Research reveals the average child:

Farts louder than it must,
Betrays parental trust,
Tilts too soon to lust,
Avoids advice like rust,
Upends you back to dust
Convinced it all was just.

Gripple Love

A glimpse of nipple and I’m in the gripple love. ;o )

I like this because it’s funny and because there’s something about cleavage and nipples that every time I’m drawn into their orbit it’s as if I had never been there before.

No Longer Catholic

I am no longer a member of the Roman Catholic Church. I read my way in via Augustine and Aquinas but more recently read my way out.

Although I no longer regard the Magisterium as a reliable (or even consistent) teacher, I retain an academic interest in Catholic theology, especially the thought of the fifth-century Gallic monk Vincent of Lerins.

Who cares? Perhaps no one, but given that matters Catholic sometimes come up hereabouts, and given that I was known to be Catholic, it should be noted that I no longer am.

A proof I'm not a prophet

A proof I’m not a prophet
Is thus revealed to me:
Each noon I wash my hands for lunch
Then feel the urge to pee.

My Five Factors

I'm reading a book about personality and took a test measuring the 'five factors' psychologists see as most stable across a person's lifetime.

Extraversion: LOW (--my lowest overall score)
Neuroticism: HIGH
Conscientiousness: Medium
Agreeableness: LOW
Openness: HIGH (---my highest overall score)

I thought I was more agreeable than that. Oh, well.

Pen me a naughty note today

Pen me a naughty note today
To make me smile and write right back
It’s neither love nor lust but that sweet thing
For which we both possess the knack.

The “Herd” Follies

I play Herd-A-Word at Facebook. The longest words I’ve yet “herded” together have ten letters. (One such word is “threesomes” and another is “discussion.” You might wish to discuss fancied threesomes with me, though I somehow doubt you will.) Now I’m obsessed with long words, looking for them everywhere, wanting to have as many as possible in mind while playing. Naturally, I have turned some of them into silly rhymes.

My inspiration for long rhymes is Lorenz Hart, who wrote many great lyrics for tunes played by Richard Rodgers.

In “My Funny Valentine” he set the gold standard with,
“Your looks are laughable,
Unphotographable—
But you’re my favorite work of art.”

I’m not at that level, but I’m sure he wrote a lot of lesser lines on the way to that one.

A ‘Bama babe core-pone-ious
Got high and turned felonious;
Her lawyer proved euphonious—
They moved to Methadonius.

(---The inspiration for all that was “Methadonia,” a fabled land of my own invention where recovering heroin addicts live in tract houses and watch “The View.” It cracked me up.)


Senator Nefarious
Prefers the fling precarious--
The sluts he bring upstairious
Must sing like a Stradivarius. (<<<<I want to get the “a” out of that line but haven’t figured out how. Suggestions?)

(This all started with “multivarious,” which isn’t even in the final version. Soon as I said it, I thought, “hey, multi *means* various, so…)

Mystical Dee calls home Tennessee
Despite its ennui, speaking re-
Incarnationistically.

Reincarnationistically! If your tongue doesn’t love working that word, you’re a lost linguistic cause! Key: you have to work up to the IS (pronounced ISS, no IZ, of course)
I originally used “mystically” and “statistically” along with it, but needed a character, so went with “Mystical Dee. At first, it was Mystical Lee, but hearers couldn’t distinguish that from mystically. That’s the songwriter in me. By the way, I’m playing my guitar daily and doing technical exercises that have really helped my playing. My next batch of songs---on CD no less, but probably not this year, as I won’t have the gear I need that soon—will kick ass “guitaristically” and also have some cool lyrics. The bit about the “’Bama babe corn-pone-ious” may wind up in a song. You heard it here first!)

Reincarnationistically was the longest word I could conjure yesterday. I doubt that it is in the “Herd-A-Word” dictionary, and I wouldn’t argue for its inclusion on linguistic grounds, but it’s been a boon to my life already. Can you tell I come from poor people? My toys are words—free!

Here’s another funny thing. This one is true. I was in the car with my mom the other night and she was hesitating to turn at an intersection though she had time, provided she *went* already. I barked, “Go!” She did, though she berated me for “backseat driving.”
This went on for about a mile. Then:

Mom: I’ve been driving a lot longer than you have.
Mark: But you haven’t gone near as far—you drive too slow.

It made her madder that I cracked up at that. She was still mad about me telling her to go but I was already onto, “That is funny.”
Mom: Not to me, it isn’t.
Mark. It’s funny. I’ve got to write that down. Use it somewhere.
Mom: That’s just what the world needs, someone writing songs on the highway.
Mark. Hey, you’re the one driving. If you can call that driving….

The moderator jumbles

[I moderate a Tribe for like minds who not only love to solve the daily newspaper “Jumble” but who go further and use the words to create phrases, sentences, fictional scenes, and other flavors of delight.]

This set of Jumbles is my own creation. The following sentence uses them to explain my recent absence.

DONETN
TUSCRHCE
DRTSANEI
DNEBRDIED

[Did you unscramble the words?]

Because of a strained Achilles tendon, I was bedridden for days, wearing the back half of a used cast (-how cool is that?), but can now get around on crutches.

What would you say?

Suppose you correspond with someone you cannot visit. A friendship develops and the conversation branches out in many directions—politics, literature, music, childhood, marriage, whatever—ending up for today in a consideration of religion / spirituality / ethics / morality, the gamut. Your faithful correspondent—whom you respect and feel comfortable with, and who has much more free time than you do—writes to you, “Tell me three things to read that will give me the best possible sense of *your* approach to such questions.”

What would you say? What three works would you name?

If the issue were English poetry, my answers today would be: Hamlet, Paradise Lost, and The Hunting of the Snark.

But that’s not the issue. The issue today is what three works give someone else (-and someone I like, someone I respect, who is asking in an attempt to get to know me better, not to raise a ruckus of any kind) the best sense of *my* approach to religious / spiritual / moral / ethical questions.

I would say the Nichomachean Ethics of Aristotle, the Bible, and the great Summa of Aquinas. I think anyone familiar with those three works—whatever he thought of them—would have a good sense of how I’ve come to think about such matters.

What three books would you list?

If you’re not interested in religion or in spirituality but only in ethics and morality, just list three about that.

I ask out of simple curiosity. I’m not angling for an argument of any sort here. I want to see which titles come up the most often, and which ones are new to me!

[Cross-posted in Atheists, Christian Talk, Christianity Unplugged, Politics, and The Lion’s Den.]

"Jumbled" Poet

A nightingale's song stirred in the poet memories of his agile youth, so he leapt over the brook, then leapt back, and leapt over a third time, landing queasy. His stomach soon settled in an oblong box.


Made from the four "Jumble" words from one recent day: brook, agile, oblong, and queasy.
Your turn!
If you like such play, join the Jumble Bums tribe! :o)