It was such fun before to run some jokes,
We thought we'd try again with different strokes:
This time we'll vent
Two jokes we're sent
About two little good old lady folks.
.jpg)
It's a terrible thing when a pipe gets clogged up,
Whether a pipe in your heart or one lower's cocked up.
With either dysfunction,
You feel you need unction,
Something to clean your pipes out and get you back up.
I wasn't going to comment but I laughed out loud at the line; surely if a "miracle" occurs, the only winner can be Tom? [first comment on the post]That is, the joke is on me.
Moristotle's limerick of last night—
A growing-old writer of limerick,
Being choked by a joke about Heimlich,
Went into his mind,
Reached round from behind,
And conjured this meter-and-rhyme trick.
—announces its theme and its dominant rhyme word only at the end of the second line. This immediately throws the reader into some consternation, since the last word of the first line, "limerick," doesn't rhyme with "Heimlich."
Or does it? The final line refers, self-referentially, to the limerick's "meter-and-rhyme trick" and offers the clue to add a hyphen to "limerick" so as to subtract a metrical beat and render the first line ending "lime-rick."
I've looked at the referenced blog and learned that the joke, rather like a limerick, rests on a pun on the Heimlich maneuver, which is a method of helping a choking victim to expel whatever is lodged in his or her throat by grasping the person around the chest from behind, locking hands at the solar plexus, and pulling back hard to force air up the victim's esophagus. In the joke, the victim expels the lodged bite of her sandwich when she is shocked by a redneck's yanking down her drawers and administering a quick "hind lick."
And another of the blog's readers, one Steve G, comments that a "hind kick" would also suffice. Therein seems to lie the inception of Moristotle's limerick, for in a comment after Mr. G's, Moristotle announces that he "feels a limerick coming on." And in his first version of the limerick, his third through final lines refer explicitly to that situation:
There was an old writer of limerick
Who, inspired by a joke about Heimlich,
Here told his intent
Then came back content
To display his meter-and-rhyme trick.
But he obviously wasn't content, for (as Serena herself acknowledges), his revision is "even better."
How is it better? It's better by adding a whole second layer of self-referentiality: the "lime-rick" itself as a Heimlich maneuver (heralded, in fact, by the limerick's title). The "growing-old writer" is now metaphorically choking on the joke (not just "inspired" by it).And now he turns out to be the author of the limerick: he "conjured this meter-and-rhyme trick." But this limerick was written by Moristotle, who is, we see, the "growing old writer," the one who found himself "choking" on the joke in Serena's blog and wrote the limerick by way of performing a metaphorical Heimlich maneuver upon himself (by "going into his mind and reaching around from behind").
Serena gets the last words: "Yay, Mori"!
George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld think you’re stupid. Yes, they do.And in today's New York Times ("Throw the Truthiness Bums Out"), Frank Rich writes:
They think they can take a mangled quip2 about President Bush and Iraq by John Kerry – a man who is not even running for office but who, unlike Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, never ran away from combat service – and get you to vote against all Democrats in this election.
Every time you hear Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney lash out against Mr. Kerry, I hope you will say to yourself, “They must think I’m stupid.” Because they surely do.
They think that they can get you to overlook all of the Bush team’s real and deadly insults to the U.S. military over the past six years by hyping and exaggerating Mr. Kerry’s mangled gibe at the president.
...if the Bush team can behave with the level of deadly incompetence it has exhibited in Iraq – and then get away with it by holding on to the House and the Senate – it means our country has become a banana republic.
While lying politicians and hyperbolic negative TV campaign ads are American staples, the artificial realities created this year are on a scale worthy of Disney, if not Stalin. In the campaign’s final stretch, Congress and President Bush passed with great fanfare a new law to erect a 700-mile border fence to keep out rampaging Mexican immigrants, but guaranteed no money to actually build it. Rush Limbaugh tried to persuade his devoted audience that Michael J. Fox had exaggerated his Parkinson’s symptoms in an ad for candidates who support stem-cell research purely as an act.As I said, American politics is the cheapest entertainment going, but it's not pretty or funny or fun3.
In a class by itself is the president’s down-to-the-wire effort to brand his party as the defender of “traditional” marriage even as the same-sex scandals of conservative leaders on and off Capitol Hill make “La Cage aux Folles” look like “The Sound of Music.” Just in recent days, the Rev. Ted Haggard, a favored Bush spiritual adviser and visitor to the Oval Office (if not the Lincoln Bedroom), resigned as leader of the National Association of Evangelicals after accusations that he patronized a male prostitute, and the Talking Points Memo blog broke the story of the Republican Party taking money from a gay-porn distributor whose stars include active-duty soldiers. (A film version of Mrs. Cheney’s "Sisters," alas, still awaits. [Sisters is an out-of-print lesbian sex novel by the wife of "vice president" Dick Cheenie.])
