A limerick a week #21

On trugs and affaires de coeur

Aficionados of a certain class of televisual whodunnit will be familiar with the scene, so picture it now:

A chocolate-box village invested with bucolic grandeur by the landscape that envelops it. Its artfully thatched cottages keeping a hirsute watch over their grounds; gardens that were crafted with love through the hazy days of tranquil summers past – the halcyon summers of her untroubled though solitary mid-life years. And now she kneels. Alone. Trowel in hand.

In faded redolence of her life a tired, but much-loved summer frock mirrors the careworn passion of her being. Her youthful countenance conserved by the wide-brimmed flowery hat that wards off the ageing ravages of the sun’s beguiling embrace and frames the handsome visage of a woman in her prime. How many times has her story been told? Morse? Miss Marple? Midsomer?

Midsomer! We know what happens next…

A never-was-and-never-will-be-beau from decades past returns to haunt the vestige of his youth. He rediscovers long-departed yearnings. He rediscovers her.

She screams! His heinous revenge, exacted for youthful, ill-imagined slights, leavens the madness of his life. His early passion unbeknown to her. Unbeknown and unrequited. For him, unforgotten. His madness now destroys the daylight dreams that once consumed his waking hours. Her scream subsides.

She lies there. Still and silent amid the splendour of her flowers. The tools that shaped her garden recline solemnly beside her in an open casket, a hand-crafted gift of yore; a simple wooden trug.

“She obviously lived alone” said Barnaby.

“How so?” asked his young sergeant.

“The trug” he replied, “it’s a dead giveaway. You see, at a certain age they replace the men in their lives with a trug. Never forget that Troy”. He sounded bitter.

The older man continued: “The day will come when you too will be asked to forgo a romantic moonlit dinner or a picnic nestled by the river on a summer’s day. No more jewels or trinkets desired. No more weekend-away-surprises. No more négligée. No more déshabillé. No more passion. No more … you! Just a trug”.

Barnaby’s face fell as he remembered that day. The day that Joyce had told him she wanted a trug for her birthday “but not a plastic one”.

So with Cully’s help he had bought her a wooden one. An expensive hand-made trug sculpted from willow and chestnut, but it mattered not. Now viewed from marital exile in his cheaply rented rooms, his life had never since been the same.

But Joyce and her garden blossomed. Until, one day, a long-forgotten school-day confrère reappeared in her life.

He had worshipped her from affair, but she hardly knew his name, or cared, as she collected her tools in her trug.

In his lodgings, Barnaby heard a piercing scream rent the air…

 

Trugs – an antidote to the man in your life

“I’ve no need of a passionate hug”
She said with a nonchalant shrug.
“‘Cos I’ve now reached the age
Where I’d rather engage
With my garden; so get me a trug!”

A limerick a week #20

Orangutans with ape-itude …

There was a cheerful story from the Netherlands this week. Staff of a primate park near the Dutch town of Apeldoorn are showing pictures of potential mates to their adult orangutans to see if they have a preferred choice of partner. Tinder for Apes!

D’ye think he’ll swipe right if I show him my bum?

Meantime Chester’s orangutans have become the stars of The Zoo, a TV documentary series that follows the lives of the zoo’s animal collection. Their ability to break out of their compound and go walkabout has been most endearing, but perhaps they’d be better behaved, or at least ‘otherwise occupied’, if the zoo introduced Tinder for Apes for them too:

They get into all sorts of scrapes
When a group of them sometimes escapes.
But a Dutch zoo has found
That they all hang around
When they swipe right on Tinder for Apes!

Postscript: For a while now my place of work has promoted a networking scheme for staff via its so-called ‘Random Coffee’ club. Its aim is to encourage staff to meet colleagues they would not normally bump into. Interested parties put their names forward and random pairings are then drawn to share a coffee break at a mutually agreeable date. Random Coffee is, in fact, a location-based social discovery service that facilitates communication between mutually interested users.

That is all very worthy and innocent, but can you spot the obvious? Let me help. The last sentence of the paragraph above is a truncated version of Wikipedia’s opening paragraph in its entry for Tinder:

Tinder is a location-based dating and social discovery service application (using Facebook) that facilitates communication between mutually interested users, allowing matched users to chat.

Yup! It was not long before Random Coffee became known as the Lab’s version of Tinder. I don’t know who coined it thus or if it has yet led to romance, but it’s given us two limericks for the price of one this week …

I sent out a new memorandum
That staff should now meet up at random.
So forget about Tinder
And let us not hinder
Your efforts to hook-up in tandem.

Quotes that made me laugh #25

This from Lorna Wallace’s winning entry to a Burn’s night poetry competition held in New Zealand entitled: ‘A Scot’s Lament fur her American Fellows (Oan their election of a tangerine gabshite walloper)‘. A coruscating critique of Donald Trump in which his demeanour is described thus:

Poutin’, glaikit through this farce,
His mooth wis pursed up like an arse,
His Tangoed coupon glowin’ like
A skelped backside.

The entire poem can be heard or read here.

A limerick a week #19

A quote usually attributed to the late USA Senator Patrick Daniel Moynihan is that: “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but they are not entitled to their own facts”.

In truth, there are some that argue otherwise. An Australian philosopher, Patrick Stokes, gets to the nub of the problem: “If ‘everyone’s entitled to their opinion’ just means no-one has the right to stop people thinking and saying whatever they want, then the statement is true but fairly trivial, but if ‘entitled to an opinion’ means ‘entitled to have your views treated as serious candidates for the truth’ then it’s pretty clearly false.

Which brings us to the new White House incumbent’s view of (i) winning the popular vote in the American presidential election (along the lines of “I won if you disregard the votes of the millions of illegal voters” – this despite any evidence of mass illegality and rather akin to saying that “if my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle”) and (ii) claiming the biggest-ever crowd at a presidential inauguration despite clear evidence to the contrary.

The White House trumpeted its non-sensical perspectives as ‘alternative opinions’ or, more insidiously, as ‘alternative facts’.

… where lies trump facts

Dangerous stuff, so:

When it’s “truth” that your verbiage lacks,
They’re “lies” not “alternative facts”.
So without much compunction
I hope that you’re dumped-on
For your pathetically risible acts.

Postscript #1: Fred Shapiro, editor of ‘The Yale book of Quotations’, points to an earlier quote about the right to one’s own opinion by Bernard Baruch, an American financier and philanthropist. It seems to have historical precedence over Moynihan’s quote and states that: “Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.

Postscript #2: My all-time favourite title for an article is Richard Lewontin’s and Stephen Jay Gould’s paper entitled: ‘The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm’.

Having just become aquainted with Fred Shapiro’s work (Postscript #1), I’m now pleased to say that I have a second favourite title, from his article: The politically correct US Supreme Court and the Motherf**king Texas Court of Criminal Appeals‘.

Down at heel …

… and dignity in di feet!

Sometimes petitions work! I rarely sign online petitions, but as you can read here I did sign the one instigated by a woman receptionist who was sent home without pay for refusing to wear high-heeled shoes.

As you can read below, it looks like it had an effect (it goes on a bit – a lot actually – so don’t feel compelled!):

You recently signed the petition “Make it illegal for a company to require women to wear high heels at work”:
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/129823

We told you a few months ago that MPs on the House of Commons Petitions Committee had decided to investigate the issues raised by this petition.

The inquiry has now finished and the Petitions Committee has published a joint report with the Women and Equalities Committee on high heels and workplace dress codes. The report concludes that the Equality Act 2010 is not yet fully effective in protecting workers from discrimination.

The report calls for:

· the Government to take urgent action to improve the effectiveness of the Equality Act. It recommends that the Government reviews this area of the law and, if necessary, asks Parliament to amend it.
· more effective remedies—such as increased financial penalties—for employment tribunals to award against employers who breach the law, in order to provide an effective deterrent.
· the Government to introduce guidance and awareness campaigns targeted at employers, workers and students, to improve understanding of the law and workers’ rights.

You can read the full report on the Parliament website: http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/petitions-committee/news-parliament-2015/high-heels-and-workplace-dress-codes-report-published-16-17/?utm_source=petition&utm_campaign=129823&utm_medium=email&utm_content=reportstory

We are hugely grateful to you for signing this petition and raising this issue in Parliament. Without this petition, this inquiry would not have happened.

What will happen now?

The petition and report will be debated in Parliament on Monday 6 March at 4.30pm in Westminster Hall (the second debating chamber of the House of Commons). You can watch the debate live on the day or catch up with it afterwards on Parliament TV: http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Commons

The Government will send a formal response to our report within 2 months. We will let you know when this happens. You can follow any updates on our inquiry page: http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/petitions-committee/inquiries/parliament-2015/high-heels-workplace-dress-codes-inquiry-16-17/?utm_source=petition&utm_campaign=129823&utm_medium=email&utm_content=inquiry

What Michael said #4

opinion
/əˈpɪnjən/
verb
1. a view or judgement formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge.
that, in my opinion, is right
 
2. a statement of advice by an expert on a professional matter.
if in doubt, get a second opinion

 

One of the problems with opinions is that everybody has one. And now as a school of ‘opinion’ develops across the pond that conflates lies with facts, I am reminded again of the wisdom of Michael Graham, who wrote in 1943 that:

 

To build up an informed opinion is a matter of some difficulty: not in the opinion part of it, because the public frequently shows itself very opinionated on the slenderest of information. The difficulty rather lies in making sure the opinion is well-informed.

Postscript: I could have sworn that it was the late-lamented football manager Brian Clough who said to his namesake commentator, Brian Moore: “Let’s face it Brian, we’re all entitled to our opinions, but it’s my opinion that counts”, however, I can’t find any reference to it! On reflection it seems that one of the most memorable quotes from my teens was simply a conceit of the TV impressionist Mike Yarwood.

If only …

Wishful thinking from Berger & Wyse on this year’s Presidential inauguration

Postscript: I was going to delete this post after discovering that the ‘birds’ that are being released are not, as I originally assumed, doves of peace (wishful thinking), but represent tweets from a narcissistic sociopath.

I decided not to delete it, but to let it stand as testament to (i) my ignorance of certain social media and (ii) my naïve inclination to look for silver linings.

A limerick a week #18

Adrift on the high Cs …

I’ve just thought of a category to add to my recent post for That Was My Year That Was, (2016) namely: The most beguiling performance of the year.

Two contenders stood out – Eleanor Tomlinson (Demelza in the TV series Poldark, see #TeamDemelza in posts passim) and an Irish soprano, Anna Devin, who was in Scottish Opera’s production of The Marriage of Figaro in which she played Susanna.

It was a close run thing, but Devin won. I’m by no means an opera buff, but I was completely beguiled by her performance and thought that she stole the show. Not just her singing, but her acting too. However, despite that and the critical praise of her “vivid sense of bel canto style” and “musico-dramatic intelligence” (which I think means ‘acting’) even she couldn’t relieve the tedium of the last 20 minutes of the opera – too long, Mozart, just too long!

Droit de Seignour. Count Almaviva gets on top of things as he pays court to Susanna; fortunately she told him to “p**s off” in grand operatic style and married Figaro with her virtue intact!

It took a lot to put Tomlinson’s portrayal of Demelza into second place, but Devin managed it if only because her performance was live and the twinkle in her eye was enchanting! She can certainly belt them out as well. Anyway, this is for her …

I was enthralled by a singer called Anna;
Ms Devin, that is, and I canna
Forget her recital,
‘Bel canto’ and vital,
As she beguiled in the rôle of Susanna!

From an interview with the Irish Independent: “A singing life – Anna Devin says there are certain things you need to experience in real life before you can sing about them”. Like sitting in a lake for a photoshoot? Well, you would, wouldn’t you?

I’ve always liked the term bel canto ever since Harry Secombe disparaged his own singing ability as “more can belto than bel canto“. Meantime, I’d have had a better version of the limerick if only there was an appropriate rhyme with  bel canto. You can’t win ’em all 🙁