Tag: Limericks

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!

A limerick a week #47

A mandate for the pub

The Graun reports that the east London LGBT community of Tower Hamlets has lost seven of its ten gay bars to residential development in recent years. So, after a spirited campaign by local activists, the planning authority made it a condition for the redevelopment of one such venue, The Joiners Arms, to include a pub that remained focused on the LGBT community.

The report added that to make sure this is achieved in more than name only, the Mayor of London’s office “will send an inspector to make sure it is gay enough”.

I have to admit to chuckling at that so here’s my take on it:

I’m here as the Council Surveyor,
And I’ve popped by just now to convey a
Planning consent
With legal intent
That will make your new bar a bit gayer!

Meanwhile, I have no idea how the planners intend to quantify ‘gayness’. The mind boggles …

Postscript:

… hot off the press …

It seems that the developer’s plans are on hold. As reported in today’s Graun:

Council rejects redevelopment proposals for LGBT venue Joiners Arms

Campaigners hail decision as victory after plan is turned down on grounds that it does not go far enough to ensure viability of replacement ‘queer space’

Good for them!

#StraightAlly

A limerick a week #45

I’m Kirk Douglas!

Something went awry with my budget at work last week. A lump of money that should have been allocated to my group hadn’t been and, due to a change in the budgeting process this year, we can’t track where the specific error arose. It could have been my fault, the fault of other group leaders in the team or the fault of my boss.

Any error would have been inadvertent, and I can’t conceive how any of the above could have made it. So kudos to my boss who reported the problem and accepted blame as the budget responsibility was hers. Very noble. Too noble in fact, so I also emailed the high and mighty to fully explain the issue and take responsibility because I had not checked my entries after others had amended the master worksheet. My boss emailed back immediately:

“I’m Spartacus!”

… which made me laugh and inspired the following:

A mistake in the budget quite startled us
But the esprit de corps was just marvellous
For we both took the blame
For the budgetary shame
By yelling out loud that “I’m Spartacus!”

A limerick a week #44

Knock, knock!
Who’s there?
Dr …

Well, well, well! Hasn’t the decision to cast a woman as the latest incarnation of Doctor Who rattled the sullen cages of a few social media fogeys! Of course, it’s not the first occasion that a Time Lord has regenerated as a Time Lady …

Dalek: You are a Time Lord?
Missy: Time ‘Lady’, thank you. Some of us can afford the upgrade.

As I recall, ‘Missy as Master’ rattled cages too, but Michelle Gomez’s character has since been the highlight of every episode that she’s appeared in! That makes it even more ridiculous for the fictional concept of a bi-cardiac regenerative male anthropoid (in a time-travelling police box somehow bigger inside than out) to be considered rational to some folk who then throw their toys out of the Tardis because they consider the female equivalent to be irrational.

Such griping sounds like sanctimonious bollocks to me, so, given the Tardis has finally arrived in the 21st century …

Reactionary ‘broflakes’ apart
The rest of us now can take heart
That the antediluvian
World of the Whovian
Has a Doctor Who’s state of the art!

Postscript: I was going to tell you a time-travel joke, but you didn’t get it.

A limerick a week #43

Fade to black …

Yet another limerick-as-eulogy. That’s three in fairly quick succession; a bit worrying!

Anyway, for UK moviegoers during the 70s, 80s and 90s there was really only one credible film critic on TV. That was, of course, the recently deceased Barry Norman who solo presented the BBC’s review show from its inception as Film 72 through to his end credit on Film 98. (Clapperboard, hosted by Chris Kelly and aimed at children, was not a direct challenger to the primacy of Bazza’s show).

Norman was always fair in his reviews even if he personally disliked the actor whose film he was discussing, but I’m not so sure he was as well-balanced when he was utterly captivated by one. There was a fair number of the former with whom he went toe to toe, stars such as Charlton Heston, Robert De Niro, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis; at least one of whom he walked out on after being made to wait interminably (Madonna); and another, an inebriated John Wayne, who apparently called him a “goddamn pinko liberal f****t” for laughing aloud at him during an interview in which Wayne called for the US to consider bombing Russia as a reaction to the Vietnam war.

In truth Norman rarely appeared starstruck, although he did have a bit of a love-in with Tom Cruise and was wholly beguiled by Michelle Pfeiffer. I can still recall his reaction to her flirtations during a Film 92 Special and it’s hard to believe his protestations that he didn’t really have a crush on her (his wife appeared not to believe him either). It was just so funny to watch him almost drool as he interviewed her.

Michelle sings “Makin’ whoopee”, Bazza thinks “If only …”

And so to his tag line. Although his doppelgänger on the satirical puppet show Spitting Image often referenced his supposed catchphrase “… and why not?“, Norman himself credited the impressionist Rory Bremner with conceiving it and, although it was not his creation, and something of a myth that he regularly used it, he did later borrow it as the title of his autobiography.

Anyway, both Michelle P and his catchphrase inspired this week’s limerick:

Michelle made you blush on the spot
When it seemed that you’d quite lost the plot.
‘Twas not hard to decipher
Your thoughts on Ms Pfeiffer,
But as you said once yourself: “And why not!”

 

A limerick a week #42

Of Mice and Men

Apparently, the mice used in drug trials are usually all males despite a “prevelance of sexual dimorphism in mammalian phenotypic traits”. There may be good reasons for such a gender imbalance in such trials, but there probably isn’t:

There’s a sexist researcher called Billy
Whose trials are really quite silly.
For his method entails
That he uses just males
‘Cos the girls, it appears, lack a willy!

She cut of your WHAT with a carving knife?

Postscript: This limerick was published in July 2017 as a light-hearted contribution to an altogether-more-serious discussion that was taking place in a Yammer group, to which I belonged, on women in science and engineering.

Since then, a book written by Caroline Criado-Perez has illuminated the issue with great clarity: Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men (Chatto & Windus, March 2019, ISBN: 9781784741723).

A limerick a week #41

What a shower!

Such is their meretricious nature that Theresa May and her conservative party are, as Terry Thomas would have said, “A shower. An absolute shower!”

Of the £1 billion recently promised by May to Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party to prop up her minority government, £910 million is to be spent over the next two years. Thereafter, their agreement will be reviewed with the likelihood of additional cash demands from the DUP.

In other words, over the next two years the votes of each DUP member of parliament will cost us £91 million. That is £8.75 million a week that could otherwise have been spent on the NHS or supporting the vulnerable within society across the UK as a whole. But of course, as Theresa May told our nurses (and as parroted by the Home Secretary Amber Rudd on welfare payments for the disabled) there is no magic money-tree for them, only, it seems, for a bunch of regressive, misogynistic, homophobic creationists with a dodgy history of supporting terrorists. As Bonaparte said: “En politique, une absurdité n’est pas un obstacle”.

So, not much humour in this week’s limerick …

There isn’t a magic money-tree,
For nurses or the likes of you and me,
But to stay in power
That tawdry shower
Of Tories found one for the DUP.

Postscript: this is not entirely true, of course. It neglects the magic money-tree available since 2009 for bankers (aka quantitative easing) that was used to get them off the hook for the financial meltdown that they caused while the dispossessed pay the price. Theresa May’s much vaunted Christian faith seems distinctly Old Testament: The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender. Proverbs 22:7.

Plus ça change …

A limerick a week #40

So much for Lincoln 2 …

So, Daniel Day-Lewis is about to retire. The man with three ‘Best Actor’ Oscars has decided that enough is enough. A shame really ‘cos he’s far from washed-up, but it does tempt me to list the actors of whom I’d like to see less (much less).

How about: Sylvester Stallone, Vin Diesel, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mel Gibson, John-Claude Van Damme, Nicolas Cage (absolutely Nicolas Cage!), Steven Seagal, Demi Moore, Charlie Sheen, Orlando Bloom and, sadly given their recent output, Johnny Depp and Robert de Niro.

Anyway, this is about Day-Lewis, so here goes:

The actor that made ‘My Left Foot’ is
Retiring (but not out of hubris).
So to go with his fame
He’ll now have a new name.
It’s Daniel “I’ll-Call-it-a-Day” Lewis.

Acknowledgement:

Now why didn’t I think of that!

 

A limerick a week #39

Blooming marvellous!

When your better half decides to grow a couple of very tall sunflowers and wonders why they are still miniscule several weeks later …

Our sunflowers will soon blossom forth
But I don’t think they’re going to morph
From exceedingly small
To seven feet tall
‘Cos the label that’s on them says ‘Dwarf’!

I told her that I’d never make fun of her sunflowers … I wouldn’t stoop so low 😎

A limerick a week #38

Last year I wrote:

I wonder if there is a collective noun for a spate of deaths of the performers that comprised the theatrical and musical milieu of a chap’s childhood and teenage years. Of course it’s no surprise that a clutch of the memorable stars of one’s youth begins to fall off their perch when youth itself progresses to middle-age or beyond, but it does become a bit alarming when so many seem to expire in relatively quick succession.

Admittedly 2016 was a year in which quite a number fell off their perches, but saying “ta ra” to John Noakes, for whom the bell has just tolled at the age of 83, really does comprise an end-of-era farewell. For my generation Noakes spanned the televisual experience of TV’s golden years; years that just happened to coincide with our primary and secondary school days.

He was the centrepiece of Blue Peter’s classic line-up: Singleton, Purves, Judd and Noakes.

He was the bloke that was brought in after Christopher Trace was compelled to leave the show due to an extra-marital fling and his divorce (we youngsters couldn’t be exposed to such nefarious happenings).

He was the bloke that was bruised and battered when the bobsleigh he was in crashed when descending the Cresta Run.

He was the bloke that had his foot ‘trod on’ by a baby elephant that also peed on the studio floor (except he later confessed to making up the bit about having his foot stood on).

He was the bloke that jumped out of a plane five miles up with the RAF Falcons and entered the Guinness Book of Records as the first civilian to jump from that height (the British Parachute Association records that he made 27 jumps in 5 years, including a trip to France with 3 relative work jumps, 18 freefalls, 3 water jumps from a helicopter into Poole Harbour, 7 C130 jumps, two 4 ways and his record breaking jump with oxygen from 25,000 feet).

He was the bloke that climbed a ladder up Nelson’s column without any safety lines or harness; an endeavour that seemed anodyne to a youngster watching TV back then, but is gobsmackingly courageous and death-defying to the adult watching the YouTube footage of it today.

He was the bloke that spoke with the same sort of north-of-England accent as me at a time when TV presenters all spoke with received pronunciation.

Most of all, he was the bloke that you watched Blue Peter for, the class jester. What a guy!

The Clown Prince of north country blokes
His passing most surely evokes
A nostalgic air
And quiet despair
That we’ll never again ‘Go With Noakes’.