Giorgio Coniglio, using an i-phone 7 camera. These illustrations were collected independently of the verses, and formulated using Powerpoint software. Subjects for the wildlife photographs were not reimbursed for appearing in these illustrations, and the editor admits that their consent was not always obtained; an effort was made not to disturb their environment. Other artwork by the author was performed using Powerpoint.  Where indicated, friends provided some bird photographs. When required for purposes of illustration, photos, primarily open-use, were drawn from the internet, and are designated by pale blue title plaques.

LOCALES: Unless otherwise displayed, photographs relating to flora and fauna, and to artwork in the southern United States, were shot in and around Charleston, South Carolina. We will endeavor to note other sites, which may include Toronto, San Francisco, Florida, Washington, DC, and Paris.   

JAN 1, wordplay maps: new world palindromes(#43,#44)

 

You can view the entire collection of these 50 wordplay maps, by accessing the collection 'Tourists Palindromic Guides: The Americas'. Start by clicking HERE! 

DEC 31, a brief saga: Hogmanay (Auld Lang's Sine)

 A HAPPY NEW YEARS TO ALL !!!

DEC 30, Canadiana: Haida Gwaii

web-photo

Authors' Note:

snowbird: a Canadian retiree seeking a warmer venue to spend the wintry months

  The Queen Charlotte Islands are a Canadian archipelago situated between 

the northwestern tip of Vancouver Island and the Alaska Panhandle, with landmass one-third that of the Hawaiian Islands (the latter located considerably further south). They had been the heartland of the aboriginal Haida people, who numbered thirty thousand at the time of first contact with European explorers in the eighteenth century. Their territory has a unique environment based on moderate temperatures and heavy rainfall. The province of British Columbia renamed the islands Haida Gwaii (HIE-duh GWIE[-ee], 'islands of the people') in 2010.

You can review poems, pictures and diverse nonsense related to Canada on the post "Canadiana" on our full-service blog "Edifying Nonsense".

DEC 29, patients and maladies: knee effusion

Authors' Note: This verse resulted from the author’s personal experience (as patient).

  Following trauma, standard X-rays taken in the Emergency Department show most fractures where the bone fragments are displaced. They can not, however, diagnose many undisplaced fractures, particularly in elderly patients with reduced bone density. 

  Nonspecific swelling with evidence of leaking of fluid into the adjacent joint space (joint effusion) is particularly common in injuries about the knee, and is easily discerned on visual inspection and X-rays. Follow up radiographs after another 3 weeks sometimes display an initially missed healing fracture. In cases where instability, ongoing pain, or persistent effusion are prominent, injury to ligaments may be suspected. 

Be sure to check out the whole collection of verses on 'Patients and their Maladies" by proceeding to our full-service blog, "Edifying Nonsense." CLICK HERE !

DEC 28, 2020: palinku -- two verses about partying

 

  In this post, we will introduce 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 classic Japanese analogue, this 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. 

  And, just in case you have forgotten what palindromes are about, your blogsite hosts have arranged a serial set of brief lessons on the topic ('Political Palindromes') which you can review by clicking HERE. 

DEC 27, poetic non-sequitur: cumulative song

 Authors' Note:  The cumulative song "I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly" was created by two Canadian folksong aficionados in 1952, and then recorded by Burl Ives in 1953.  Other well-known cumulative songs which are traditional include "Old MacDonald had a Farm" and "The Green Grass Grew All Around". 

 Our collection of 'Non-Sequiturs' on our parent blog "Edifying Nonsense", contains an admittedly bizarre assortment of nonsensical odds-and-ends, that don't quite fit into other topic-based offerings. But should you want to review the entire collection, click HERE.

DEC 26, old world palindromes #5 and #6

 

DEC 25, holiday verse: every Adventuality

 

DEC 24, holiday verse: "The Night Before Christmas", pandemically

 

DEC 23, classic palindrome: 'Yreka bakery'

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, PEH !!!

 

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'. 

DEC 22, waterfowl: brown pelicans

TO ENLARGE any slide or stand-alone photo on this blog, just click on it. To reverse the process, and return to this standard view, find the little 'x' in the upper right corner of the black field and click there.

OCT 10, waterfowl: Caribbean brown pelicans

You can review these illustrated verses in a wider context by proceeding to 'Immersible Verse: Limericks about Waterfowl' on the full-service blog 'Edifying Nonsense'. 

DEC 21, anagram swarm: A-VERY-STABLE-GENIUS -- wordplay for the holiday season

Today's collection should definitely wrap up this excessively extended effort. (But I am proud to say that you can now find some 350 anagrams developed as part of the total undertaking -- and some of them do seem to have some important meaning!)  

You can review an amazing number of anagrams based on this book title on our full-service blog 'Edifying Nonsense'. There are two posts to view: 

 

'A Very Stable Genius': Theme and Variations (97 anagrams),   and 

'A Very Stable Genius': additional funky anagrams.

DEC 20, singable satire: Tom Lehrer sings "REDUPLICATIONS A to K"

 PARODY SONG-LYRICS

ORIGINAL SONG: "The Elements", Tom Lehrer, 1959.

PARODY COMPOSED: Dr. G.H. and Giorgio Coniglio, 2015. This song is the seventh of nine in the series on Word- Pairs. You can find the links to the lyrics of the previous songs at the bottom of the post. 

EXPLANATION:  For a  discussion of reduplications, check an earlier post on this blog-site by clicking here. This post also honours our previous venture of Feb 15, 2017 entitled 'Abracadabra' to 'Zoom-zoom': possibly the world's largest compendium of reduplications'. 

UKULELE and GUITAR-FRIENDLY LINK: Our whole series of songs can be found in a friendly format for ukulele (and guitar)-players on our sister blog  "SILLY SONGS and SATIRE" with chord-charts and helpful performing suggestions. Click HERE to proceed to this site. 

This post is a follow-up to "The Reduplications: A Lesson"

  This collection of fascinating phrases has been modified somewhat since its original posting on the site AmIRight.com. Thanks are due to Al Silver, Becky Hurwitz and Uncle Paul for suggesting several examples which were incorporated into the current version. 

 WARNING!  Do not attempt to sing this lesson at the pace of a patter-song. The management of this blog will take no responsibility for any injuries sustained.

Many of these words have fascinating stories of their origin and subsequent use; the hotlinks highlight those with instructive or amusing information available on the web.

A mini-lesson found on the Internet

There’s achy-breaky, artsy-fartsy, bigwig, BB, and aye-aye

Abracadabra, bric-a-brac, and boulder holder, and bye-bye

And Bora Bora, beriberi, (good) bees knees, and (bad) boo-boo

And bonbon, buddy-buddy, bunga-bunga, can-can, and choo-choo

There's crackerjack, couscous, and chili, chugalug, chin-chin, cocoa 

And clap-trap, culture vulture,  chit-chat, chock-a-block,  cluck-cluck, dodo 

And dilly-dally, deadhead, dum(b)-dum(b), dingle-dangle, and clip-clop 

And easy-peasy, even Steven, fifty-fifty, and flip-flop.

There's flim-flam, fiddle-faddle, fuddy-duddy, fat cat, funny mon-

-ey; Folderol and fender bender, flower power, honey-bun.

And four-door, ga-ga, goody-goody, golden-oldy, and hotshot

And go-go, gibber-jabber, hurly-burly, honky-tonk, hotspot. 

                       

There’s hocus-pocus, harum-scarum, holus-bolus, hoi-polloi

And holy moly!  hoity-toity, hip-hop, heeby-jeebies, oy!

And hullaballoo and hokey-pokey, hotpot, hoodoo, and hobo

And handy-dandy, hari-kari, Henny-Penny and heigh-ho!

Hell’s bells! there’s hanky-panky, hootchie-kootchie, hobnob and hoo-haw

Hush-hush! knock-knock, NewYork NewYork, (its zip is fixed twixt MA and PA)

Ill will, and itsy-bitsy, heyday, juju, bass-ackward blackjack

And jingle-jangle, jeepers-creepers, kow-tow, kiwi, and knick-knack. 

Ta-Dah !!!

DEC 19, wordplay map: r-i-c anagrams #11+#12

 

You can view the entire collection of 18 wordplay maps of 'R-E-P-U-B-L-I-C-A-N-S in Canada' on our full-service blog "Edifying Nonsense" by clicking HERE.

DEC 18, American anagram swarm: 'c-o-n-s-t-i-t-u-t-i-o-n-a-l'

A brief explanation of anagram swarms, and some other examples can be found on the blogpost "A Brief Saga: Anagram Swarms"; click HERE.

 

DEC 17, Canadiana: joual

Authors' Note: Accent is a word written similarly, but spoken very differently in French and English. Joual (ZHWAHL) is the name for the accent, grammar and even spelling used naturally by many speakers in the Canadian province of Quebec; this dialect had evolved over several centuries separately from the language spoken in France. In schools, businesses and media in Quebec and other francophone areas of Canada, 'québécois' (kay-bay-KWA), more standard French, with a local inflection and local vocabulary, now predominates. In Canadian English and French, residents of the province are known as Quebeckers or Québécois respectively.

 You can review poems, pictures and diverse nonsense related to Canada on the post "Canadiana" on our full-service blog  "Edifying Nonsense". 

DEC 16, diagnostic imaging: parathyroid scanning

Authors' Note:   Attacks of renal colic (spasmodic intermittent pain) may occur due to blockage of urine flow by stones in the ureters. In adult patients, stones consisting of calcium salts are most likely. If a high serum calcium level is found (this situation prevails in only a minority of cases of kidney stones), overactivity of the tiny parathyroid (PT) glands may be responsible. Milder cases of excessive parathyroid hormone secretion may also occur without symptoms, but can lead to loss of bone mass and increased risk of bone fracture.

   A single functioning adenoma (benign tumor)  of one of the PT glands is most commonly responsible, but hyperplasia (overgrowth) of all four glands may also result in inappropriate PT hormone secretion, detected by increased blood levels. The radiotracer Tc-99m sestamibi is taken up selectively by overactive PT glands, and may help plan surgery to explore the neck and remove the tumor.

  

You can review all our verses on this intriguing topic by proceeding to a post on 'Edifying Nonsense' entitled 'Selected Topics in Diagnostic Imaging'. Click HERE!

DEC 15, etymology: 'miser'

For fans of etymology, we have three blogposts with collections of verses about word-origins such as the one above on our more encyclopedic blog "Edifying Nonsense". You can start to review some of this intriguing material by clicking HERE, and then following the links!

 

DEC 14, Toronto oases: upbeat art

NEWSFLASH !!!

December 14th: The Electoral College meets, and according to all expectation confirms the victory in the November election of Joe Biden as incoming President and Kamal Harris as Vice-President. 

 

DEC 13, wordplay map: r-i-c anagrams #9+#10

 

You can view the entire collection of 18 wordplay maps of 'R-E-P-U-B-L-I-C-A-N-S in Canada' on our full-service blog "Edifying Nonsense" by clicking HERE.