Life and limericks must go on

Despite looming fascism, surging pandemic, undermined economies, doomed climate, and several other dark clouds, we’ll act as if sanity and civilization will survive.  Children haven’t stopped laughing and dancing, and my brain hasn’t stopped licking rimes (anag.).

Said the Dwarf to the Giant: “You’re wronger.
You think you are brighter and stronger.
You’ll go supernova
And then you are over,
But I’ll be around for far longer.”

(Illustration used in my Uranus and Venus books.)

And Liz Wood, a former neighbor of ours in Lyme Regis, has sent us this:

There was a young fellow called Guy
who so loved to look at the sky
when observing the barrels of Ottery
we feared that his fate was a lottery
but luckily he didn’t quite die.

Liz and her daughter and son-in-law once took me to see a wild event called the Burning of the Barrels, at Ottery St. Mary in Devonshire, and out of curiosity I got too near to one of the barrels.

And another of our dear Lyme Regis neighbors, Jane Newby, who is a genius toy-maker and, last year, gave us a menagerie of pet dinosaurs, has now presented us with a wonderful model of us in our boat on the Thames.

She explains that the delicate carving of the boat itself was done by a kind neighbor of hers named Martin.  Actually, the boat isn’t quite yet achieved.  A skiff is not easy to moor and board from our point of access to the river, and I’m hoping to get something lighter.  Though not as fairy-light as the balsa wood of the model.

__________

Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after piblishing  it.  If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version.

This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.

 

10 thoughts on “Life and limericks must go on”

  1. I’m glad to see you’re wearing life jackets in the boat. Safety first! Last weekend we had a very large swell on the coast of northern California, with high surf, sneaker waves, and rip currents. A youth class was sailing dinghies in Santa Cruz harbor, generally a safe location behind a breakwater, but even in the harbor the water was turbulent. A dozen boats were capsized and the young sailors pitched into the cold water. It took a couple of hours to fish them all out. They were all wearing life jackets. Other than mild hypothermia they all survived unharmed.

  2. With all due respect, “piblishing” again. You need to fix your template. (You don’t need to add this comment to your blog entry.)

    1. No, it was corrected. The version you first opened contained the mistake. If you keep opening it the same way, it will. But if you instead open by clicking on the title of the post, I think you will see the most recent version.

  3. “Despite looming fascism, surging pandemic, undermined economies, doomed climate, and several other dark clouds, we’ll act as if sanity and civilization will survive.”

    U.S. Democrats are fascists, it’s true,
    Committing faux impeachment anew!
    Undermining the economy
    And pandemic control strategy,
    With slow vaccine rollouts, they do!

    But no doubt they will “save the climate” and banish all “the other dark clouds” whilst they undermine western civilization in the good ol’ Joe Biden return to “normalcy”. That and 10.00 (USD) will get you a latte grande for now. Who knows how many yen it will be in the near future, eh? But, not to worry, Biden has the yen for yen, and has a Hunter out on the prowl for them.

    1. Biden faces enormous work to undo some of the damage caused by Trump. Though Trump deserves impeachment many times over, I may agree with those who say an impeachment trial would distract from that vital work, and might at least be postponed. The verdict of history on Trump will be damning, with or without impeachment. The essential benefit of impeachment would be to exclude this bad man from holding public office again.

    1. Line break after “supernova” got deleted. Inserted now.
      Actually it’s an example of how “line” in verse isn’t completely defined.
      The third and fourth lines of limericks are shorter than the others (two main beats instead of three), and the tradition could have been to treat them as one line with an internal rhyme – a frequent patternces in poetry.

  4. How do you make up your limericks? Do you purposely compose them or do they come unbidden?

    1. Limericks are a labored form of verse, so I think they don’t often spring into the mind spontaneously, except for times when one happens to notice in the stream of consciousness a couple of silly rhyming words (“Antiguaa – figuaa”), or a set of a few words with a limerick-like rhythm. I think a limerick is more often the product of some minutes of determination to make a limerick!

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