2012/08/10

Second Person Mingular

For your reference:

Collectionofcritters
Company of parrots
Crash of rhinoceroses
Culture of bacteria
Dropping of pigeons
Implausibility of gnus
Intrigue of kittens
Murder of crows
Parliament of owls
Pride of lions
School of fish
Storytelling of ravens





'Send me to a new school!' wailed the daughter trout;
'Not a chance!' said her pa, 'Can't simply saunter out
We've been here too long; our family records indicate
Every link in our lineage swam with this syndicate.'
'What school, blessed parent, are you talking about?'
'Why, the throng we occupy day in and day out!'
Amused viewer, you know what the littler fish meant,
Alluding as she was to her academic establishment.
The collective noun, in our race a stock curse,
Is amongst our fellow evolvers only worse.
Yet dare you blame earth's lovesome creatures
For their short supply of English teachers?
A lone specimen of beast is shrewd and winning;
Cast him with his peers and his sanity's a-spinning.
You don't concur? You remonstrate?
Allow me then to d_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 

Take crows. You often catch one flying
Between branch and antenna trying
To avert his pals, for nothing's absurder
Than knowing it takes two to murder.
Airplanes give me bad food and a dry nose
Yet that’s not why I shan't fly with rhinos,
For one per flight is already rash --
Haul more up and you've got me a crash.
Now how would you react, sir, if I state
You lack culture in private?
Yet such sociological delirium
Is the fate of the bacterium.
(a) Since three's a crowd and two company,
      Pair up your parrots, but don't clump any.
(b) Dissolve a parliament only if you're prepared
      To have an owl-pecked epidermis repaired.
(c) Never hurt a lion's pride;
      A few have, trying, died.

Haven't your doubts on the subject diminished?
Then don't leave yet, our business is unfinished.

You would presume it an elementary tact
To keep society out one's alimentary tract,
But pigeons of the same feather
Create a giant dropping together.
Mischief, though, is not their intent;
No, sir, that the lab mice invent.
Invention, ah, it fetches to mind the other crow,
The darker-plumed child of E. Allan Poe:  
The heart of the raven must be brimming with myth
For it's storytelling time always when he's with kith.
Yarns of the greatest intrigue would he tell,
Albeit on kittens does he hardly dwell.
[When, however, he slideth into truth-saying mode,
 He walketh the righteous, unsensationalist road;
An impossibility is banned off raven news.
(An implausibility is a band of ravin' gnus.)]

These coincidences, sir, cannot be random,
Hence quod erat demonstrandum.
A passenger on the Ark who had had his way
Resents it hard when he becomes a they.


2012/08/05

Limerick #15: The Plight of the Classingtons

There was a young man from Limerick

Whose name was Classington Jim Eric;


For Mr and Mrs Classington, his rhyme-loving parents, when they brought Eric into our world sought for him a suitable middle name, and noticed their town's connection to humoury verse,


And as even all their love for the lyrical had never aided them to summon a word that for every syllable rhymed with their city's name [can you 
find one? Give it a shot], they concocted a brainchild: they settled on 'Jim' and advertised the toddler's name in reverse.

So the coincidence isn't quite chimeric.

Lofty Intentions


The known number of differences between a peak and an acme
is one.
It is akin to the dissimilarity between the turns of phrase 'Fire me' and 'Sack me' --
there's none.
The one is a word uttered by habitual hikers who in their devotion to scale altitude
are staunch,
The other used by unfit non-climbers who put on constant display, beside verbal aptitude,
their paunch.
This humble bard has authored a tune for the crooning benefit of the former crop;
hum it:
'Should you wonder how high, measure for every uphill step you take the vertical distance gained, have a sequence of these numbers jotted down and then when you reach the top,
summit.'



(As written in my mobile drafts on a solo trek up Spencer Butte.)