by Bruce Bennett
“NASA Launches Europa Clipper to Explore an Ocean Moon’s Habitability”
—The New York Times
Off for Europa! It will take it years,
But what the Clipper spacecraft “sees” and “hears”
Will give us knowledge precious and profound—
Provided, that is, we are still around.
by Iris Herriot
(After Cole Porter)
“Emmanuel Macron: We will fight hard to keep Emily in Paris in France:
Hugely successful Netflix show has been a boon to French tourism but latest season takes events to Rome
… [According to Macron:] ‘Emily in Paris in Rome doesn’t make sense.’”
—The Guardian
Shall I say what I feel for this timeless ville,
As I stuff my croissants with clichés?
Though eternal it’s not, it beats Rome by a lot
And it merits this twofold praise:
I love Emily in Paris in Paris,
I love Emily in Paris in la France,
I love queuing for the Louvre in the Louvre,
I love Sartre with his oeuvre, said as “ouvre”;
I love Paris in Paris in the springtime,
I love Paris in Paris in the fall,
I love Paris in Emily in Paris,
And Charles de Gaulle de Gaulle de Gaulle de Gaulle de Gaulle.
by Steven Kent
“JD Vance’s slick performance can’t hide the danger of another Trump presidency”
—The Guardian
“You promised not to fact-check here,”
One would-be VP shouted.
“Your bias now is all too clear,
Which my side never doubted.
A fabulist can’t catch a break
(Though not for lack of trying),
And yet you’ve made a big mistake—
They love me more for lying!
We know our voters well, you see;
We’re quick to turn the tables.
You think they want veracity?
They much prefer our fables.
by Stephen Gold
“Wimbledon ditches line judges after 147 years”
—The Times
Technology’s a wondrous thing,
Of that there is no doubt.
But don’t expect my heart to sing.
Alas, it means I’m OUT!
by Alex Steelsmith
“A team of Pennsylvania students broke a Guinness World Record by dropping an egg
from a height of 83 feet without it breaking.”
—UPI
Lickety-quickety
team Pennsylvania
knew that they couldn’t make
any mistake.
Record and egg had an
interrelatedness;
one or the other they’d
certainly break.
by Marshall Begel
“Graves could be reused under proposals to tackle lack of space for the dead”
—BBC
“I’ve been in this graveyard for 100 years,
And never heard stewards request volunteers
To open their parcel to any, but worms—
No dignified soul would agree to these terms!
My plot needs some weeding, my box may be shoddy,
But I will not share it with some other body!”
“Well, friend, your descendants (who couldn’t be found)
Neglected to safeguard this small piece of ground.
And please understand this idea wasn’t mine—
Some real estate manager fed us a line
Inflating the money my children would save,
If they would agree to this “slightly” used grave.
You’d better accept being double-interred,
For soon enough, we will be getting a third.”
by Nora Jay
“In my meetings with chemists, I discovered the rejuvenating properties of caviar.”
—Former First Lady Melania Trump in her memoir
With sturgeon’s eggs she’s studded,
And cellularly flooded:
So now we know
What makes her so
Sleek, silent, and cold-blooded.
by Julia Griffin
For Mary
“Wrinkles reveal whether elephants are left- or right-trunked, study finds …
The team say a left-trunker—which scoops objects towards the left side of its body—has more
wrinkles and longer whiskers on the left side of its trunk, with whiskers on the right worn down by
more frequent contact with the ground.”
—The Guardian
Her mother and myself are simple, honest megafauna.
We make our sludge ourselves, don’t look to others for a sauna:
We trumpet when appropriate, perform our scoops and sprinkles,
And never even thought about the numbers of our wrinkles;
But now it seems we’re guilty of an all-time tusker-clunker:
We’ve somehow foisted on the herd a sinister LEFT-TRUNKER.
Of course she went to swishing class (the cost was something frightful);
We tried to stop her eating till she took a rightful biteful;
We wouldn’t let her wallow in a swamp where people knew her,
Whose numbers were quite rapidly becoming few, then fewer;
We chose at last to hide her in a sort of jungle bunker,
And prayed that there she’d cease to be a troublesome left-trunker.
We tried so hard to fight such aberrations of behaving:
We’d heard some say it’s sorcery, this crazy mirror-waving;
But gradually we came to first acceptance, then bravado,
Then honest pride: our calf, the pachydermic Leonardo!
And now we say: come raise your trunks and drink, until you’re drunker,
The untruncated future of our trusty, true left-trunker!
by Steven Urquhart Bell
“Manchester airport announces direct £19 flights to Europe’s ‘last real hidden gem’”
—Manchester Evening News
So don’t delay: get on the phone
And make a booking now, because
This hidden European gem
Is not as hidden as it was.
by Dan Campion
“Scientists now know what the head of the biggest bug to ever crawl the Earth looked like”
—The Associated Press
A nine-foot-long bug’s head would suit
The ’50s movie scene,
And has now been described, to boot,
In time for Halloween:
It’s bulbous, sprouts antennae, sports
The pop eyes of a crab.
At masked balls you may see all sorts,
From Batman to Queen Mab,
But not with sixty-four long legs
And centipede-like dome.
A costumed Gregor Samsa begs
To be kept hid at home.
by Paul Lander
Dictionary Day.
Ironically, I don’t have
Words to describe it…
by Eddie Aderne
“Germans decry influence of English as ‘idiot’s apostrophe’ gets official approval
Linguistic body has relaxed rules on use of apostrophe to show possession, not traditionally correct
in German … [T]he punctuation mark [is] colloquially known as the Deppenapostroph (‘idiot’s apostrophe’) “
—The Guardian
The orthographic errors of the grocer
Have long brought English-speakers to our knees;
Nothing, meanwhile, makes Germany moroser
Than giving genitives apostrophes.
If Germans scorn our favoured punctuation,
We anglophones are poorly placed to scoff:
At least they’re still avoiding, in that nation,
Our Lebensmittelhändlersapostroph.
by Dan Campion
“Fly brain breakthrough ‘huge leap’ to unlock human mind”
—BBC
Drosophila, you’re just like us!
We’re merely you, scaled up!
Except that while we swat and cuss,
You swarm our sherbet cup.
by Chase Keller
“By recommending that children avoid exposure to peanuts until age 3, doctors
inadvertently turned a rare issue into a major health problem.”
—The Wall Street Journal
When I was a child, the doc would command me
to watch out for cookies and Halloween candy.
“And just to be safe, keep an EpiPen handy,”
he’d tell me. “No ifs, ands, or buts.”
Now I can’t have snacks without reading the label.
I’m banished for life to the peanut-free table.
My story is sad, but it’s also a fable:
no glory can come without guts!
If I could embark on a time travel mission
I’d go back and fire that pediatrician.
And when he asked why, I would cite his position:
“You’re right, I’m allergic to nuts.”
by Steven Kent
“Boris Johnson: We considered ‘aquatic raid’ on Netherlands to seize Covid vaccine”
—The Guardian
A plot was hatched at Number 10
By BoJo and his Merry Men
To cross the Channel late at night
And steal vaccine shots—crazy, right?
In retrospect, one has to laugh:
It’s not his worst idea by half.