Well, your Oblateness knows more about your literary souvlakiographic than a student like me. I oink (I am polite --- when in Stye, be Stylish), so I oink you know that the Odyssey was spoken first in a metrical trotameter that just bristled with feminine insight by Circe, a leader of an island thiasus of schoolboys. So there !

And you will udderstand that this one farrow of her scholars
[μια φαρροω in Mod Greek] loved her for her fine lunches, but she loved a Wanderswine sailor and had to disguise her authorship.

As for waterbears, Festus Porcius, and aureate Marcus Porcius Cato Major Domo, pooh !

Shakespigg to you, anyway. Do you play Scrapple? I play a lean game.

Moving to music and l'Orchstre Suidae Romande,
where are the melodic swine? And how should one fit a square pig into a round of applause?

Squeal !!
 

Well, Mr Tice, sir, there is also, of course, our beloved Poet Laureate, James Hogg. And in foreign parts, we are proud of Federico Garcia Porca. We still mourn his fate under General Franco, the man who gave swine everywhere a bad name.

Musically, it is true that we pigs - sus scrofa - have been comparatively undistinguished, although it should never be forgotten that we owe the completion of Mozart's Requiem to his pupil Franz Xaver Sussmayr, nor should we overlook Leoncavallo's opera I Pigliacci. Above all, there is Puccini's tragic opera about a wild boar, Tusker.

But perhaps our proudest moment was the vital role we played in the creation of Woman. As you are doubtless aware, Eve was assembled from a spare rib.

And so was your Brittanic lyricster, Algernon Charles Swineborn. By now I've shown I am no piggist, I θink.

Allen, Brian,

Did you also know that Bacon cooks at six degrees? One must separate, of course.

Ah, if only I had that sort of reasoned eloquence at my command.

The thing is, of course, that she's not. She's a smart, thoughtful commentator with whom I don't see eye-to-eye on this issue.

http://www.newversenews.com/

All good fart jokes aside, this is not necessarily an easy subject.

Oddly enough, I still remember my horror upon seeing a fellow freshman floormate (adorned in blue jeans and university issued t-shirt, who had signed up for Philosophy 101, in 1980, at the top of the stairs of Schramm 2) tearing to shreds his assigned textbook at the start of week two, stating "who is Hugly (our philosophy 101 teacher, one Phillip Hugly) to question the existence of God."

Kids (and Aquinas) be warned. Life is hard.

Pigger warning:

The Peg-leg Pig

A farmer’s daughter keeps a hog
who sports a wooden leg.
“Tell me about that peg-leg pig,”
travelling salesmen beg.

“He saved me from a rabid skunk.
He stomped it with his peg.”
Suspiciously a seed man squints:
“How did he lose the leg?”

“He found me when a whiteout hit
and led me through the snow.”
“You called the vet to amputate?
A case of frostbite?” “No.

“He pulled me from a flaming barn
before the rafters fell.”
“Enough to put me off my corn.
It must have hurt like hell.”

“Who said my peg-leg pig was lamed?
He never got a scratch.”
“That leg is missing all the same.
Sister, what’s the catch?

“Was it chomped on by a bigger pig
or torn off by a plow,
squashed beneath a threshing rig
or trampled by a cow?

“Was the porker born to walk on wood
or crippled in his prime?”
“Mister, you eat a pig this good
one leg at a time.”

--Tim Murphy

Well, is this poem a metaphor for a larger religious concept? The latent cruelty dressed as humor needs grounding in the world of experience : of warfare, of something. Is it actually humorous?

This seems to call for a little fiddle with a steady tapping there on the hi-hat. That, and the snare. Hog of the Forsaken, by Michael Hurley, going out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3YxlbYiLhA