Down vs. across

This turn-of-the-eighteenth-century poem reads one way down, another way across. The "down" version was politically orthodox back in the reign of George I, whereas the "across" version represented treasonous Jacobite sympathies.

I love with all my heart	The Tory party here
The Hanoverian part	Most hateful doth appear
And for their settlement	I ever have denied
My conscience gives consent	To be on James's side
Most glorious is the cause	To be with such a king
To fight for George's laws	Will Britain's ruin bring
This is my mind and heart	In this opinion I
Though none should take my part	Resolve to live and die

Summer haiku

How gracefully she
   inhaling the red roses
      goes down on her knees.

A haiku

Quantum mechanics:
    Which moves through the springtime pond?
        Frog or a ripple?

This is post 200.

"Irrumabo vos et pedicabo"

In my first year of college, long ago,
I took a class on Ovid and Catullus.
One of the sexual poems I found confusing,
and the book we were using
was quite devoid of commentary on it,
grammatical or otherwise.

So at the next class, I asked my professor
what the poet meant by such-and-such.
He was hesitating, doubtful, maybe-yes-maybe-no.
Yet at the following meeting of the class,
he was entirely changed:
he explained forthrightly just how the poem worked.

I could not understand the sudden change
until I looked about the studentry
and saw the only female student
absent that day.
I was shocked and outraged --
naïve nerd from a feminist family that I was --
to think that a professor! of the liberal arts!
and of Latin of all things! could be so sexist,
so crude, so utterly indifferent to his duties
to all his students.

Many years later, it occurred to me to wonder
if he had sunk so low as to ask her
to be absent that day so that he could answer my questions.
All the worse, I thought.
All the worse.

Looking back today, I think:
perhaps he was, poor man, in a cleft stick,
caught between the fear of being accused of harassment
by the woman for openly discussing sex in class,
and the fear of having his dean (who happened to be my mother)
coming down on him for neglecting the questions
of her precious darling (little did he know
that while she might have disapproved,
she would never have punished him for that --
my mother believed in justice).

It's a hell of a thing
when students can't learn
for fear or for shame
what the poets sing.

Well, wuddaya know

Here's a poem in blank verse:

Oh, moralists, who treat of happiness
And self-respect, innate in every sphere
Of life, and shedding light on every grain
Of dust in God's highway, so smooth below
Your carriage-wheels, so rough beneath the tread
   Of naked feet, bethink yourselves
   In looking on the swift descent
Of men who have lived in their own esteem,
That there are scores of thousands breathing now,
And breathing thick with painful toil, who in
That high respect have never lived at all
Nor had a chance of life! Go ye, who rest
So placidly upon the sacred Bard
Who had been young, and when he strung his harp
Was old...

Go, Teachers of content and honest pride,
   Into the mine, the mill, the forge,
The squalid depths of deepest ignorance,
And uttermost abyss of man's neglect,
And say can any hopeful plant spring up
In air so foul that it extinguishes
The soul's bright torch as fast as it is kindled!

Who wrote it? Well, Charles Dickens, in Martin Chuzzlewit. What's that? You didn't know Dickens was a poet? Well, the above passage appears, printed as prose, in Chapter 13, with the additional words "and had never seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging their bread" between the two stanzas, quoted from Ps. 37:25. Such things can prose writers fall into when they are trying to be high-flown and not watching themselves carefully.

Kudos to H. W. Fowler for spotting this example.

The War (after Simonides)

This is a villanelle, a very special verse form that I have taken some liberties with. I had always wanted to write one, but I never could come up with a couplet strong enough to support all the required repetitions. It finally dawned on me that the couplet didn't have to be original with me, if I was clever enough about it.

Even if you don't click on all the links, be sure to mouse over them: they provide a first-level commentary on the poem.

"Go and tell the Spartans, passerby,"
   The man of Keos sings in lines that soar,
"That here, obedient to their laws, we lie."

The king of Lakedaimon will not fly,
   Though "Kill them all!" the hordes of Persia roar:
Go and tell the Spartans, passerby.

The news is carried of their terse goodbye
   From Hot Gates to far Atlantic shore
That there, obedient to their laws, they lie.

The law of nations ready to defy,
   Atlantis rising plots aggressive war --
Go and tell the Persians, passerby.

The Archon smiles, and smiles: real men don't cry.
   His friends sell not reality but lore
As here, obedient to his will, they lie.

Boxed in flags, the dead all verse deny.
   They cannot serve their country any more.
"Go and tell our people, passerby,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie."

The Song of the End-of-lifed

I posted this to xml-dev on a Friday afternoon back in 2003. No tune is required, but you can sing it to any of various tunes that fit the original if you want to.

We have fed our code with a thousand docs
  And still it cries unfed,
Though there's never a tag of all those tags
  But marks our hackers dead:
We have sent our best through the standards mess,
  Past the Borg and the Borg's own gull,
If blood be the price of SGML,
  By Charles, we ha' paid in full!

There's never a flood on the list we love
  But it trashes the posts we wrote;
There's never an ebb of sensible mail
  But the poets come out, quote unquote,
With their haiku (bad) and their limericks (worse),
  And their double dactyls too.
If blood be the price of XML,
If blood be the price of XML,
  By Jon, we ha' pushed it through!

So we'll parse our well-formed marked-up text,
  For that is our doom and our pride,
As it was when they punched on the 029
  So it is with the Code Worldwide.
Though we disagree upon every point
  To this one fact we can swear:
If blood be the price of XSLT,
If blood be the price of XSLT,
If blood be the price of XSLT,
  By James, we ha' paid it fair!
      --Not Rudyard Kipling

Yet another filk

Not many people have heard of the song Lillibulero today, though many have heard the tune on the BBC World News Service without knowing what it was, or that it's generally attributed to Henry Purcell. I was reading an article about the near-total loss of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, made famous by the Ernest Hemingway story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro". Shortly thereafter, I found the chorus of this song dancing in my head. The classic BBC version is on YouTube; it has about the right tempo, but it's only one verse + chorus. You'll need to put it on Loop (right click on the video before starting it) if you want to sing along. The original lyrics, history, other versions, and much more are at Wikipedia.

Ah, brother mine, have you read the report?
Kilimanjaro's melting away.
The summers grow long, the winters grow short:
Kilimanjaro's melting away.

Chorus:

'Jaro, 'Jaro, Kilimanjaro,
All of your snows are melting away;
'Jaro, 'Jaro, 'Jaro, 'Jaro,
Kilimanjaro, melting away.

The rain it will fall, the storm it will storm,
Kilimanjaro's melting away.
Our planet is growing unpleasantly warm,
Kilimanjaro's melting away.

Chorus

There is a prophecy found in old books,
Kilimanjaro's melting away,
The world will be ruled by dimwits and crooks,
Kilimanjaro's melting away.

Chorus

And if we don't change our culture of waste,
Kilimanjaro won't be alone.
Antarctican ice will slip off its base,
Katrina will look like a weekend at home.

Chorus:

London, London, New York and London,
Bangkok and Singapore under the waves.
Global warming, global warming ‒
Hundreds of millions in watery graves.

'Jaro, 'Jaro, Kilimanjaro,
All of your snows are melting away;
'Jaro, 'Jaro, 'Jaro, 'Jaro,
Kilimanjaro, melting away.

A diamond-shaped poem on XML schema languages

First, here's the poem:

WXS:
Complex, inflexible,
Boggling, wearying, proliferating,
Circumscribed, inadequate. Future-proofed, compartmentalized,
Systematizing, pleasing, sufficing,
Straightforward, simplified --
RNG!

The constraints on this kind of poem is that there are seven lines: lines 1 and 7 contain one noun, lines 2 and 6 contain two adjectives, lines 3 and 5 contain three present participles, and line 4 contains four past participles. I cheated slightly: inadequate is derived from a Latin past participle.

I decided to add a syllabic constraint as well: the syllable lengths in each line are 3, 6, 10, 15, 10, 6, 3, corresponding to a binomial distribution.

Horhorn, quickening, and wombfruit

Someone asked me the meaning of the following signature line that I use:

Deshil Holles eamus. Deshil Holles eamus. Deshil Holles eamus.
Send us, bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening, and wombfruit. (3x)
Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa! Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa! Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa!

saying: "It reads like the gibbering of a schizophrenic. Is it anything but?"

It is, indeed, anything but. The text is from the "Oxen of the Sun" chapter of James Joyce's novel Ulysses, and consists of remarks that can be heard in and around Holles Street maternity hospital in Dublin. Deshil is Irish for "street", eamus is Latin for "let's go"; the speakers are medical students, who know enough Latin and Irish to fool around in both languages, even simultaneously.

The "Send us" line is the prayer of the expectant mothers. I do not know exactly what "Horhorn" means, but "quickening" is pregnancy, and "wombfruit" is a baby, with reference to the familiar prayer to Mary: "... and to the fruit of thy womb, Jesus." Indeed, the German version "Schick uns, du Heller, du Lichter, Horhorn, Leben und Leibesfrucht" leaves "Horhorn" untranslated. (3x) is just my way of saving space; the original repeats this line, like the others, three times.

As for the last line, it represents what someone (the midwife or obstetrician) is saying at the delivery of a male infant, perhaps a first child (they tend to linger a long time). The German version is straightforward: "Hopsa, ein Jungeinjung."

Old Irish satire

Although Westerners have pretty well given up believing that the name is the thing, or even that there's some kind of resonance between names and things, it hasn't always been so. My ancestors were about as western as you can get in Europe, and they used names to induce malefactors to commit suicide: "sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can really mess me up."

Here are a few examples of Old Irish satire, that most feared of all arts:

A satire on Bres, "the first satire made in Ireland", from the story of the Second Battle of Mag Tuireadh.

Cen cholt for crib cernini,
Without food quickly on a dish,

cen gert ferbba fora n-asa aithrinni,
without cow's milk on which a calf thrives,

cen adba fir iar ndruba disoirchi,
without a man's dwelling after the staying of darkness,

cen dil daimi rissi,
without a storyteller band's payment,

ro sain Brisse.
so be Bres.

A "poem to raise blisters" from Cormac's Glossary:

Maile baire gaire Caier
Evil, death, short life to Caier

combeodutar celtra cath Caier
May battle spears slay Caier

Caier diba Caier dira Caier foro
Caier by land, Caier by earth, Caier rejected

fomara fochara Caier.
Under mound, under rocks, Caier.

And a single line from a much longer satire; each word means "I will satirize" using three different roots:

gromfa gromfa glamfa glamfa aerfa aerfa

I suspect that these curses probably did "work" in their context: an intensely shame-oriented (as opposed to guilt-oriented) culture in which people identified extremely strongly with their public reputations, to the point where the destruction of that reputation could send them into overwhelming depression. (God knows it isn't so today: the Irish have acquired an overwhelmingly guilt-oriented culture somewhere along the way.)

I often wonder if Japan might have been able to escape the spiral of events leading to World War II if they had institutionalized public satire as an escape valve.

Go away, you silly samurai, or I will satirize you ... a second time!

Question and answer

On a mailing list I was administering, a user enquired:

All quiet: no whines,
no rants, no eye-glazing screeds;
Was I unsubscribed?

I replied:

No, not at all, Sir.
Our view of you is unchanged.
Fix your spam filters.

Chapter titles

These are the chapter titles of Hal Clement's novel Fossil: Isaac's Universe, exactly as given on the table of contents, except that I have titlecased and punctuated them.

1. Where jumpers suffer more from wind than weight,
2. And air is made for swimming, not for flight,
3. The best precautions may be taken late
4. And icy death can come from sunlit night.
5. Here hills maintain their stance no more than waves
6. And clearest trails the keenest minds misguide:
7. A closely followed road no distance saves
8. And clues may oft but little help provide.
9. Clear sight may not provide the clearest view;
10. The closest search may furnish but a hint;
11. But new light on a scene may show it true
12. And word unknown guide straighter than a print.
13. Every idea has to face its test
14. And still be "only theory" at its best.

There is also an Epilogue.

"To Althea From Prison"

To Althea From Prison
Richard Lovelace (1618-1658)

When Love with unconfined wings
Hovers within my gates,
And my divine Althea brings
To whisper at my grates;
When I lie tangled in her hair
And fettered with her eye
The birds that wanton in the air
Know no such liberty.

When flowing cups pass swiftly round
With no allaying Thames,
Our careless heads with roses crowned,
Our hearts with loyal flames;
When thirsty grief in wine we steep,
When healths and draughts go free,
Fishes that tipple in the deep
Know no such liberty.

When, linnet-like confined,
With shriller throat shall sing
The mercy, sweetness, majesty
And glories of my King;
When I shall voice aloud how good
He is, how great should he,
The enlargèd winds, that curl the flood,
Know no such liberty.

Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage:
If I have freedom in my love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone, that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty.

The famous lines (the first two of the last stanza) also express a legal truth: you can be "falsely imprisoned" without any sign of stone walls or iron bars.

Geolibertarianism in rhyme

There was a man named Henry George
Of land monop'ly quite the scourge.
Wealth, said he, is what we make
For profit or consumption's sake:
Stone axe, print book, or Jedi saber,
We make them with Capital, Land, and Labor.

The natural world, you understand,
Is what economists mean by "Land";
Including sea and sky and soil,
And iron, forests, coal, and oil.
"Capital"'s wealth used for production;
On "Labor" we need no instruction.
The return on Labor we call "Wages"
(All this is written on many pages,
Paper and Web; I can barely tap it all);
"Interest" is what's paid to Capital.
And those who by some accident
Own Land, we pay them what's called "Rent".

This maxim Henry carved in stone:
Ourselves, ourselves are what we own.
The products of our mind and hand
Are at no other man's command.
But what is not of our own making
Is anyone's at all for taking,
Provided (this point is due to Locke)
They leave enough so as not to block
Others from taking Land as good
That still is free, it's understood.

If this is so, then why endure
So many who are so very poor?
Simple: we've decided to pay
All Rent to those who (as we say)
By hook or crook have gotten hold
By being there first and being bold.

Then they, or their heirs, get to collect
(Waking or sleeping) what they expect
The traffic will bear. The rest of us
Must pay what they ask, without any fuss,
Or else go scratch -- for without Land
There is no scope for mind or hand.
The amount of Land is fixed, you know,
Higher prices won't make it grow.
(The self-same law we can construe
Of those who own ideas too.)

Why should the rest of us pay Rents
To their current recipients?
Their title's not one we should endorse,
It is commonly based on force.
Instead, community Rent collection
(The so-called "Single Tax") based on inspection
And assessment, would be just
And pay for services that we must
Have, like national defense,
Safe water, protection of innocence.

What's this to do with XML?
Quite a bit. You see, Ideas as well
As Land belong to all mankind.
If we technologists allow the blind
And greedy to enclose this space,
A commons of the human race,
We and our children will be paying
Forevermore (it goes without saying)
To Concept-owners, past all praying.

So by this maxim be impressed:
Use the tools that work the best.
Do not yield your sovereign judgement,
To any sort of political fudgement.
The criterion of sound design
Should be, must be, your guideline.
And if you're designing documents,
Try RNG. We charge no rents.

The folk process

I got curious about a song half-remembered from my childhood and spent a few hours tracking it down. It makes a marvelous example of the folk process at work, as well as what happens to Irish when the Americans (even those of Irish or Scots-Irish descent) get a hold of it.

The original song is "Shule Aroon", and the first verse and chorus look like this:

I would I were on yonder hill
'Tis there I'd sit and cry my fill,
And every tear would turn a mill,
Is go dtéidh tú, a mhuirnín, slán!

Siúl, siúl, siúl, a rúin!
Siúl go socair, agus siúl go ciúin,
Siúl go dtí an doras agus éalaigh liom,
Is go dtéidh tú, a mhuirnín, slán!

On arrival in the colonies, the song split into two versions. The better-known one shed its Irish altogether, acquired a Revolutionary War motif, and became:

Here I sit on Buttermilk Hill,
Who should blame me cry my fill?
And every tear would work a mill,
Johnny has gone for a soldier.

Buttermilk Hill is in Westchester County, New York; supposedly dairy cattle were hidden there during the Revolution to protect them from raiders from either side. The tune changed too, but all versions can be sung to all tunes, so I ignore this.

But in the southern U.S., where there were lots of Irish and Scots-Irish people, the Irish was retained in singing but its meaning was forgotten and its phonetics garbled. This version was collected in Arkansas in 1958, when I was busily being born:

Well, I wish I was on yonders hill
There I'd set and cry my fill
Every drop would turn a mill
Ish come bibble ahly-boo-so-real.

Shule-shule-shule-a-roo
Shule-like-shagrus-spilly-bolly-qule
First time I saw spilly-bolly-eel
Ish come bibble ahly-boo-so-real.

Not too much later, I learned the "Buttermilk Hill" version but with the following chorus:

Shool, shool, shool a rool,
Shool a rack-a-shack, shool-a-barbecue,
When I saw my Sally-baba-yeel,
Come bibble in the boo-shy laurie.

And so over the past 200+ years, Irish has slowly turned to complete gibberish.... Ghu only knows what will happen to the song if Americans keep singing it for the next 200 years!

Update: The Irish means roughly "Go, go, go, my love / Go quietly and go peacefully / Go to the door and fly away from me / And may you go safely, my darling."

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Also the names of Emory P. Gray,
Mr. and Mrs. Dukes, and Oscar Baer
Of Seventeen West Fourth Street, Oyster Bay.
     --Morris Bishop

More tidbits of truth and fiction

I decided this was too long and moved the top half to another posting.

The state of New York, where I live, is divided into counties, and each county is fully partitioned into towns, cities, and Indian reservations. The term "village" also has legal significance: a village must be contained in a county, can overlap various towns, but cannot overlap any cities. A city can unilaterally (if the state legislature agrees) incorporate any towns adjacent to it, but cannot incorporate an adjacent city without a reciprocal agreement. Therefore, New York City is completely surrounded by technical cities, some of them quite small.

It's been said that technology cannot solve business problems, but automobile technology solved the business problems of the buggy-whip manufacturers rather well. Internal-combustion buggy whips save the industry, but with an engine in the handle, the whips were too unbalanced and hit the horses too hard.

In Latin class, I once said something to the effect that Caesar won such-and-such a battle multo equo 'with much horse'. Priscian's head shrank and cracked. It should have been multis equis, of course -- 'with many horses'. I'm still blushing.

Roses are red,
violets are blue,
I have D.I.D.,
and so do I.

There are basically five known roots of the writing-system tree: Egyptian hieroglyphics (which led to the Semitic syllabaries), Chinese characters, cuneiform, Cretan (Linear B etc.), and Mesoamerican. In some cases, we are dealing with "stimulus diffusion" rather than direct inheritance: the idea of writing Georgian must have been derived from the Greek alphabet, as the order of the letters shows, but their actual shapes seem to owe nothing to Greek script.

English is full of idioms involving the word "Dutch". Here's a few: Dutch anchor 'a useless object (archaic)', Dutch uncle 'someone who talks to you patronizingly', Dutch treat 'each pays for himself, thus not a treat at all', Dutch auction 'the price is lowered until someone bids', if that's so I'm a Dutchman '[emphatic negation]', Dutch courage 'courage induced by alcohol', double Dutch 'jargon'.

I'm glad to see that H. L. Mencken's rewrite of the U.S. Declaration of Independence in spoken American made it to the Net.

At International Falls, Minnesota, on the Canadian border in the heart of the heart of North America, the annual temperature range is about -25 C to +25 C, with the records (not in the same year) being -51 and +46. Average precipitation days per year is only 132, certainly far from rain-forest conditions, but still involving plenty of rain (660 mm per year) and snow (1524 mm per year). International Falls is distinctly noticeable on the U.S. weather map as usually being at the center of the most brightly colored spot.

My wife, many moons ago, worked for GTE in Florida as a long-distance operator — this was before, or nearly before, subscriber-dialed long distance. People typically asked for numbers by city and local number, or even city and subscriber name, and she set up the trunk connection. When she moved to Denver, she got the same job with Mountain Bell. One day, a subscriber asked to be connected with such-and-such a number in "Hollywood". He meant Hollywood, California, of course, but out of habit my wife promptly forwarded him to the same number in Hollywood, Florida. And there was much confusion.

Little Boxes (thanks, Malvina, wherever you are)

Little boxes in the colo,
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,
Little boxes, little boxes,
Little boxes, all the same.
There's a Dell one and a Sun one
And a Blue one and a Compaq one
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all run just the same.

And the folks that write the programs
All go to the university,
And they all get put in cubicles,
Little boxes, all the same.
And write systems for e-commerce
And XML Web Services,
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.

And they all play their RPGs,
And write in their blogs by night,
And they all have pretty pictures,
Pretty pictures, all the same.
And the pictures all have metadata
And they export it with RDF
And they all get put in aggregators
And they all come out the same.

And the geeks go into business,
And their start-ups raise some capital
And their code gets put in boxes,
Little boxes, all the same.
There's a Perl one and a Java one
And a Lisp one and a Python one
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all lose just the same.

Tune

24 ways of looking at Dao De Ching 33

It's too big to be a blog entry, so see my web page on it.