This week’s whimsy is brought to you by the Twitter hashtag #LessAmbitiousBooks.
Some examples:
The Adequate Gatsby
The Facebook Profile of Dorian Gray
The Unbearable Lightweightness of Being Tony Abbott
Thus Tweeted Zarathustra.
The Grinch Who Drunkenly Vandalized Several Nativity Scenes
A Tale of One City
The Suggested Triviality of Being Earnest
The Lad of the Rings
To Seriously Injure a Mockingbird
Lowered Expectations
The Mediocre Life of a Salesman
Please share any bits and pieces you have come across recently that have surprised, delighted, intrigued or otherwise positively engaged you.
NB: the weekly whimsy thread is a stoush-free zone
If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world.
Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation (think of Psyche!)
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won’t it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It’s a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!
A lovely spoken word performance by Peter Mulvey: Vlad the Astrophysicist.
@1 I only skimmed the middle section, but I
thoroughly thought it through, though tough.
Wilful, that’s just wonderful.
Less ambitious books is a bottomless well of possibility, isn’t it.
1983
Wuthering Modest Elevations
A Garage for Mr Biswas
My Okay Career
Long Day’s Journey into Evening
Who’s a Little Nervous About Virginia Woolf?
@2, on a space theme, here is a worthy observation about walking on the moon, from Brian Regan:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBJ6yptGqm4
(Soz for bad image quality, but the lulz are the audio…)
His Beige Materials
The Similarity Engine
The Little Book of Communist Motherhood Statements
Fields, Factories and Workshops
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Wavering Agnostic
Moby Duck
In the great russian literature field:
dustups and makeups
whoopsies and smacks
the not very bright guy
Where Cherubim Fear to Tread
To the Buoy
The Puppy of the Baskervilles
The Semi-A
rid Land
Prince Lear
The Old Man and The Puddle
Gulliver’s Plans
The Possibly (Mildly) Offensive Verses
Overcharging and Mediocre Dinner Seating Arrangements on the Orient Express
Lady Chatterley’s Husband
The Utter Importance of Being Humorous
The St Trinian’s animation test brought to you by the sadly now late Ronald Searle.
Kerfuffle and relative calm.
Of Primate Obligation.
Near the Beach.
Hamlet, Baronet of Denmark.
Pickwick Tissues.
Difficult Times.
The 38 Steps.
The Elderly Man And The Large Pond.
Not Very Noisy On The Western Front.
The Octacameron.
… and for a movie …
The 6⅞ Samurai.
The Quite Nice Seeds of April
When the Greenwood Grins
The Tibetan Book of Near Death
TAFE Book of English Verse
In Search of Woy Woy
The Iliad of Wayne
In Search of the Ordinary
Now, for a vaguely sci-fi bent:
An Orange Pendulum.
2001: A Space Excursion.
Ripple.
The Small Magellanic Cloud Effort.
Nub of Tenebrosity.
Misbehaviour and Chastisement.
Departed with the weather conditions.
2001: A Postcode Oddyssey
Fellini ate the other half
Not quite according to plan…
The Big Snooze
The Assistant Manager Of The Friendship Bracelets
The Stumps Trilogy
the Somewhat peckish caterpillar
@7: ‘Moby Duck’…… I believe that is the Kiwi edition.
Brave New Room
Guy standing in a gluten free grain field gently encouraging children not to fall off the cliff.
My neighbour came off his ladder whilst pruning (no injury) ; his wife said ‘he did a Molly’: and so our language evolves.
100 Years of Bacchanalia
The Gutenberg Quark
The Self of Small Things
The Lavatory of Babel
The Tree of Woman
Salmon Fishing in the Back Yard
The Pamphlet
Thus Muttered Zarathustra
Terangeree, LOL – with your talent you should approach a publisher. Are you any good with graphics for covers?
#26, that is what the flick version became wherein all the naughty parts got removed. IIRC Bogie did The Maltese Lesser Kestrel and Rabat before that.
Darkness at 10.38 pm, AEST.
How to put the dampener on a birthday party.
20,000 Leagues Under The River.
Marquis Kong.
Farenheit 423.
How about #LessInflaminatoryNetworks Lawn Ornament War ’11
<a href="http://salmanrushdie1.tumblr.com/" <Rushdie on Hitchens, FEBRUARY 2012.
Ootz @ #33: ‘The Tree of Woman’, a less ambitious version?
O RLY?
Pavlov’s Cat – loved “To the Buoy” and “The Puppy of the Baskervilles”.
@#41 O RLY?
Less ambitious: T ULLAMARINE?
Yeah, lost the focus on ‘less ambitious’ and got carried away being too complicated (there was a nonsexist joke intended, but I may dig a deeper hole for myself trying to explain). No harm intended, however, I’ll submit to self flagellation for punishment.
Attempted Murder on the Orient Express
Near Death in the Clouds
War and Ceasefire
Brideshead Repainted
Hitchhikers Guide to the Solar System
Mister and Commander
For the term of his semester
The Tuppeny Musical
The grapes of irritation
Of mice
Love in a time of tinea
Ten hours of solitude
A cup of tea at Tiffany’s
A passage to Southampton
Parva Carta
Lady Chatterley’s distant acquaintance
Darkness at night
The postman doesn’t deliver to this part of town
The cheeky verses
The True Story of the Kelly Club
I Can Walk Through Puddles.
Black Prettiness
The Faraway Shrub
East of Pambula
The Year of Living Circumspectly
dear editor
in a related key:-
symphony no3 in eflat: ‘the erotica’
piano sonata no23 in fminor: ‘a passion-on sonata’
opening overture: ’1812 for tschaikovsky’
yours sincerely
alfred venison
Mr Venison please accept this lol as a token of my appreciation.
All along the wall
Rock around a few minutes
Happiness is a warm lasagne.
General Accord
tangled up in a colour
Highway 60
Like a rolling ball.
when Billie Joe McKallister looked off the Tallahatcie (sic) bridge.
Minor deamon gate drive.
Goldilocks and the Three Irish Wolfhounds.
Revolution Number 8
The Day of the Dahlias
What a delightful Whimsy. It minds me of how much greater fun a sing-along around the piano is, rather than listening in to songs on the wireless. Perhaps Grannie was right about that after all?
12 Slightly Miffed Men
dear dylwah
i’ll meet your brace and offer in reply:-
‘extenuating circumstance’ marches 1 – 5
ballet en deux tableau: ‘the wrong of spring’
symphony no9 3/4: ‘the unbegun’
symphony no8 in eflat: ‘symphony of 999′
piano sonata no14 c sharp minor ‘the moonshine sonata’
‘the moet & pheasant’ overture (mmmm)
tondichtung fuer grosser orchester: ‘so spat zarathustra’
‘the goldbrick variations’
‘iphegenia in brooklyn’ (opera in 5 acts after kletzmer)
symphonic poem: ‘in the steppes of central australia’
string quartet in d minor: ‘life & the maiden’
symphony no4 in c: ‘poem of ekky’
‘rhapsody in beige’, ‘an american in kabul’, . . .
yours sincerely
alfred venison