Behind the Easter bunny.

 I am currently working on what I refer to as my four last songs, the five books I want to get out of the way before hanging up my pen.

Of course, when I talk about stopping writing, my friends react like the Canterbury Pilgrims did, on their first day out:

Nonetheless, I forge ahead. Now about the Easter egg, one of the works is The Bruces’ Dictionary of Phrase & Fable: which is subtitled the origins of mythology and a mythology of origins.

From this, I have drawn the entry on the Rabbit:

A small and over-sexed mammal. They are rare in some areas as the female rabbits prefer to mate with roosters, which is the origin of the ‘Easter Bunny’ legend. To achieve this result, a rabbit must first associate with hens, to acquire a suitable smell, after which they move in with the rooster, but it does not last, for a fowl and his bunny are soon parted.

Another of the works being finalised is a selection of verse called Let's Fang the Fauna, and given the style, I considered using the pen-name Ogden Gnash, but I decided I wanted people to know who was doing it to them. Anyhow, here's a rabbit-related sample:

The finest perfumes in the land
Will make some noses runny;
The dinner that the hawk has planned
Is bad news for the bunny.

Many rabbits have the luck
To not become our meat
For almost every doe and buck
Has lucky rabbits’ feet.

The rabbit, served in various ways,
Has culinary merits.
Eat rabbits for a hundred days,
Then take a dose of ferrets.

By the way, there's an Easter egg buried here...

Happy Easter!

Oh yes, there will be more on this in the next entry. Here's a link.

The girl who hated poetry

From the case notes of Dr 'Harry' Truman, counsellor.

Eliza D came to see me in despair. "It's Henry," she said. "We're engaged to be married. but whenever I want to talk of love, he starts spouting poems..."

"Which poets?" I asked.

"I don't know," she said, "but he called me his 'bright star' the other day..."

"That's Keats," I said. "I think he loves you."

"Another time, he said 'My love is selfish. I cannot breathe without you' but he never touched me."

"Keats again," I told her. "I think you're going to be fine. Marry him!"

"I don't know," she said. "The other day, I decided to test him out by taking off my clothes, but when he should have been getting interested, he sat back and started babbling about unclasping my warmed jewels..."

"That's also Keats," I said. "The Eve of St Agnes, very romantic..."

"You might think it's romantic, but I think he's made of stone, and it's sending me round the twist!"

I stopped her there. "Eliza, old thing, if you can't stand the Keats, get out of the hitching."

Winter versicles

I've been posting these to Facebook: might as well give them a permanent home. No, I'm not a poet, but I used to know one.

Winter whinge

I'd rather have a splinter

Stuck in my big toe

Than live a day in winter

For winter will not go.

Winter growl

I wanted to say what I think about winters

To tell the whole story, by hook or by crook —

But then I was told that the nasty old printers

Won't let me use those words in their sort of book.

Winter grizzle

Every poet winter fears:

It freezes their poetic ears,

Poets moan in winter time

Of seasons when it's hard to rhyme.

They loathe the fierce and chilly blows

That frizzilate a poet's nose,

They rant and rail at polar winds

That mortify a poet's shinds.

Every poet hates the winter

Winter forces poets into

Ugg boots, jumpers, woolly socks,

Beanies for their tangled locks . . .

Every poet winter fears,

Then spring comes in and interferes!

All the poets love their springs

That rhyme with sings and swings and strings.

Last of the winter whine

I've had enough

Of winter's rough

And ready hold

On wind and cold.

I hate the storm

Just give me warm

Fresh air and fun

And summer sun.

Lord, what foods these morsels be

 Some of me pomes that I assembled for a writer's festival, and then didn't use.

Carpe fortuna

The finest perfumes in the land

Will make some noses runny;

The dinner that the hawk has planned

Is bad news for the bunny.

Fortune can be cool or hot,

When there's a chance, just grab it.

Your lucky rabbit's foot was not

So lucky for the rabbit.

Rabbit pie

The rabbit served in sundry ways

Has dietary merits.

Eat just that for thirty days,

Then take a dose of ferrets.

Currawong stew

That currawong, up in the sky

Will surely grace my pan,

For as it flies, I hear it cry

Quite clearly, "Coq-au-vin".

On writing science verse

Sorry for the silence, but I have been playing Writer's Twister, a game that involves simultaneously having my nose to the grindstone, my shoulder to the wheel, my back to the wall and my ear to the ground.  I m doing end-touches on two books and working on the Big New Project, of which I may say something later this month.

On the right, you can see a dead wombat, keeping its ear to the ground.

Like the wombat, I am aware that I am inexorably approaching my use-by date.  Unlike the wombat, there are no intimations of mortality, and indeed, all the signs are good, but  it is simple mathematics.

So I have decided to gather some of my better stuff from around the web and put it in a place that will last. These items will be linked by the tag treasure chest.

This one was written to help young people trying to write verse for the first time.  You can't teach  people how to write verse, but you can teach them a few trade tricks.  In writing verse, there is art, which involves inspiration, and there is craft, which involves work.  This was originally called Literary Lapses, and its URL was (and for now, still is) http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/scifun/literary.htm

Clerihews

George the Third
Ought never to have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder.

This is a clerihew. They are amusing "potted biographies" of people, and they were invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. They do not need to have a rhythm (a metre, if you are pedantic), but they must have a rhyme, and they must say something about the person involved who has to be historical.

Limericks have to have a perfect metre and astounding rhymes, here among the clerihews, the aim is to be historically correct in an odd sort of way, and to get a weird rhyme. Relevance rates highly in clerihews, but truth is not required. Here are two more examples:

Sir Christopher Wren
Said: "I am going to dine with some men.
If anybody calls,
Say I'm designing St Paul's."

* * * * * * *

Sir Humphry Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium

Now it is time for you to try your hand. Here are some names to get started on. Most should be accessible to most people, and some are drawn from areas other than science, so feel free to pick and choose. They will all be found, somewhere on the web.

Julius Caesar    
Mary Anning    
Bill Gates    
Robert Koch    
Catherine the Great
James Joyce    
Louis Pasteur    
Richard Nixon    
Burke and Wills    
Marie Curie
Sir Francis Crick    
Sir Isaac Newton    
Sir Joseph Banks    
The young Torricelli    
Annie Jump Cannon
Macfarlane Burnet    
Jakob Bernoulli    
Pablo Picasso    
Kiri Te Kanawa    
Claude van Damme
Gus Nossal    
Dame Nellie Melba    
Arnold Schwarzenegger    
Enrico Fermi    
William Gates

Limericks

Unlike clerihews, limericks do need metre.  They need to scan.

When you start out, you need some help, so here are some ideas, a few lines to work with. In five lines, the limerick writer mist introduce somebody, explain where they are or what they are doing (second line), explain what happened to the person or thing in line three, what the reaction was in line four, and finish the whole thing off in line five. Read a few sample limericks to get the feel of it first.

Limericks have a special form. There are five lines, with lines 1, 2 and 5 rhyming, and lines 3 and 4 are rhyming. Good limericks use different words at the end of each line. They also need the right rhythm, or metre:

d'DAH-dah d'DAH-dah d'DAH (dah)
d'DAH-dah d'DAH-dah d'DAH (dah)
   d'DAH-dah d'DAH
   d'DAH-dah d'DAH
d'DAH-dah d'DAH-dah d'DAH

Here is a prime example:

There WAS an old MAN from DarJEEling
Who TRAVelled from LONdon to EALing
   It SAID on the DOOR
   Please don't SPIT on the FLOOR
So he CAREfully SPAT on the CEILing

Notice how we can sneak in the odd syllable here and there.
Now you are ready to begin:

First lines:
There was a young man from Palm Beach (reach, beseech, teach, leech, leach, peach, preach)
There was a young man from Dee Why
There was a young fellow called Smith (myth, pith, kith, with (?))

Third lines
As the camels walked in,
As the rainforests fell
For the rest of his life
The Impressionist school
As his feet turned to lead
As the keyboard went green

It is actually better to have a good word play in mind for the fifth line, or a good idea about your third and fourth lines. Here are some lines 3 and 4:

Third and fourth lines
Though he feared they had germs,
He ate all the worms

His large flock of wrens
That he passed off as hens

They found the canary
Was rather too hairy

If the horse had a chance
It would normally dance

He said "Thanks very much,
But I cannot speak Dutch,

Fifth lines with word plays:
And made cider inside her inside. (an old one!!)
A Norse of a different colour

The people cried "Cafe au lait" ( or Olé)

I came up with this line after seeing a car with OLE in its number-plate -- so the moral is: always keep your eyes skinned, as limericks can come from anywhere!

A Spanish soprano called Fay
Always sang in a can belto way
In the Coffee Cantata
When she was a starter
The people cried Café Olé!

(That one basically came to me during a walk of 200 metres, after I passed the car, to when I reached the bus stop I was headed for. Then all I had to do was tweak it.)

Other ideas for limericks:
Dig into a book, and look through the index for some interesting words. Check out your library, and see if you can find a Rhyming Dictionary -- it lists words by their rhymes.

Talking about the weather...

The Dark Knight's Tale

Knight on bear mountain

The knight rode up, in squeaking armour,

Fury writ upon his brow

And strange to say, he rode a lama—

A thief had nicked his favourite cow.

A knight whose thing was riding cattle?

I hear you ask, in rising fear.

Why yes, he did, but not in battle

The horse he'd sold to pay for beer.

His helm was sable, like his rage

And black was all the gear he wore

Save on his arm an off-white gage

But black was the stubble on his jaw.

He slapped his shield upon the bar,

It bore his motto "Ebon semper"

And made it clear, both near and far

He had a really nasty temper.

He kicked the spittoon over twice

And gave the crowd a dreadful fright

And then they saw, quite in a trice,

It was a dark and stormy knight.

Please send this to your friends, and spoil their New Year.

Kids and lambs

I may have mentioned that I have just switched over to a new computer and Windows 8.1 — and this in the midst of checking page proofs of a new book, doing an index and stuff like that.  Life has been just a bit frantic.

Along the way, I found a file of lost verse, so for the first time since my Young Idiot's Guide to Opera, I will offer some rhymes.

I recall, one winter's day,
Our mothers sent us out to play
And we took off our hats and coats
To romp among the sheep and goats.

Our mothers had gone out to paint
The scene, but one fell in a faint.
The other mothers brought her round,
And that was when we children found

She thought it made us all look cheap
To frolic with the goats and sheep.
She wanted us, midst rocks and greenery
To blend in with the painters' scenery.

When faced with such artistic needs,
Obedient youngsters shape their deeds.
We children gave our solemn word
That we'd be scene but never herd.

Death and the Rhinestone Maidens

And now for something completely different: an instruction in opera appreciation in one act, 'twixt the Cab Sav and Cav and Pag in the Café Mozart.

Death and vengeance, that's the stuff

A statue of Hans Sachs in Nuremberg. He appears in
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (which is German for

The Sound of Mucus).

Demanded by the opera buff —
They don't care who does the deeds.
So long as someone sings and bleeds.

They're not content with minor strife,
They have to see some loss of life.
One more thing: the operatic
Kind of death must be dramatic:

Make it that, and they won't gripe
If cause of death is trash and tripe.
A thrown-down gun, a fallen dagger
Will do to make the player stagger,

Sing and fall down on the left
While all the cast sing they're bereft.
In Wagner's operas, deathly pallor
Pays the entry to Valhalla –

Opera deaths are rarely cool,
And most are prone to ridicule.

Casting call: young Irish hoofers who don't quite understand what
Lohengrin is all about. It isn't actually an opera about a contented

cow, at least not the Wagner one. TheTossini version was, but who
has heard ofTossini today?

In Cavalleria Rusticana,
The hero's stabbed by a green banana.

And after that, it's all downhill
There's lots of sillier ways to kill:
Pagliacci dies a death more mean,
Crushed by a falling aubergine;

And in some opera by Rossini,
The murder's done by ripe zucchini.
If you think that's a weak libretto,
You haven't yet seen Rigoletto.

So that's the story, mark my word:
In opera, death is quite absurd.
If you're a star then one thing's certain:
You'll bleed before the final curtain.

Now off we go, the opera's on
But don't ask why they're all called "Don"
We've had our meal and it was filling
So let's avoid an off-stage killing.

This is dedicated to all those people who haven't realised yet that an opera is just a musical in which the story (called a libretto after the great writer Antonio Libretto) is much more complicated.

Caution: this post may contain traces of nuts.
That said, all facts contained herein are of equal reliability.