I have a newbie request for double dactyls, which can only be explained by the fact that she cannot find our past insane threads using this form. To make it more interesting, I would like to see double dactyls in one of two categories: 1) ones that include a reference to an animal, the more obscure the better; or 2) ones that use the words (or forms of the words) "gravy", "flout" or "tepid". Good luck (and keep those Eliot exercises pouring in!).

Unusual beasties comin' atcha.

Pathogen wathogen
Anton van Leeuwenhoek
looked through his eyepiece and
saw something squirm.

‘twasn’t euglena, nor
cryptosporidium.
Schistosomiasis--
that was his worm.


Tony




[This message has been edited by Tony (edited April 10, 2001).]

Chromosome, schlomosome
bioneered zebrafish
glow in the dark under
UV light beams.

Such are the wonders of
biotechnology—
witness the monkey with
jellyfish genes.

Tony

[This message has been edited by Tony (edited April 10, 2001).]

Hideous, widdeous
batrachophobia—
fear of amphibians
lurking in bogs.

Those who loathe toads suffer
bufonophobia;
ranidophobiacs
can’t abide frogs.

Tony

Clippity cloppity--
Lemuel Gulliver,
washed up on shore of an
uncharted isle,

found he was captured by
equinilogical
creatures who thought him a
Yahoo with style.


Quibbity, quobbity,
Erwin J. Schroedinger,
genius and physicist,
boxed up his cat

testing his theories of
quantuministical
waves of the probable
rising til splat--

choices collapsing from
superpositioning
crash to a certainty:
puss is squashed flat.


Howard

Hope this isn't stretching Michael's call for animal d-d's too much, but here's "Mary had a little lamb" I just recast into double-dactyl form on a challenge from a friend. (Given the nature of the undertaking, I thought it might be okay to wave the 2nd line as name rule.)


Stories are told of a
Mary McGarrity
who had a lamb with a
snowy white fleece.
Talk about ultimate
amicability!
They were so close that they
seemed of a piece.

Once on a beautiful
morning in autumn, it
followed our heroine
even to school.
Picture it acting so
anthropomorphically;
surely the creature was
some kind of fool!

There all her classmates were
taken with laughter, though
sterner Miss Prigg was less
kindly inclined.
She was despotic, and
inflexibility's
massive authority
governed her mind.

"Mary," she lectured, "we
simply can't tolerate
conduct encouraging
others to shirk,
nor will we countenance
extracurricular
matters that compromise
serious work."

Trembling, poor Mary, who
had no idea that
such inhumanity
lived in the heart,
tried to explain to the
disciplinarian
she and her lambkin were
never apart.

"Lambkin?!" Disquieted,
Prigg referred Mary to
Bilge the psychiatrist,
fearing her ill.
He was disturbed by such
interdependency,
deeming her "batty" and
padding his bill.

Word quickly spread of the
poor girl's infirmity--
carrying on with her
four-footed friend!
How can one answer such
scuttlebuttmongering?
Surely you know how the
story must end.

Mary was finally
driven to butcher her
dear little pet, and to
sell him for slops.
Quite a sad lesson in
quantificational
reckoning: friend =
twenty-two chops.


Jan



[This message has been edited by Jan D. Hodge (edited April 13, 2001).]

Jan, a huge welcome to Erato! What a great poem!

Carol
green with envy

Thanks, Carol. Glad to be here.

But I don't think green becomes you. http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif

Jan

Michael called for d-d's with "gravy," "flout," and "tepid"? Okay. Keeping with my Mother Goose theme, how about:


Jack Sprat could eat no fat . . .


Food for the ill-suited
Mr. and Mrs. Sprat
(Jack and Amanda) was
always a strain,
even before a marked
insensitivity--
tepid, then virulent--
turned it to pain.

First it was minor things:
ice cream or sherbet, or
whether the tea should be
honeyed or not.
Jack had a palate for
oleomargarine;
Mandy insisted on
butter, bei Gott!

Things became ugly when
Jack rather nastily
sugared the gravyboat,
merely to flout
Mandy (who suffered from
hyperglycemia);
she creamed his veggies to
trigger his gout.

Curious spectacle,
watching such enmity
eat at these creatures at
every repast;
hardly a shock when the
gastrointestinal
warfare dissevered the
twosome at last.


Jan

Jan--
Welcome to Eratosphere. Your two epic dactyls are magnificent.
Tony

Howard--
I particularly enjoyed the Schroedinger dactyl. (But wasn't "puss" poisoned by cyanide, rather than squashed flat?)
Tony