Biology evolves ...

The great evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, scourge of creationists, was attending a conference in America. At the concluding banquet  he illustrated what is arguably his greatest contribution to biological science, that natural selection operates at the level of the gene, with a limerick.

An itinerant selfish gene
Said "bodies a-plenty I've seen
You think you're so clever 
But I'll live for ever
You're just a survival machine"

When I was at university, studying Zoology as it happens, religious thinking still resisted the concept of natural selection to some extent and tried to find holes in it. It has always struck me as ironic that Darwin was a devout Christian and Mendel an abbot. So to me:

The essence of science is doubt
There's a lot about which we know nowt
Belief is OK
At least in its way
But it stops us from finding things out.

My principal tutor was an authority on snails, as well as carrying the torch for natural selection. I notice from a recent magazine that they are still being studied, some 60 years later.

For years we've been studying snails
They're a lot more convenient than whales
Having only one foot
They mostly stay put
And when moving they leave you some trails

The other everlasting research animal is undoubtedly the fruit fly, about which by now there can hardly be anything wholly mysterious. Apparently we have now got round to investigating its motivation.

Now we know the genome of the fruit fly 
We can find out the code that it lives by
Its easy to feed 
And willing to breed
So what does it think we could next try

There was a ...

Now for a set of traditional "there was a ... " limericks from me. 

There was a young glutton from Hayle
Who ate all his food from a pail
Said his mother "Just wait
There's enough on the plate"
Said he "I could still eat a whale"

There was a young Pole came from Stettin
Whose fiancée objected to pettin'
"Stop being a prude
You look great in the nude
And anyway I'll see what I'm gettin'"

There was a young lady called Nancy
Who no one when sober could fancy
She was built like a tank
And what's more she stank
So getting up close was too chancy

And finally a Nantucket one:

The was a young girl from Nantucket
Hit hard on the head by a bucket
As her head rolled away
All her boyfriend could say
Was "you should have tried harder to duck it"

A happy New Year to everyone

Brexit

No set of limericks would be complete without something about Brexit, which is generating more heat at the moment than Hinkley Point C. It may turn out to be a triumph or a calamity, or more probably a shambles. We shall see.

 To start, Dumas’ three famous characters came to mind, so:

Just look at the three Brexiteers
And realise your very worst fears
With Pathos, Bathos and
Allamiss to hand
It's enough to reduce you to tears 

 

Please feel free to choose your own interpretation. Is there a d'Artagnan waiting in the wings do you think?

Take pity on poor Theresa
No news at the moment to please her
"Of course there's a plan
I'll tell when I can"
So unkind of her MPs to tease her

Clearly she's stuck between a rock and a hard Brexit, not helped by the mutterings of her Foreign Secretary on the subject of cake.

"We're having our cake and we're eating it
I've said it and now I'm repeating it
Don't listen  to them
It's all so much phlegm
They need us and will end up admitting it"

Sorry about the rhyming (or lack of it) in the last line.

Apparently there's a suggestion that we may offer the EU some form of subscription (i.e. bribe) to sort of stay in: about £350M a week perhaps. Sorry about the NHS.

We don't want to be part of the club
But perhaps if we offered a sub
They'd see their way clear
To make it appear
As if we were out - there's the rub

Clever Clogs

People have played all sorts of games with limericks, including one person who wrote one reading from bottom to top. When I was at school we had a prize for solving mathematical connundrums (connundra?) which I never won. We had a clever clogs in the class who always did, and went on to get a first. This limerick is by a British mathematician who would also no doubt have won.

12 + 144 + 20 + 3√4  + (5x11) = 9² + 0
               7

Or in English:

A dozen, a gross and a score
Plus three times the square root of four
Divided by seven
Plus five times eleven
Is nine squared and not a bit more

Another from the same Wikipedia source makes fun of the difference between pronunciation and spelling, in this case of the Scots name Menzies.

A lively young damsel named Menzies
Inquired:"Do you know what this thenzies?'
Her aunt with a gasp
Replied "It's a wasp
And you're holding the end where the stenzies"

Two more of the same, the first from me this time and the second modified from Brownielocks:

A girl who was dressed all in taupe
Was considered a bit of a daupe
Her parents despaired
Of getting her paired
Said her mother "there isn't a haupe"

An elderly bride from Port Jervis
Was quite understandably nervis
As her much younger groom
With three wives in the toom
Was insuring her during the servis

The next two were collected by Bennet Cerf, who, in his own words revised, dry cleaned and annotated them. The second one is particularly complicated, hence splitting the first line in two. It illustrates the incredible problems people learning English must have with pronouncing -ough, and that's not the only one!

There was a young girl in the choir
Whose voice went up hoir and hoir
'Till on Sunday night 
It vanished from sight
And turned up next day in the spoir 

The wind was rough ...
... and cold and blough
She kept her hands within her mough
It chilled her through
Her nose tuned blough
And still the squall the faster flough

And yet, although ...
... there was no snough
The weather was a cruel fough
It made her cough
Please do not scough
She coughed until her hat blough ough

Naughty Naughty

The following anonymous limerick is to be found in Wikipedia's entry on the limerick as poetry:

The limerick packs laughs anatomical
Into space which is quite economical
But the good ones I've seen
So seldom are clean
And the clean ones so seldom are comical

I don't necessarily agree, but many of the saucy ones are funny, although most would not qualify for an airing on the BBC. Otherwise serious writers, such as George Bernard Shaw thought that clean limericks were generally rather dull.  Be warned, some of the ones which follow are definitely saucy, but, at the same time, funny.

 Isaac Asimov, when not concocting laws for robots, wrote dirty (and funny) limericks. Here is one from his book "Lecherous Limericks":

There was a sweet girl of Decatur 
Who went to sea on a freighter
She was screwed by the master
An utter disaster
But the crew all made up for it later

I like this one, source unknown, though often quoted:

There was a young girl of Cape Cod
Who thought babies were fashioned by God
But 'twas not the Almighty
Who hitched up her nightie
'Twas Roger the lodger, the sod

This one is politically incorrect, but it sort of illustrates Mendel's first law:

There was a young lady called Starkey
Who had an affair with a darkie
The result of her sins
Was quadruplets not twins
One black, one white and two khaki

And finally, the first from AngelFire, and the second from me (do your own translation):

A wanton young lady from Wimley
Reproached for not acting quite primly
Said, "Heavens above!
I know sex isn't love,
But it's such an entrancing facsimile."

I knew it would just be my luck
At the end of our ultimate (activity often conducted in bed)
For her chap to appear
Full of whisky and cheer
With my (male appendage) irretrievably stuck

Nantucket ...

One of the oldest and most famous first lines for a limerick is "There was a young man from Nantucket". Its obvious rhyming potential has led to many rude limericks, but the earliest versions are rather more ingenious and cleaner. According to Wikipedia, the original one was:

There once was a man from Nantucket 
Who kept all his cash in a bucket
But his daughter, named Nan
Ran away with a man 
And as for the bucket, Nantucket

This led to variations on the same style, playing ingenious games with the first and last lines. Two of them are:

But he followed the pair to Pawtucket
The man and the girl with the bucket
And he said to the man
He was welcome to Nan
But as for the bucket, Pawtucket

Then the pair followed Pa to Manhasset
Where he still held the cash as an asset
But Nan and the man 
Stole the money and ran
As as for the bucket, Manhasset 

So, now two small additions to the series:

The man then went back to Nantucket
And put some more cash in the bucket
Nan flashed him a smile
And then ran a mile  
So once more the wily Nantucket

That foolish old man from Nantucket
Wept over the now empty bucket
With Nan on the run
Once again she had won
So all he could say was "Oh! fuck it"   

There now I've said it! 

Shakespeare Again

When writing the original post I thought of two more limericks on Shakespearian themes (loosely). The first, with apologies to the Scottish play (I'm not superstitious), is:

Why should we three meet again
In thunder, lightning or in rain
Oh bugger the weather
Let's  just get together
And move the whole scene out to Spain

When the remains of Richard III were found in a Leicester car park, I thought:

How sad for Richard of Gloucester
At Bosworth, his kingdom, he lost her
If he'd cried for a car
And got out faster by far
He wouldn't have ended in Leicester

It then transpired that Edward I's remains may be under a car park in Reading, which is even more down market I would have thought. I doubt if William the Conqueror would have been pleased.

Take pity on Edward the first
Another king whose ending was curs'd
Is Leicester or Reading
The best place to be dead in
I'm damn'd if I know which is worst