Smiley faces here,
float across my sight. Sincere?
My eyes don’t see clear.
[Editor’s note: a bit of silliness apropos of nothing in particular, other than sometimes I think “emoticons” are overused and somehow this rhyming haiku floated across my mind. Of course, real smiley faces are at times overused as well, creating a sense, at least in my mind, of a bleary reality.]
Filed under haiku, poetry by author, Workshop weekend
In our continuing quest to revisit a classic, or even a curiosity from the past and see how relevant it is, we continue with The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce. Originally published in newspaper installments from 1881 until 1906. You might be surprised how current many of the entries are.
For example, here is a definition for Abdomen. The Old definition is Bierce’s. The New definition is mine or somebody else contemporary. From time to time, just as it was originally published, we will come back to The Devil’s Dictionary, for a look at it then and how it applies today. Click on Devil’s Dictionary in the tags below to bring up the other entries.
OLD DEFINITION
Abdomen, n. The temple of the god Stomach, in whose worship, with sacrificial rights, all true men engage. From women this ancient faith commands but a stammering assent. They sometimes minister at the altar in a half-hearted and ineffective way, but true reverence for the one deity that men really adore the know not. If woman had a free hand in the world’s marketing, the race would become graminivorous.
NEW DEFINITION
In this case, it’s more of an augmentation of the original definition than revision of the original.
Augmentation 1:
Beer Belly, n. The temple of the god Stomach after a regular and continual ingesting of liquid graminivorous forms. These graminivorous forms include ale, pale ale, stout, larger, and lite forms of these and other similar liquids.
Augmentation 2:
Six-Pack Abs, n. The flip side (so to say) of the beer belly in which attempts are made to make the temple appear like the packaging of the liquid graminivorous content and not the liquid graminivorous contents themselves.
[Editor’s note: In case you are wondering, graminivorous is a word and it is a word that Bierce used in his definition. I did not add it to show off. It means: feeding or subsisting on grass.]
Filed under Ambrose Bierce, definitions, Devil's Dictionary, dictionary
Are newspapers sending us subliminal messages? Have you checked yours, today?
Filed under newspaper humor
There once was a woman from Oak Ridge
who used sexual “knottiness” as a bridge.
She’d tie down her sailor;
have him now and have him latter.
And she’d (k)not keep it quiet, (k)not a smidge.
Filed under Knottiness, limerick, poem, poetry by author
Q. Where does a writer find interesting characters at the breakfast table?
A. In a cereal novel.
Just make sure it is a whole grain cereal, so you get well-rounded interesting characters.
Filed under Monday morning writing joke, writing humor
I was somewhen gliding over Virtuosity when I woke up from my copy/paste coma. I was ten thousand bar stools above pay dirt, but the drinks had stopped coming long before the last sequence of route rot procedures was done. I tried to perk up with three quick and awful coffees and a Hershey’s kiss left over from my last intrusion into the real world, but it wasn’t helping much. The coffee was a tannic acid man’s dream, bitter and beyond redemption no matter how I tried to doll it up. And the kiss, well, I am a sucker for chocolate, even old chocolate, but this kiss had seen its last sweet pucker long ago, maybe even in a candy gallery far far away.
She walked into my room the way all sycophants do these days – with an air of predestination. She sat down in the old overstuffed chair next to the old overstuffed couch I was crouched on. She placed her legs in just such a position that a trigonometry professor would’ve been had pressed to explain, and it was all I could do to keep my eyes from triangulating on them. They were her best feature, but the rest of her was at least suborbital as well. She dressed in clothes with sharp angles, some of which would probably frighten an armadillo. Her lips were as full and shiny as a waxing moon and her hair gleamed as if it were a source of light all its own. In short, she was as textured as the night, and just as dangerous.
She dragged out a smoke and was about to light it.
“Not in here.” My head was a series of dots and dashes in binary world, and lighting up wasn’t going to help.
She pouted and then put them away. “The boss sent me.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
She looked perplexed, lost in the great heartland of non-sequitors, a trollop with a message trying to make connections with polarized plugs in a non-polarized world.
“The boss says—”
“I know what the boss says. He says it every time he sends one of you floozies down my rat hole with a message, and every time he promises me my freedom and every time he finds a way to wriggle out of following through. Tell Lucy, Charlie ain’t kickin’ at the ball no more.”
She looked even more nonplussed. I could just imagine one big minus sign stretched above her pretty little head, like a halo dancing black hole mambo with an event horizon. One day enough neurons might come burrowing out, Steven Hawking style, to make a moment of enlightenment, but age and propriety would keep me from waiting that long. After all, it’s not polite to stare indefinitely at a glacier, no matter how easy on the eyes.
[Editor’s note: not sure what to do with this. If I should pursue it or let it go. if you have read it, any thoughts or comments? is this an interesting beginning? Thank you for stopping by.]
Filed under story, Sunday story, Virtuosity, Workshop weekend, writing
There once was a tree in my yard
that came down in a wind rather hard.
I sawed on it yesterday;
it’s still there today.
It’s tougher than a month old canard.
The hackberry where it split and most of it bowed to the ground to the applause of thunder and wind and rain.
Filed under limerick, poetry by author, Workshop weekend
In the process of making a small tree. Still much to do. Thankful for a neighbor and smart people who came to help.
There is an old joke.
How do you make a small tree?
Start with a large one.
[Editor’s note: I know, originally, the joke was: how do you make a small fortune? Start with a large one. But fortune would be eight syllables instead of seven and ruin the attempted humorous haiku. Plus, I’ll be more like to have a large tree to start with than a large fortune. I don’t hold much prospect that I’ll have a small fortune, either. As for a small tree, well, that may still take me a little while. You don’t know how much brush one full-grown tree can create until you have to clean up after one.]
Filed under Found story, Photo by author, poetry by author, Thunder, Workshop weekend
Freeform Friday: “The Kindest Cut”
Nude man armed with chain saw arrested in East Knox County
Source: http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2012/jul/12/nude-man-armed-with-chain-saw-arrested-in-east/
Below is a rewritten summation of the story.
KNOXVILLE, TN — On Wednesday, July 11, 2012, 46-year-old man, L.M.S. of Knox County was arrested because he was nude while using a chain saw to cut up a large tree that had toppled in his yard. Apparently, though appearances can be deceiving, this was not the first time he had subjected his neighbors to an au natural display of himself, though it may have been the first time he had done so with a chain saw.
He had occasionally been appearing in the nude for over a decade in this neighborhood in Knox County, but this time a neighbor complained about a public display of nudity by a nearly bald man obviously weighing more than the 210 lbs. listed on his driver’s license.
When Knox County Sheriff’s Deputy S.R. arrived at the scene, he later wrote in his report: “I saw arrestee standing behind the tree in his yard. When arrestee saw me, he ran inside his residence. Arrestee had no clothes on and was clearly visible from the complainant’s residence and the surrounding homes.”
L.M.S. was arrested, charged with indecent exposure, and was freed from the Knox County Sheriff’s Detention Facility after posting a $750 bond.
The neighbor who called in the complaint was reported to have said L.M.S.’s display of himself in the buff was “so common,” it had become a neighborhood joke.
A few editorial thoughts about this incident:
Maybe he was sleep chain sawing and didn’t realize it. You know, sawing some logs, so to say.
Or maybe he was caught up in the fervor of the upcoming Summer Olympics in London, possibly even wanting nude chain saw tree cutting to be a trial sport. Of course, it would be a little more difficult to identify which country he (or other participants) might be representing. He would be, however, competing in the style of the original Greek Olympics in which the participants did conduct their events in the nude. (I guess that was to make sure nobody was hiding any secret elixirs from the nearby temple at Delphi. Had to worry about doping even then.)
I say relocate him to Alaska, have him and others like him (After all, I’m sure he’s not alone.) chain saw trees in winter in the nude, and call the show, “Nude Loggers of the North: the chain, the pain, the complain.” Maybe ESPN and the Weather Channel could co-sponsor it.
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Filed under Freeform Friday, my hometown, Random Access Thoughts
Tagged as chain saw, commentary, humor, Knox County, Knoxville, nudity, satire