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| You expect me to draw a cartoon about THAT? |
Ring around the rosy
Pocket full of posies
Ashes, ashes, we all fall DOWN!
Timeless children's song in which kids plop onto the ground on that last word. It dates
from the time of the Black Death, and ashes is a word for death; a cemetery was once called the "ash grove."
Many nursery rhymes were written as social commentaries.
The Black Death, believed to be bubonic plague, swept through Europe, Mid-East, India, and
China (1347-1351). It killed at least 75 million people.
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On a happier note, the world's first recorded voice was a poem: Thomas Edison's voice
on a tinfoil- covered rotating cylinder, 1877:
"Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white as snow --"
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The Scots vs. the English
| from Yahoo Image Search |
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| Pay or I'll Play |
1314 A.D. -The London Daily Scandal
Wee Bonnie Brucey's feeble forces
will face our team at Bannockburn.
His confidence only endorses
this fact -- that guy will never learn!
His "soldiers," wearing ladies' dresses
don't scare us, but that high-pitched howl
of their darn high school band's excesses
could drive the dead to holler "Foul!"
RhymeCon
But for a better example click here
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| GERRYMANDER ON MODERN MAP |
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| RAND McNALLY ROAD ATLAS & TRAVEL GUIDE |
| THE ORIGINAL GERRYMANDER |
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| FROM THE BOSTON GLOBE, 1812 |
Happened two hundred years ago, thereabouts,
Massachusetts' Governor, Elbridge Gerry, redistricted his state
to improve his
own party's political fate
but the Whigs had their doubts
about the strangely shaped boundaries. "It
just don't look so great!"
shouted one. "Thing's a salamander."
"No it ain't!" wrote The Globe. "It's a Gerry-mander."
And they printed a drawing. Of all the lampoons
it became one of the earliest political cartoons.
"Gerrymander" has joined our vocabulary.
Could a political poem do the same? (Well, not very.)
RhymeCon
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| A Sister Suffragette - 19 th century |
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| Mary Taylor - the cartoonist |
You got nothin' t' worry 'bout, ma'am.
There's nothin your mind could grab.
Can't vote or run for office, preach a sermon, drive a cab,
Can't do man's work in a man's world; that's what men won't allow.
Forget about Women's suffrage,
we've suffered sufficiently now.
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| cartoonist: Charles Gibson |
Believe it or not this icon of the 1800's was part of the fight for women's rights, including
the vote. She was self-sufficient. She had self respect. She knew what it was all about.
But mostly, she's so pretty I enjoy looking at her. (I'll put this in poetry form but haven't
written it yet.)
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| For Sale to the Highest Bidder |
In the early 1900's a short poem shamed the British Parliament into passing child labor
laws.
In the early 1900's newspaper cartoons shamed the U.S. Feds and the states into passing child
labor laws. An example of each:
The mill is right beside the links,
and every single day
the laboring children can look out
and see the men at play.
author unknown, to me at least
So why couldn't a cartoonist and poet be doubly effective if they'd team up together?
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| JOHN BULL WRESTLES WITH THE IRISH LAND PROBLEM |
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| by Sir John Tennial |
In mid- 19th century Ireland
Irish farmers were taking their hits
for they had a dire need to hire land -
land that was owned by the Brits.
The potato blight then brought starvation
that brought Merry England to tears,
(not so much for that grim deprivation
but that it placed so much rent in arrears.)
RhymeCon
That's my rhyme. But for an infinitely better example of PoeticPunditry on the subject, click here. (Then push your BACK button to return, I hope with a tear in your eye.)
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| Same Artist- More Familiar Picture |
Tennial's cartooning was of highest rank and if his style seems familiar it might be because of his
famed illustrations of Alice in Wonderland.
Note that "Ireland" has no rhymes in the rhyming dictionary. Yet it's easy to rhyme, as often is
the case with a multi-syllabic word and an inventive poet. Like "firebrand" or "tire stand." And I saw a typical liberal
blog that mentioned the "chimp" that's the leader of the "liar band."
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| 1937, showing Pres. & Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt |
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| TEXT: A New Washerwoman Can Create a Lot of Embarassment |
POETRY - Modern as Tomorrow
Poetry hasn't been too popular with news columnists
because it's not suited for
detailed facts and figures, but wait! Today poets can link to anything they need without
affecting rhyme or meter. Help me experiment!
Here's
a toast to the ghost of Hugo Black,
U.S.
Senator and the liberals' man,
F.D.R's
appointee to the U.S. high court,
and
Knight of the Ku Klux Klan.
And
Hugo, (well you go and look this up),
said
his favorite slogan in the long run,
“The
Separation of Church and State”
supercedes
Amendment One.
The
First Amendment forbids the state
to
infringe on religious debate,
but
the Hugo-an slogan did a heck-of-a-lot more,
making
churches steer clear of the state.
Perhaps
Hugo recalled long ago, some appalled
church
had preached from its heart against slavery,
and
he sought to ensure that religion stays pure
and
separates from such knavery.
And
he wrote, as the champion of the oppressed
the majority opinion that
scraps
all
your rights and puts you for years behind bars
without
charge if your parents are Japs.
Now
does he delight in his far-away night
that
liberals now take a stand
and
defend gallantly the rights of the poor
by
helping the rich seize their land?
bob4
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Headline: Minden Firm Builds First Plant to Convert Cooking Oil to
Diesel
First Ouch! This was a good example
when I posted it and for weeks afterward but I just found it fell victim of the curse of the links: When you link to someone
else's site the link might be broken at any time. Sorry!
Oops again. It occurred to me to google for another headline to
use as an anchor link. Now I'm using the substitute link instead. (I had to do exactly the same thing for my "helping
the rich seize their land" link in the above item on Justice Hugo Black. Which is why it's important to frequently test all
your links to sites external to your own.
Although a cartoonist I'll admit that I'm not,
a PoeticPundit could work with a Cartoonist a lot!
The below might appear in the paper, and yet
the above would be suitable just for the net.
Though the two are quite similar, here's the upshot:
one is LINKED to the news while the other is not.
Find New Sources of Fuel, urges president
In his State of the Union address President Bush stated that America must give
up its dependence on foreign oil. He said we need furthur research on obtaining ethanol from sources other
than corn - such as grass.
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But they've said to
all those of a chauvinist hue
"We're gonna tell the U.N.
on you."
The report also states that "we note with alarm"
programs that engendered gender equality
programs forty years old - are Buying the Farm -,
and are no longer part of our national polity
because vile politicians have selfishly pleaded
programs forty years old MIGHT no longer be needed.
RhymeCon
I guess teaming up "engendered" and "gender" is a little too cutesy for serious poetry
but it should be acceptable for PoeticPunditry.
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There's a special magic about Mark Little.
He's my son and that makes him special. And he's your Daddy and that certainly makes him special.
But there's a special magic about him that you won't find in all sons or all Daddies, and if I tell you something about him,
maybe we can figure out just what his magic is all about.
He was a quiet and thoughtful little boy. Not the type that would organize a softball game,
but the type that would learn his school lessons with ease.
He was thrilled when he brought home from the first grade a small book his teacher, Mrs. Shaffer,
had made for him and his classmates. It was made of two small sheets of paper stapled together to make eight pages, and she
had DITTO'D (that was an old-fashioned way of making copies) some drawings of a rabbit and a simple little story and the name
of the booklet was "The Rabbit Ran." There were only about a dozen different words in the story.
But the important thing was: Mark could read it all by himself. And he's been reading ever
since.
He was born in Deasrborn, Michigan, on July 21, 1961, and we moved to Mansfield, Ohio when
he was five. We lived in a three-bedroom house on Yorkwood Road, but later finished the basement and that's where Mark had
his bedroom.
Mark and his brothers, your Uncle Steve and Uncle Dave, all liked music. For years we bought
season tickets to the Mansfield Symphony concerts at Malabar High School, three blocks from our home.
Mark and Steve took piano lessons. Later, Mark took violin lessons and played in the orchestra
at Appleseed Junior high school and then at Malabar High school, and when he was in college eh taught himself to play the
classical guitar.
Steve quit taking piano lessons because he got bored with the simple little pieces, but later
he taught himself to play the piano, and taught himself very well.In high school he played slide trombone in the marching
band,
Dave took only a few lessons, but taught himself to play the acoustic guitar and electric guitar.
Then he got a good buy on a used keyboard and brought friends out to the house to jam with soft rock music.
All three boys went to Mansfield's Ranchwood Elementary School. It was a nice neighborhood
and a number of the boys' friends were sons of doctors.
Mark always liked poetry. In about the second grade he learned about pollution; that was in
the 'sixties when Americans were just beginning to talk a lot about the environment. His class was assigned to write about
pollution, so Mark wrotehis very first poem:
"Polution is bad. Pollution we have had.
Now we have too much, and soon we can't do
such a thing as living."
They built a new shopping mall, Richlan Mall, west of Mansfield, and it had a sunken lounge
with benches for resting. Next to the lounge was a pet store, and the boys always insisted on stopping there to look at the
pets. One day as we rested in the lounge Mark and Steve (Dave was too young) borrowed some pencils and used the blank side
of some adverising papers andbegan drawing pictures of rabbits. They told us there was a prize for the best drawing.
Then we looked at Doktor's Pet Store. It was nearly Easter, and in the window was a sign "DRAWING
FOR A FREE RABBIT."
I about the second grade Mark learned about the Americn Indians, He really got interested,
and began making Indian drums and peace pipes. I told him about flint arrowheads, and that people are still finding them today.
Later that day I found him digging a hole in the back yard. He was confident he was going to find some arrowheads,
All three of the boys went through the Cub Scouts (you had to be eight to join) and Boy Scouts
(you had to be eleven). The Cubs were organized as Pack 107 and met at Ranchwood School. For seven years, from the time Marked
jopined the cubs until Dave went up to Scouts, I was the Cubmaster, and for much of that time their mother was a Den Mother.
Cub Scouts age eight and nine were considered too young to go camping in the wilds. Bit the
rules permitted them to have sleepouts in someone's back yard, if there were parents and telephones available. I think those
eight-year-olds were too young, for when the pack had a sleepout in a Den Mother's yard some of them brought their
teddy bears as sleeping partners.
But ten-year-old Cubs were eligible to join a Webelos den to help them get ready for Boy Scouts.
They could go camping in the wilds if they had plenty of adults along. Once our Webelos Den camped out at the Boy Scout camp
- seven boys, all with their fathers. Scott Young's dad was a doctor with a family practice. Brad Banko's dad was a
pediatrician. Greg Auchard's dad was a bone specialist. Alan Lindquist's dad was a pathologist. Keith Kine's dad was a dentist.
Jeff Jolley's dad, and Mark's dad, were the only two that were not in the medical field. We joked about having plenty of medical
help in case of an accident.
When Mark joined Boy Scouts he was small for his age. That alway bothered him a lot, and having
the last name of "Little" didn't help matters, either.
Some of the older scouts were making plans to go backpacking at Philmont Scout Ranch in New
Mexico. Bruce Drushel, who had hiked Philmont the year before, was giving a talk to the troop, and told them "If you're in
good shape it will be easy, but if you're not in good shape it will be pretty tought. And if you're like Markey Little, well,
I don't think you should go to Philmont at all." There was laughter. For years Mark resented that cut-down. He made up his
mind that, when he'd hike Philmont, he'd be out in front of the whole troop.
Love,
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