Net: Today we offer, for your reading edification …
THOUGHTS AND PROVOCATIONS
From Sired by a Turkey Baster: I have another public service announcement. Net: For those of you who might be confused, Turkey Baster wrote in about Diggers last week, under a different name — thus the “another.” Turkey Baster has many identities, and remember — we know who you are.
There are some really nice grrrls running a really cool clothing recycling operation in the retailers’ hell known as Stinkytown. Nobody seems to survive there very long, as evidenced by the numerous vacant storefronts along those streets.
Anyway, there’s an air of homespun elbow grease in this effort, and I think it’s best that you all go buy something there soon so they can stay alive. They have way better prices than Ragstock Net: A place that smacks of a more hypocritical embrace of contemporary pop culture hegemony than anyplace else in Dinkytown, with the possible exception of Dub’s (but oh, those wings!) and they let you trade your own stuff for theirs. The place is called Everyday People, and it’s worth your patronage. If they die off there, like everything else there does, we’ll all be guilty of not feeding the cutest stray puppy ever to sit on our back porch. Net: ?
I just plain like them, and I think they deserve a little Network salute.
Net: You got it. NITWIT is erect and at attention. Then again, NITWIT always is.
TODAY’S POEM
From Kitten: I was sitting in calculus, another day of summer school and another day of math, when I was shaken by a flash of inspiration — or maybe it was just the guy next to me waking me up, so that the professor could ask me again to make some sort of sense out of the mess he had scribbled on the board. Net: You should have told him to ask the janitor. There’s this one in Boston. …
Whichever it was, it left me with the following verse, and the overwhelming need to join the poetry bandwagon.
“Math”
(To be read in a lilting tone of voice with increasing frenzy, much as Willy Wonka exhibited when he performed “The Rowing Song” in the chocolate factory.)
Oh Lord, another integral —
I swear to you, my head is full!
One day this summer school will end;
May it be soon, this heaven’s send
For if it’s not I am afraid
Men in white coats will soon invade
My home and take me far away
Because, you see, I cannot stay
In such a state much longer now.
If others could, I don’t see how!
Why math has come to rule my life
I cannot say, but this I might:
Give me a choice between hell and math,
I could not ever choose my math
For that is not a choice at all
But deep twin pits in which to fall
It’s hell in Vincent (Hall)? Math on Earth?
One and the same! That is the curse
Of taking courses all the while
That friends are living out in style
Their summers, back at home and free
Of this horrid atrocity!
My greatest wish, my one desire
All I need, and I’m no liar:
I long to sleep, that I may dream
Of places where no math is seen!
Net: Noble effort, Kitten — we’re purring with delight. We do, however, question your mastery of iambic tetrameter. For example, we notice that, in some places, such as your line, “Of this horRID atrocity,” that your syllable stresses are awkward. Also, though you follow a conventional A-A-B-B-C-C-D-D, etc., rhyme scheme, some of your breaks on thought don’t match your breaks in verse. Perhaps this is your personal style, which allows you to break out of normal conventions; we would need to see more of your work to be sure.
