Limericks – Page 26 – A View From The Lanterne Rouge

A limerick a week #57

Ill blows the wind …

Weather bomb! Sounds dramatic doesn’t it? Explosive cyclogenesis! Sounds even more dramatic! Paired words that I can imagine voiced with a booming, stentorian roar by Tom Baker’s incarnation of Doctor Who as the world faces up to cyclones and storms of unimaginable ferocity; a confrontation with nature’s pent-up fury released as a cataclysmic tempest that seeks ruination of the land …

As I type, the UK meteorological Office has issued a weather warning for the south and west of the UK and forecasts strong winds arising from such a weather bomb. In fact, it is predicted to be a storm of sufficient magnitude that they have given it a name.

So what have they called this child of a weather bomb? Brian, that’s what! Brian! I mean, with all the best will in the world to all the Brian’s of the world, what scale of pent-up fury can you imagine being unleashed by a Brian?

Now, there are some very well-known Brians: Wilson, Blessed, May, O’Driscoll and Cox (times two) to name but a few. In fact Blessed may be the man who roars (see what I did there?), Cox#2 may understand the secrets of the universe, and May may be Under Pressure, but none of them approach the realms of a furious cataclysm.

Elsewhere, we have Brian the snail (remember him) and the Brian to whom the Python’s gave Life (“Vewy well! I shall… welease… Bwian!“). LinkedIn claims profiles for 90+ Brians Gale and The Arctic Monkeys even recorded Brianstorm, but nowhere, absolutely nowhere should we have ‘Brian-offspring-of-an-explosive-cyclogenesis’! Here’s my take on it:

This storm will roar like a lion
Says the forecast that we all rely on,
But our climatic nemesis
(A fierce cyclogenesis)
Needs a name that’s more brutal than ‘Brian’!

(No offence is intended to any of the Brians out there, especially the ones that I know!)

A limerick a week #56

Take me to your leader …

Political groupings don’t consider everyone to be leaders within their ranks. They-who-are-to-be-led look for leadership from the top and plus or minus some ~~back-stabbing~~ debate, they then follow their leader whose charisma is such that they carry their troops with them even if the journey they undertake is perilous. (Aye right😂)

Which brings me to the Conservative party’s ‘strong and stable’ UK government and its ragtag coterie of political drones whose idea of collective responsibility appears to be that of Caesar’s assassins. How can we define its leadership?

Here’s the limerick:

In her recent political homily
Theresa May be an anomaly.
‘Cos she claimed “strong and stable”,
But, in truth was just able,
To show that she’s both “weak and wobbily”!

(BTW, I do know it’s spelled ‘wobbly’ and I also know that “strong and stable” was an election phrase and not a party conference outpouring. Please, give a chap some literary licence!)

A limerick a week #55

Offaly good caramel …

We’re back from our Irish travels and we have since heard that Management’s welcoming relatives, with whom we stayed for a couple of days, had later won an award at Blas na hÉireann (the Irish Food Awards) for their Dulce de Leche product. So, well done Clara Fields on your Chef’s Choice award (and my apologies for the clichéd ending to the limerick that it inspired)!

Here goes:

When your taste buds demand you procure
A gustatory affaire d’amour
Then please let me fetch ya
Some Dulce de Leche
From Clara … To be sure, to be sure!

(and the limerick’s anapestically correct too – woohoo!)

Postscript: One longstanding ambition of mine had been to visit Achill Island in the northwest of the Irish mainland, and Keem Bay in particular where an historic basking shark fishery once took place. It was well worth visiting anyway, but made all the more so by my former professional interest in fisheries for the sharks.

Looking down on Keem Bay, Achill Island, co. Mayo.

and some other assorted views elsewhere on our tour …

Ballymastocker Bay, Portsalon, co. Donegal – once voted the second most beautiful beach in the world by readers of the Observer Magazine!

The Glencar waterfall in Yates’ Country, co. Leitrim.

The southern flank of Benbulben, co. Sligo.

… and finally, The Giant’s Causeway, co. Antrim, best seen late in the day when most of the crowds have gone and the sun is low in the sky.

A limerick a week #54

A Galway a week #1

This week Management and I have travelled around the island of Ireland in Priscilla the campervan. We only had limited time and could travel no further south than Clara and Galway so Waterford, Limerick and Cork will have to await our next visit.

Talking of Limerick …

I drove across Ireland today
And a thought crossed my mind on the way,
That it seems quite perverse
For a Limerick’s verse
To end with the words ‘Galway Bay’!

A limerick a week #53

… and don’t rest your hand on the gear stick!

Just when I was lacking inspiration for this week’s ALAW, my Ice Cream Buddy took delivery of her new car and provided the necessary stimulus. Apparently, on her first attempt to park it she was left temporarily embarrassed when she needed to reverse and couldn’t get the car into gear, so …

The new car that Anna possessed
Went forwards quite well she confessed,
But she started to curse
When it wouldn’t reverse.
No wonder the clutch felt depressed!

“The reason we’re not moving backwards is that the car is in neutral. It’s me you’ve just put into reverse!”

A limerick a week #52

Happy birthday ALAW & “Goodbye” Sir Peter Hall

The posting of ALAW #52 means that it is now a year since the first one was published (on 24 September 2016 to be precise). I suppose that is a modest achievement insofar as I managed not to miss a week. Some I thought good, some were make-weights, and some I was really pleased with. I think I shall carry on with them!

This week’s ALAW doesn’t celebrate the anniversary, instead it arises amidst a bit of a conundrum.

My profile on the blog says that I value decency over achievement. I do, but what if someone who has been described variously as controversial, vituperative, deceitful, detested, brutal, disloyal and embittered, and whose private life was unstable to say the least, had achieved something that gives you lasting pleasure? Is that to be valued? Well, I take the easy way out. “Yes”, it is to be valued, but with much less respect for the person whose achievement it was compared to the personal respect for someone that had achieved less but whose fundamental decency shone through in all things!

Sir Peter Hall, who died this week, founded the Royal Shakespeare Company. His obituaries tell of that and his many other accomplishments, with a couple reflecting on some of the adjectives listed above, but it is the RSC that does it for me thanks to the late John Kremer, an English Literature teacher who instilled his enthusiasm for the Bard into a fourteen year old rugby-playing, science-orientated schoolboy (one who, years later, ‘out-Shakespeared’ his more arts-inclined, academic and intellectual brother, much to the surprise of the said brother’s family!).

So, with whom did Hall fall out (apart from walking-out on three wives as soon as he had found ‘another’)? Well, Laurence Olivier, Kenneth Tynan, Jonathan Miller, John Osborne, Bill Kenright and Harold Pinter to name six from the top drawer of British theatre of the 50s, 60s and 70s. Quite a collection really.

Hamlet without the iambic pentameter. Sir Peter would not approve!

This is the RSC’s eulogy for Hall (a quote taken from Cassius’ lines in Julius Caesar):

“Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world

Like a Colossus, and we petty men

Walk under his huge legs and peep about

To find ourselves dishonorable graves.”

which is a bit double-edged because Cassius’ words actually reflect his concern that Caesar had put himself above others and attained too much power (which, ironically, was a criticism of Hall made by his detractors).

And so to the limerick …

His theatrical nous and esprit
Gave birth to the famed RSC.
All the world was his stage
‘Till that terminal age
When, alas, he was then ‘not to be’!

A limerick a week #51

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!

So, Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston and its environs, Hurricane Irma, one of the strongest recorded and the longest lasting of that strength, has laid waste to a number of Caribbean islands (and Donald Trump’s mansion on Saint Martin) and is, in turn, being followed by Hurricanes Jose and Katia.

Meanwhile, as reported by LiveScience in early August, “NOAA recently predicted that the season would have between 14 and 19 named storms and between two and five major hurricanes. Already, the season has experienced six named hurricanes and 11 named storms. Hurricane season doesn’t typically reach its peak till September 10“.

While all of this is going on, Trump continues to reverse the previous US administration’s efforts to limit carbon emissions and forbids policy papers to refer to global warming or climate change.

Trump’s idiocy as viewed by the Graun’s Ben Jennings

So it comes to pass that the threat to Trump’s Caribbean mansion and Floridian properties and golf courses is down solely to ‘weather extremes’ or, as a recent Graun headline phrased it, “The Trump administration’s solution to climate change: ban the term“; something facilitated by its senior advisor to the US Department of Agriculture, Sam Clovis, a right-wing talk-show host with no background in science, who considers climate research to be junk science.

Back in the real world, a statement from the independent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reflects the reality of the past 30 years: “A changing climate leads to changes in the frequency, intensity, spatial extent, duration and timing of extreme weather and climate events, and can result in unprecedented extreme weather and climate events.”

For a gabshite that’s so prone to blunder
Even Donald must soon start to wonder
If he’s wholly deranged
To think climate’s not changed
Now his home by the sea’s rent asunder.

A limerick a week #50

KEEP CALM
and
CARRY NAPPIES

It’s not always easy to think of something sensible to write on a colleague’s You’re leaving to have a baby card. So I wrote this instead:

On Parenthood

I’m sure (s)he will turn out quite sweet
(Despite all the things (s)he’ll excrete!)
But in time mum and dad
Will be driven quite mad
Watching kiddy-cartoons on repeat!

Postscript: Some folk made cake for the pre-maternity leaving do; I made tiffin …

Crumbled digestive biscuit and chopped raisins and glace cherries

Butter, cocoa powder, golden syrup and caster sugar

A limerick a week #49

Lies, damned lies, and linguistics!

A friend recently asked whether I treat the word data as singular or plural; is it data is or data are? It seems an innocent enough question doesn’t it, but oh boy, does it not half stir passion in the hearts of traditionalists versus modernists in the world of pop-linguistics!

Indeed, having spent some time researching the differing views, it’s clear there are unresolvable differences between the extreme singularists and the extreme pluralists (although it does look as if the latter are increasingly in the minority).

I’m a pluralist, but not an extreme one since I long ago dispensed with my antagonism towards those of a singular disposition (unless they are deserving of a wind up!). After all, it is the quality and interpretation of data that ultimately matter:

My friend says she is inconsistent in her approach to data’s plurality, but, as with language in general, she feels that if it sounds okay then it is acceptable. I think that is a pragmatic and sensible view, and, if it sounds okay to one but not t’other then we have simply to ~~punch the other’s lights out~~ accept the plurality of perspectives. Even ones like this:

“Singular data annoys the same people that find split infinitives objectionable – pedants with no understanding of linguistics.”

… so that’s me told, but at least the UK Office of National Statistics is on my side:

“The word data is a plural noun so write “data are”. Datum is the singular“.

Amen to that, and …

To me, it’s singularly bizarre
That scoundrels linguistically spar
And deny the reality
Of data’s plurality
‘Cos data ain’t ‘is’ – they just ‘are’!

A limerick a week #48

Imbibo ergo sum!

I searched my wallet in vain for a few coppers this morning and surprised myself by finding a scribbled limerick that I penned ages ago and had quite simply forgotten about.

I can’t recall what inspired it; possibly some reflections on getting merry along the lines of Shakespeare’s let my liver rather heat with wine or perhaps I was thinking of a line from Bruce’s Philosophers Song, I drink therefore I am. Anyway, whatever it was, here’s the result:

Whether you rest in the Fields of Elysium
Or want for a grand mausoleum,
Live a life full of mirth
For your tenure on earth:
Carpe diem! Carpe noctem! Carpe vinum!

Postscript: The faux Latin phrase used in the title of this post is a modified version of the correct Latin: bibo ergo sum – I drink therefore I am. I just think imbibo sounds more ‘Latin’ than bibo!

I don’t need to tell you that it’s a play on René Descartes proclamation: cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) and, although its quotation in English is sometimes attributed to Oscar Wilde, the earliest known printed source of the phrase in Latin is found in A New Philosophy of Man’s Moral Nature as defined by The Ancient and Honorable Order of the Priests of Bacchus in Cornell University’s yearbook (The Cornellian) of 1886:

“Our dictum, for a philosophy without a dictum is not worth much, is—Bibo Ergo Sum. It will be urged, no doubt, that this is an adaptation from Descartes. We frankly admit that it is, but we maintain that while Cogito Ergo Sum” is good, Bibo Ergo Sum is inﬁnitely better”. [See the original citation and web link here www.barrypopik.com]

In fact, as Dr Google tells me, bibo ergo sum refers strictly to the biological need to drink to sustain life. If the phrase is meant to reflect one’s need for alcoholic refreshment, then the correct Latin would be poto ergo sum. It looks like Cornell’s bacchanalian students of the 1880s got their Latin wrong!