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 |   Tales from real life |
| Well, if they're not true, they oughta be! |
My wife and I went to an Oktoberfest fundraiser at our local parish last night. The menu was brats and sauerkraut, of course, and several local brewpubs donated their product for taste testing. The food was good, the beer was better, and the subject of preferred condiments came up. Deb and I renewed our long running discussion (argument) about Dijon mustard. She thinks plain yellow mustard is boring, but I can't abide horse radish. And it isn't just that I don't like it, I physically cannot swallow the horrible stuff. And our discussion (argument) reminded me of a story that was perfect for a tableful of friends and acquaintances who were trying to enjoy their food. Way back in 1980, I got involved with a project to integrate the Bandit CNC with an H. W. Ward lathe. A Computer Numerical Control allows a relatively unskilled operator to cut metal parts on a machine tool with almost perfect accuracy. It was a financial boon for industry, but traditionalists lamented the passing of the skilled machinist. H. W. Ward is a British company and I spent almost a full month in England as the project was winding up. My 'minder' was a fifty-something mechanical engineer named John Payne. He had his doubts about all of the new 'computer stuff' but was friendly toward me and supportive of my efforts. Our schedule was tight and pub lunches were expensive, so John offered me tea and roast beef sandwiches one day in lieu of going out. I like roast beef and the pub food was mediocre at best, so I gladly accepted. What I didn't know was that John was a horse radish fiend. He slathered on a layer of the awful white goop as thick as the meat itself. I'm not much of a tea drinker and I was focused on adding enough milk and sugar to make it palatable to my sweet tooth. I didn't really look at the sandwich as I picked it up and took a big mouthful of pure horse radish. To quote Col. Kurtz from Apocalypse Now, "The horror, the horror . . ." My reaction was immediate and uncontrollable. The bite of sandwich bounced, literally, and I barely managed to reach the waste basket as everything came up. John, with perfect British reserve, didn't even flinch. "If you don't care for roast beef, you could have just said." |
A recent reviewer noted that I used a forced rhyme in my poem Aging Out. The comment was more tongue in cheek than critical, and I wasn't offended (or fazed). My literary misdemeanor was to rhyme mate with faith, and I plead guilty as charged. I prefer to use natural rhymes, but I won't let a little thing like a near rhyme prevent me from completing a poem, especially if I like the lines or if the poem is just a quick bit of fluff. There's more than one way to force a rhyme, and we each have our own opinion as to what is and isn't acceptable. Here are some more egregious examples (in my opinion) for your consideration: Singular/plural - One word ends in 's' and the other doesn't. This is a subset of the near rhyme, and I am sometimes guilty of this one as well. Near rhymes have to be judged case by case, some work better than others. In Aging Out I also rhymed sown with home, and it escaped the reviewer's notice. Awkard word order - This usually means twisting a sentence to put the rhyme word at the end. I did this in my poem Seize Cruise  : as the lash, my lessons it taught. This is a fractured sentence, but it places the word taught at the end of the line to complete the needed rhyme. Seize Cruise was an early effort, and I didn't even realize what I'd done. I may go back and try to improve that line someday.Breaking meter - This occurs when the stressed syllables of the rhyme don't match, as in to sing and laughing. I try to be sensitive of meter even more than rhyme, so I don't do this unless it's by ignorance of proper pronunciation. Irrelevant line - This is quite common for beginning poets who can't think of a good next line. Something like this early draft: Tiger, tiger burning bright, can't go on an airline flight. I hope I'm not guilty of this one, but critics may not find all of my lines to be relevant, either. Sight rhyme - This is when two words look similar, but sound different as in rough and cough. There may be such a thing as visual poetry where this would work, but it doesn't work for me. So, should we use forced rhymes? Of course not, but I won't 'should' on your poetry if you don't 'should' on mine. I think there's room for all of us to express ourselves in a manner that feels right to us. Even if it's 'wrong' per the critics. As Mark Twain might have said (if he'd written poetry): "It's a poet of poor imagination who can't think of at least two ways to rhyme a word." |
My son sent me a tongue-in-cheek text to warn of the looming danger of Friday the 13th. Being contrary in nature, I replied that the concept of Friday is merely a conceit of Judeo-Christian culture. And that the number 13 is just an accident of using base ten to count the days of the month. Having a mind like a grasshopper, I began to think about other calendars and other number systems. Ancient calendars all seem to be based on the lunar cycle. Moon phases are obvious even to the casual observer, but the 29.53 day lunar month doesn't sync well with the 365.242 day solar year. So, you need 12.368 lunar months to equal one solar year. The Babylonians figured this out quite accurately. They used twelve 30-day months and added an additional month every few years to keep things in sync. Pre-Babylonian calendars usually didn't name the months or days, and they didn't use the concept of weeks either. They simply counted the days from one new moon to the next. Some early cultures determined that the 1st, 7th, and 15th of each month should be a holy day. The Babylonians made every seventh day a holy day and they also named the months. The Hebrews borrowed some of the Babylonian concepts and the modern 7-day week is based on their calendar. The Romans named the days of the week for their Gods. What English speakers call Friday was known as Venus' day to the Romans (it morphed into Viernes in Spanish). The English word 'Friday' didn't come into use until much later. The earliest references come from the 11th century CE. The number 13 is rather arbitrary, too. It's based on humans having ten fingers to count on. But that hasn't always been the case. At least two Native American tribes counted up the spaces or along the knuckles in a base eight number system known as octal. I used octal back in 1985 when programming an early computer system. Octal uses only the digits 0 through 7. Today, computer languages use a base sixteen system known as hexadecimal. It uses A through F as digits in addition to the more familiar 0 through 9. The simplest system is base two, or binary, which uses only the digits 0 and 1. Each digit (or bit) in binary is a power of two, 1 = 1, 10 = 2, 100 = 4, 1000 = 8 and so on. All digital information is stored in binary inside your computer and the binary representation of 13 is 1101 (8 + 4 + 1). Octal separates binary numbers into three-bit groups. So, 1101 is parsed as two digits, 001 and 101, and that's written as 15 octal. Hexadecimal separates binary numbers into four-bit groups. So, in hex, 1101 is parsed as one digit and written as simply D hex. There are many choices from other cultures, but I can claim both Venus and D as part of my heritage. So, happy Venus D! p.s. My friend Gerry pointed out that we instinctively use base ten when counting on our fingers. But if we count in binary, with each finger representing one bit, then we can count up to 1023! (or up to 1,048,575 with our shoes off) |
| Here's a sentimental ballad for Halloween. It's sung to the tune of Dream a Little Dream of Me: https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=dream+a+little+dream+of+me&... Scream a Little Scream Night closes in around you, humid mist rises up to surround you, fitful moans among moss dripping trees, scream a little scream for me. Stealthy steps and rustlin' of leaves, a tingling sense of danger unseen, strain your eyes but it's too dark to see, scream a little scream for me. You can run but there's nowhere to go, dear, it's a round-trip flight. Every path leads you right back to me, dear, you're mine tonight. Just scream until I find you, won't take me long to sneak up and bind you. Gasp in heart-pounding fright as you flee, scream a little scream for me. Don't try to run, there's nowhere to go, dear, can't avoid the bite. Your creamy neck is what I adore, dear, it's mine tonight. Glassy eyes roll back in your head, soon you'll be waking among the undead, feel the razor-sharp fangs sink in deep, scream a little scream for me. |
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