If Wishing Made It So

Describe the perfect sandwich.

Will Smith.Me.BradPitt.

What?  It could happen…

Poetry Can Be Fun…Honest

Image via Wikipedia

Today is National Poetry Day.  I was going to bring you some fun and interesting facts about poetry, but you know what?  There aren’t any.  Not on the internet, anyway.  Poetry is dull.

By the way, remember to check out my poetry blog, I’m Not A Verse.

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I did find a site called Poetry Fountain.  Under the heading ‘Interesting Facts’ it has these interesting facts:

• Starfish have no Brains.  I wonder if they write poetry?
• There is a species of ants that is found only in buildings in Washington, D.C.  It’s killing me not to make a joke about politicians here.
• The scientific name of a Boa Constrictor is Boa Constrictor.  Scientists don’t use metaphors?
• Diamonds are the hardest natural substance on earth.  Apart from me on National Share Your Maltesers Day.
• If you turn a shark on its back, it will fall asleep.  It must have been reading Wordsworth’s & Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads.  The same thing happens to me.
• Shakespeare was born and died on the same day (only many years apart).  Well, duh!  Whoever wrote that qualifying remark either thinks we’re all stupid or is an infant prodigy.  And it is only suspected that Shakespeare was born on that day: births were not recorded back then; only baptisms.  Glad I got that off my chest.
• In one day more money is printed for Monopoly then for the US.  If ever there was a glorious typo, this is it.
• Mrs.Roosevelt was the only first lady who carried a loaded revolver with her.  To stop Mr Roosevelt from reading Lyrical Ballads to her, I’m guessing.
• Democratic Congressmen are almost twice as likely as Republican congressmen to be offered a bribe.  And the very next fact is:
• Franklin Roosevelt was related by blood or marriage to eleven other presidents.  Coincidence…?
• The female black widow spider devours the male after mating. She may kill as many as 25 males a day.  Too many Lyrical Ballads, too few Maltesers…
• The flounder has both eyes on one side of its head.  What’s so special about that?  So do humans.
• The national Institute of Education reports that over 5,000 teachers are robbed each month in American schools.  And I bet not one of them lost their copy of Lyrical Ballads.

Your homework for today: choose one or more of these interesting facts and use them to write a poem.

And to show that poetry can be fun, here’s a bit of fluff:

 

 

Almost A Ghazal, For The Beautiful Brad

Dear Mr Pitt, I long to twizzle with your cheeks.
I may be a silly twit to love the sizzle of your cheeks.

They have me quite delirious;
I am bedazzled by your cheeks.

With you I’m deadly serious –
I am bamboozled by your cheeks.

I’m in love but also frantic
to solve the puzzle of your cheeks.

Thus, I crossed the wide Atlantic
So I could nuzzle on your cheeks.

Yet I’m now locked up in jail
For getting too close to your cheeks.

But if you don’t mind posting bail
I’ll say I’m sorry to your cheeks…

If you’ll agree, you were a bad boy
Showing your backside in Troy.

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Fascinating False Facts?

Image via Wikipedia

Viewfromtheside offered fascinating as the weekend theme.  I thought you might like some fascinating facts.  Can you guess which, if any, are true?

• You can’t fold paper more than seven times.  You can, actually, if you are young and determined and rope in your family and a shopping mall.  From Wikipedia:
  

  In January 2002, while a junior in high school, [Britney] Gallivan demonstrated that a single piece of toilet paper, 4000 ft (1200 m) in length, can be folded in half twelve times…Gallivan succeeded in folding a very long sheet of toilet paper in half 12 times. She calculated that instead of folding in half every other direction, the least volume of paper to get 12 folds would be to fold in the same direction, using a very long sheet of paper. A special kind of $85-per-roll toilet paper met her length requirement. Not only did she provide the empirical proof, but she also derived an equation that yielded the width of paper or length of paper necessary to fold a piece of paper of thickness t any n number of times.

• So, proof, if it were needed, that you have to be rich to debunk myths – $85 for a roll of toilet paper!  I know where I wouldn’t be using it.
• Brad Pitt once had a summer job posting warning signs at coal mine entrances
• Milk causes mucus.  But you should still drink it, especially if you’re old and female: lack of calcium causes osteoporosis.
• Elephants are the only mammals who can’t jump.  Not true: rhinos and hippos can’t jump either.  Also sloths, but that’s more a case of disinclination than inability, I’m guessing.
• Anyone convicted of animal cruelty in Sedalia, Missouri, is sentenced to a month’s confinement in the county animal shelter. 
• Haggis was invented in Scotland.  No it wasn’t: we can blame the Scandinavians for that one. 
• Which puts paid to the myth that Vikings were mean – you can’t be mean on disgusting slop.
• No doubt now I’ll get a testy comment from Viv, putting me right on haggis.  You might as well save your fingers, Viv, because I’ll never be convinced.
• Penguins can smell toothpaste from several miles away.
• With the exception of a small 200-square-mile section of Antarctica, every single square kilometer of dry land on the planet has been walked on by at least one human being.  Probably looking for an open public toilet.
• This one is for that notorious plant killer, Sarsm: if you place a fresh Viagra tablet in a houseplant’s soil every six months, the plant will not wilt.
• If a cricket were the size of Mount Rushmore, it could jump to the moon.  But it won’t have to bother: if crickets ever get that big, I suspect we’ll all be living on the moon.
• Frank Sinatra didn’t want to record the song “My Way” but was forced to by his record label.  Don’t you just love the irony?

So tell me: which initial statement is false, and which true?

I Knew Him Back When

With apologies to Paul, who might not find this blog to be quite what he was expecting.

Take a look at this You Tube video.  This – boy? young man? lad? What do I call him?  He’s of a similar age to Tory Boy but obviously we are not on similar terms. I’ll call him ‘person’ and make him sound like a bad smell under my nose…you mothers out there: did you find, like me, that the smell of a dirty nappy lingered long after it had been disposed of?  That sweet smell of success – Clever boy!  You did a big, sloppy poo for Mummy! – which meant your child was developing normally.  No?  It was just me?  Maybe I should have washed more often. 

Where was I?  Oh yes, the person in the above video is a young person in my creative writing class.  He is one of about ten hard-core persons left at what is almost the end of a twenty-week course.  When it started there were about thirty persons; some never came back after the first week; a few dropped off as the course progressed, one after the other, like synchronised swimmers in a 1930s’ water musical, until there was just me and nine others who liked writing more than they disliked my annoying presence.  This person, who (whom?  This is a day for questions, isn’t it?) I shall call ‘Paul Usher’, because that is his name, is one of the younger persons who has stayed the course of the course (I’m sorry, dear reader; I have my frivolous head on this morning) and I eventually overcame the age gap enough to occasionally talk to him. 

He’s a lovely lad and I learned that he writes and sings his own songs.  I checked out his website at www.paulusher.net – not because I’m stalking him: why would I do that when I haven’t finished with Brad Pitt yet? But because he shared his details with the class (a better class of persons you could not hope to find).  I was impressed.  I am doing a little bit of promoting as a result, and I hope my three regular readers will spread the word on his behalf.

Here’s the weird part* – Tory Boy knows him. Paul is the cousin of a very good friend of  TB’s.  It was the Hub who made the connection: surname-music-age-da-dah!  When I shared the information with Paul, he was only a little frightened, bless him.  We had been talking about stalking in class, however, and he might have mistaken my intense staring into the back of his head for something other than a motherly desire to check for nits.  We have only ever had one case of nits in this house, I’m happy to report; discovered in a certain head – naming no names or the boy will be embarrassed – on the first day of the Christmas holidays, 2000.  I bought an industrial strength de-lousing shampoo and treated the whole family.  Once our hair grew back we never had another case.

*Okay, it’s not that weird; Stockport is a small town.  I know this because the Queen refused to give us city status in the year of her Golden Jubilee.  Maybe we should buy a second-hand cathedral.

To sum up: itch that scratch; talk that stalk; stay away from Stockport if you’re a royalist; and check out my main man No-Drugs P.Usher.**

**There is a permanent link on the right-hand side under I Know An Artist… so that you don’t have to read through this again if you want to find him.

Remember – you read it here first!  And if you got this far, I don’t think Paul will mind if you don’t become a fan.  Seriously.  Stay away, you nutter.

My Perfect Old Bag

I have long been in search of the perfect handbag.  It must be black; have a short and long handle, so that I can carry it down, under my arm, over my shoulder or over my chest; it must not be so big that I carry a load of junk around with me that I will never use, or so small that I can only fit in keys and a lip salve; it must have a small pocket on the outside to hold tissues, phone and lip salve; and it must be made of leather.  Blame Carole Duffy: she gave me the perfect handbag way back in 1982 and I reluctantly threw it away in 1996 when both straps cried, We can’t hold on any longerrrrrrr, and lost their grip, tipping the detritus of fourteen years onto the floor, and returning, in their last, brave act, my mother’s Boots’ nail file that I stole from her in 1985 and which I thought I had lost in 1993 – it was inside the torn lining.  The Hub had repaired the straps of my bag so many times that he would have had to sew the bag to my shoulder to keep it in service.

The bag that Carole gave me was not new, not black and did not have two sets of straps, but it was perfect.  It was made of brown leather and it had a sort of patchwork effect but not like the soft leather, differently-coloured patchwork bags that you buy as a gift for your favourite great-auntie.  It was all one colour and a sort of muddy colour at that, but it was perfect for me.  I was eighteen and still at school and Carole was nineteen and working and could afford to give away a handbag she no longer used. I had never owned a leather handbag before, just girlie plastic ones, and I was thrilled.  The pocket held my lip gloss (I still had young skin then) and my emery board, and the bag was large enough for all the crap that eighteen year old girls never go anywhere without, including Cosmopolitan and whatever book I happened to be reading at the time (no kids, see).  I loved it.  I took it out to South Africa with me; worked, married, bore two children; came back to the UK; and I would rather have parted with the boys’ father at that point, I think, than my beloved bag.  Before you start to think I am being unfair to the poor Hub, at that stage of our lives, having a marriage just like everyone else, we were the living embodiment of the old footballing joke:

Me: You love that <insert anything you like from computer to one smelly shoe to Manchester City> more than me.

The Hub: I love United more than I love you.

Fortunately, the old bag that I discarded was not the Hub and, in fact, it’s possible his desperate attempts to save it, stitching it with every type of cotton, yarn and thread he could get hold of in a vain attempt to sew holes to holes, reminded me of why I loved him in the first place.  I won’t go into all that now because we’ve had enough slop for one month and we still have to get through New Year’s Eve tomorrow, but suffice it to say that I’m glad I kept him, and he kept me.

This kind of answers the question of why my dream perfect bag is not at all like my last perfect bag: you can’t improve on perfection, but you can perfect your improvements.  Now I’ve made the Hub just how I like him (and it only took me twenty-seven years), I’m not about to replace him. 

Though I could be tempted if Brad Pitt would only shave off that ridiculous beard.