The Age of Nefarious

What, is it the Age of Aquarius this morning or something? Did everyone carry moonbeams home in a jar? Tim Blair's going on about daffodils in the sunlight, and Paco's got a video of penguins chasing a butterfly.

Sick! You people sicken me!

Be festy! Go to festivals!

Timing, as the man who turns up early to work on his day off will tell you, is everything. Well, I certainly admire the sense of timing and consideration shown by Melbourne arts and event administrators, as evidenced by their scheduling over the next month: at least five separate, major calendar events are happening, and if they're not exactly happening all at once, then they're certainly trying very hard to do so.

Check it out: the Melbourne Writers Festival goes from August 27 to September 5, which overlaps with the Darebin Music Feast, going from September 4 through to September 19, which runs concurrently with the Overland Poetry Festival, going from September 10 through to September 19, not to mention the similarly scheduled SF Aussiecon, running from September 2 to September 9, with the AFL Grand Final finishing proceedings on September 25. That's an event no-one knew about, running at the same time as an event no-one wanted to go to, and an event everyone wanted to avoid, as well as an event nobody would be able to get to anyway, concluding with an event that absolutely no-one in the world would want to attend apart from everyone else (who are nobody in particular, anyway). I suppose you might say all the events administrators wanted to help no-one, in as comprehensive a manner as possible.

It looks very much like those people concerned with Melbourne events (and what a concerning thing they are) wanted to help all those people who didn't want to attend those events, not attend several of the events, all at the same time. True, their organisation wasn't perfect, and many of the events still end up occurring at different times. And if people aren't careful they might find themselves actually attending one of the events, accidentally. In a few more years time, however, hopefully we will be able to see all of the above mentioned events happen at once, in the same place, and everyone can fail to attend the events at their leisure, perhaps in a little venue just down the road from the place at which everything is happening, known as 'home'.

In the future, perhaps, updated festival programs could contain not only all events, but all competing events, that you might attend in the event that their event is not the event you wanted to turn up to, eventually. Also, for full accuracy, they should, in all fairness, schedule in the activities that you partake in at 'home' during the time that their events are running (eg: 5 pm - 6 pm, playing with bits of string dangled in front of cats, drinking cup of tea, watching telly). I certainly know what I am planning to do at the time that the planners of those festival plans have planned their plans to take place, and my plans do not coincide well with the plans of the festival planners.

One day, hopefully, cultural festivals and events will be so hard to get to, that they will be left up to cultural professionals, who are paid to attend such events, and carry on with the awesome responsibility of making this city respectable and cultural and hip and sophisticated and urban and shit. In the meantime, the rest of us can just sit around at home being uninteresting, uncultured slobs, doing boring things like writing sonnets, or listening to music, or reading books, or watching DVDs, or holding dinner parties. I certainly look forward to it.

Brief record of my thoughts

1. What a nice cat Bea is.

2. Mmm, Milo.

3. This biscuit is tasty.

4. Ooh, that's a pretty website.

5. OHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGODAUSTRALIASTILLDOESN'THAVEANELECTEDGOVERNMENT!

6. I want another biscuit...

Soooo, is not caring about something at all better than very briefly, momentarily caring about something but then forgetting about it right away?

What did Chad ever do to deserve this?

Someone said on Paco's blog the other day that the prevalence of hung parliaments/hanging Chads right across the Anglosphere is mathematically pretty unlikely. That sounds about right. (It's happened in the US, twice, in the UK, in Tasmania, and Western Australia, and now the Australian Parliament. I'm sure there are other examples).

Applying Occam's Razor to find the simplest solution, I think you'll probably find that there's no simplest solution to this. It's so damn complex. I mean, it's not as if the political situation in the US, the UK, Australia, Tasmania, and Western Australia across the past decade are equivalent, though you might like to exaggerate the superficial similarities. (Not looking at anyone in particular...)

Really, what are you left with? You could argue that historical forces (whatever they are) caused it, and that this is just an example of cyclical history. Or you could postulate that it really is just sheer fluke of luck, an astounding historical coincidence. Or you could theorise that God caused it out of bloody-mindedness.

What's the simplest solution? I've no damn idea. Can we go for the most complex solution? Someone, give me a complex solution!

UPDATE! - Hang on, I've got it. A combination of the feng shui in the UK Parliament, and the alignment of certain astrological symbols over the United States, as well as the rise of the Jedi religion in Australia, the operation of the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, and a large proportion of Higgs Bosons over the Pacific Ocean have resulted in a fundamental karmic imbalance which has in turn caused the hung parliaments.

So all we need to do to solve this dilemma is to get together our leading astrologers, Taoists, Jedi priests, Buddhist monks, engineers, and theoretical physicists, perhaps creating a government department to facilitate their operations. So complicated it's simple.

Proposed Herald Sun article

CHILD VICTIMISED ON BIRTHDAY

A baby child has been brutally victimised, being slid down a narrow canal and then threatened by several adults with scissors today, police have been told.

And this traumatic experience occured... on the baby child's birthday.

Thankfully, this horrific event happened in a hospital, and the mother and experienced technicians were quickly there to save the child.

[Insert several more paragraphs, statistics about other children tormented on their birthdays in similar circumstances, reader poll, etc, etc]

...

Listening to Mahler's Lied von Erde while watching Australian Election Pokemon. There's got to be something wrong here...

(Hat tip to Helen!)

Godwins Law sub-clause viii

viii.
At a certain point, n, in the future, there will be a Downfall parody for every significant event of the 21st century.

Realiest

Oh look, I wrote a poem.

A really really really real Julia song

First Julia was fake
Then Julia was real
And now she’s even realier
And she has a real deal
For real jobs for Aussies
But she’ll need some real luck
To seal this real deal for real -
... Cos otherwise she’s f*ed.

The parable of the polls

CHAPTER 1
1. And it came to pass in the days of Gillard the Prime Minister and Abbott the Opposition Leader that three Opinion Polls stood in judgment over the land. 2. And lo! for a certain percentage of people were satisfied with the current form of Government, but a certain percentage of people were NOT; and the percentage that were not satisfied were greater than the percentage that WERE. And the Opinion Polls reflected this, with great prudence and wise judgments. 3. And there was great dissension and trouble through the land. 4. And people began to cast about saying, 'what can we do to save our DEMOCRACY? For surely if we do not, then the land will be troubled and famine and pestilence will follow soon after.' 5. And the Opinion Polls did say, 'a certain percentage of people are dissatisfied with the current form of Government, and a certain percentage that is significantly greater than the first percentage are NOT.' And they did further say, 'a certain percentage of people are dissatisfied with being dissatisfied, and a certain percentage of people that is significantly smaller than this, are NOT dissatisfied with their dissatisfaction.' 6. And the people bowed their heads to the wisdom of the Opinion Polls.

CHAPTER 2.
1. And therefore the Opinion Polls asked the people, SHOULD WE run for the leadership of THIS LAND? For verily, the prophets saith, we reflect the people's opinions better than the people themselves. 2. And the Opinion Polls did say, 'on a scale of one to ten, ten being 'STRONGLY APPROVE', and one being 'STRONGLY DISAPPROVE'', what do you think of us becoming LEADER and ruling over the LAND? 3. And the people did respond to the Opinion Polls. And some did say, '10', and some did say '1', and some did say a figure that was in between '1' and '10', yea, verily, some did even say a figure that was either higher or lower than '1' or '10'. Howsoever, these brethren were disqualified for statistical purposes. 4. But YEA, when all the opinions of the people were counted and weighed up, MORE people STRONGLY APPROVED of the proposition that the Opinion Polls should become LEADER of the LAND than those who STRONGLY DISAPPROVED. 5. And so it came to pass that the Opinion Polls did become Prime Minister and ruled over all the LAND. 6. And the people rejoiced.

CHAPTER 3
1. And the Opinion Polls did rule over the LAND for many years, and some people were satisfied with their leadership, and other people were dissatisfied. 2. But the politicians bowed their heads down to the Opinion Polls, and the newspapers bowed their heads down to the Opinion Polls, and the people did say, 'Oh well. They are only reflecting public opinion after all'. And their reign continued. 3. And every week the Opinion Polls would call a certain randomly selected group of people and ask of them, 'DO YOU STRONGLY AGREE, AGREE, NEITHER AGREE OR DISAGREE, DISAGREE, or STRONGLY DISAGREE that we should accept more refugees in our society', or 'THIS WEATHER IS SOMEWHAT UNSEASONABLE. Do you think it is caused by climate change? YES OR NO.' And the randomly selected people would respond. 4. And all agreed that the Opinion Polls were a wise and just ruler that reflected, in a statistical manner, their own opinions, if not all or a good deal of, then at least some of the time. 5. But in the latter years of their reign, the Opinion Polls began to ask strange questions, such as 'DO YOU LIKE WOMEN IN GREEN HATS? Please answer with a YES or a NO.' Or 'DO YOU STRONGLY AGREE, AGREE, NEITHER AGREE NOR DISAGREE, DISAGREE, or STRONGLY DISAGREE that YES OR NO questions on the question of 1 TO 10 questions on the issue of LEADERSHIP STABILITY reflect the opinions of the electorate? Please select A, B, or C.' And all of the people, save for the small proportion of theoretical statisticians, were somewhat puzzled. 6. And BEHOLD, then one day a GREAT TIDAL WAVE arose and drowned the entire south of Australia. And it was a disaster that had not been seen before or since. 7. And the Opinion Polls did say, 'DO YOU SAY YES or NO to the proposition that STRONGLY AGREEING, AGREEING, NEITHER AGREEING NOR DISAGREEING, DISAGREEING, STRONGLY DISAGREEING with 1 to 10 questions on a TWO PARTY PREFERRED BASIS are NEITHER SATISFYING NOR UNSATISFYING to WOMEN IN GREEN HATS.' 8. And even the theoretical statisticians, or statistical theoreticians, or whosoever else is supposed to be able to understand Opinion Polls, were somewhat puzzled. 9. And thousands of people died, which they found somewhat dissatisfying. 10. And the people did not rejoice. And they did vote the Opinion Polls out at the coming election.

CHAPTER 4
1. And the Opinion Polls did weep and wail and lament and rend their hair and gnash their teeth. 2. And the people rejoiced again. 3. And all was well. 4. Apart of course from all those people who died. 5. But they were too dead to care much. 6. This is the parable of the polls.

Badly hung parliaments

Measured ambiguities from Julia Gillard, triumphant equivocation from Tony Abbott, Channel Nine reporters and guests all saying bland generalisations over one another for hours, ABC reporters admitting they have no freakin' idea what's going on.

Well that was all a furiously exciting lack of conclusion to the election, then.

UPDATE! - And no need to fight over who lost, Tony and Julia. You can both be the losers. It's nice to share.

UPDATE AGAIN! - Oh yeah. Newly-elected Greens MP Adam Bandt apparently has 'love' as a major policy, and Bob Brown delivers the victorious speech of a party leader who has delivered one MP in the lower house compared to the ALP and the Coalition, who got over 70 MPs in. He also said something about baby whales.

To do list

Things to do

- Set a pigeon amongst the cats
- Find a crocodile and smile at it
- Take a knife to a spoon fight
- Make some lemons out of lemonade
- Turn an upside-down frown downside-down
- Find some sleeping dogs and shout at them
- Hit my head on a nail

Then go and climb into the wrong side of bed in preparation for the morning.

Preponderant ponderings on matters of chronological concern

I always liked that saying, 'be with you in two shakes of the lamb's tail'. It seems an exceedingly strange method of measuring the time, but rather pleasing in its absurdity nonetheless.

The Baron informed me today, to my surprise, that this phrase refers merely the time that the lamb will take to shake its own tail. Personally, I had always imagined that the speaker was talking as if they themselves were shaking the lamb's tail. I mean, you can't imagine that lambs would wander around shaking their own tails in a regular fashion merely to please humans, do you? This is a job we have to do for ourselves. Why humans would go around shaking lambs' tails, I do not know. Then again, there are a great many things we do not know about this world, so let's not tie ourselves into knots over this one. We probably shouldn't tie the lamb's tail into knots either, for that matter, a little shake would do.

UPDATE! - Just as it is with shaking lambs' tails, so is it with lambs' frisking, frollicking, frivolling, and gamboling on the meads. If there isn't a Department for the Management of Lambs' Frisking, Frollicking, Frivolling, and Gamboling on the Meads, there ought to be, as it is certainly much too serious an activity to be left up to the lambs themselves. It should be entirely supervised and performed by trained humans.

UPDATE UPDATE! - The Baronial Matriarch sends through this instructive video of a lamb gambolling. Please pay close attention:



Note effective deployment of bed springs for extra uplift, use of all available limbs, and frequent recourse to all four corners of the bed. Now just think how much more effective this gambolling could be if an experienced person had been in charge!

Watch the video again if you like. And again. Take all the time that you need. There is a lot to learn from it.

Crime news

Two villanelles were apprehended last night and charged for coupleting in a public place. The villanelles appeared in court today and pleaded not guilty for breaking poetic license, arguing they were being mistaken for similes. The two are thought to have recently committed a poetic sequence of crimes, including alliterating in the park, and walking animals off the cliche.

The two were charged to a ten word sentence in the stanza each, but were released on ellipsis...

The Tim Herald

HEADLINE: ALP campaign launch for economically straitened times: No expenses, frills, notes, thoughts.

SUB-HEADING: Liberal-National policies to cut back on excess expenses, love, compassion, kittens.

If Bram Stoker wrote the 2010 Australian election campaign

“But the important point is, there is no silver bullet” said the Federal Parliamentary Secretary for Health, as the preternatural canine that had just moments ago been Carruthers leapt snarling upon him and, with its newly-developed bestial fangs, ripped his throat out.

Miss Darkwood took the blunderbuss down from the wall, loaded it with a singler silver bullet, aimed it at the snarling beast, and fired.

UPDATE! - Miss Darkwood placed the blunderbuss back up on the wall, next to the cross, the wooden stake, the cloves of garlic, the pitchfork, the Chalcedonian dagger, the sword of power, the chalice of mystery, the jar of preserved spring sunshine, and the rather nice picture of a jenny wren, and located the latest copy of the Ladies Home Journal. She turned to the second page, where they were discussing the latest developments in the immigration debate. She frowned. She did not like the way this debate was progressing, not one little bit.

Toothpaste ruminations

One toothpaste tube by the sink the other day. Two toothpaste tubes by the sink a few days later. Three toothpaste tubes tonight.

I think they're breeding.

Though it does make you wonder, how does a toothpaste tube breed? Do their caps come off and... hmmm.

Perhaps you'd better stop wondering about this now.

Location location location smash bang

For the last year or so I've been working in a little corner to the back of the office, with a window fronting on to a laneway. The office that I work in sounds more or less like an office should, the corner that I sit in sounds more or less like any corner would, but the laneway that the window looks out over sounds, unfortunately, very much like a laneway. The laneway comes complete with trucks that sound very much like trucks should, a warehouse that sounds very much like a warehouse should, and objects being vigorously unloaded from the warehouse that sound very much like objects being vigorously unloaded from any old warehouse, anywhere in the world, should. In case you are in any doubt what vigorous unloading sounds like, several onomatopaeic terms should convey to you a general sense of these sounds, and their effect on your auricular cavities:

SMASH
CRASH
CLUTTER
SHATTER
BANG
SLAM
CLITTERCLATTER
CLATTERCLITTER
BLAM
LOUD
NOISE
HURT
RATTLE
CLASH!

Got that? So as you can imagine, this tends to have an effect on the, ahem, high quality documents that I'm banging up from the radio or television at any one time:

VERY IMPORTANT POLITICIAN: And I can reveal to you today SMASHCLATTERCLUTTERCLATTERNOISELOUDSMASH fiscal expenditure BLAMSLAMBLAMSLAMRATTLEBATTLEWARHURTDISORDERCLATTERCLITTERSHATTER and so you can see, there is absolutely no doubt at all that my party are absolute and utter economic and political geniuses, and you should vote for us immediately.

RADIO ANNOUNCER: Wow. You've convinced me.

Or:

ANGRY MAN: And so Mister SLAMBLAMCLATTER is actually HURTWOUNDSHATTER and also RATTLERATTLERATTLERATTLEBANGBANGSLAMBANG not to mention a BLAMSLAMCRASH did I just say that on radio?

RADIO ANNOUNCER: Yes, I think you just did.

ANGRY MAN: Whoops.

It's just a pity it hasn't happened more in pieces of this nature:

A CERTAIN FORMER PRIME MINISTER: Fair suck of the sauce bottle, Ms Reporter, can I just say this [INSERT SEVERAL MINUTES OF RATTLECLATTERBANG] programmatic specif [SEVERAL MORE MINUTES OF SAME] thank you for your time today, it's been a pleasure.

Bugger, hey?

If Matthew Reilly ever wrote a novel about killer watermelons

"Amid the rain of bullets, the head of the watermelon burst open like a watermelon..."

UPDATE! - Some amongst you may ask, "but why! Why on earth would a watermelon be a killer? What possible cause could make it go on a murderous psychopathic rampage?" Well, perhaps they were evil from the start, or perhaps it was society that turned them bad. But that is something that we will never know the answer to for sure. "Yes, but," you may ask, "it's a pretty bloody stupid idea for a novel, isn't it?" Well go tell that to Matthew Reilly; he's probably sold more novels than you, so I guess he'd know, wouldn't he?

Not that a watermelon's ever going to kill you. Probably. Though you never know.

They always let you down

Stupid anagrams. They always let you down. No matter how hard you try to fit the words 'NICE CHAP' or 'AWESOME DINOSAUR SLAYER' or even 'JOLLY EXCELLENT TYPE OCTOPUS' or perhaps 'ALPHABETICAL GALLIMAUFRY' or, just for fun, 'LIKE URANIUM SOFA' into the name TIMOTHY TRAIN', they just don't fit. What the hell do we pay you for, anagrams? Is it too much to ask? As a matter of fact, just about all you can get out of my name is

I AM TIT HYTRNO.

I'll bloody hytrno you, you hytrnoing hytrnoers!

Gluemy meditations

'What ho!' 'Pip pip!' 'Good show!' 'Whoopsa!' Just some of the many happy and cheerful calls that emanate from Plenty Road, the happy and cheerful little byway that runs happily and cheerfully behind our house. Well the calls are more like 'Arrrrrrrgh!' and 'Yeaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrgh!'*, but you get the idea. It's a happy and cheerful place to be all right, especially if you are doing, or rather being, on Plenty Road, at 1 or 2 or 3 o'clock on Saturday morning.

But the call that I just heard emanate from Plenty Road, about half an hour ago, took the cake, if the cake was made out of beer from the Plenty Road beer barn just down the, well, road.

'STUCK IN CLAG!'

Stuck in Clag, I thought? It is indeed concerning that you are stuck in Clag glue; I can certainly vouch for the fact that Plenty Road is not typically a place to feature Clag glue in copious quantities, certainly not enough to cause a grown woman to be stuck to the spot. Indeed it is a most curious, most anomalous incident, to be stuck in Clag glue on Plenty Road; I would tend to attribute the presence of Clag glue to a shopper, possibly a tram traveller who has dropped one or two of their glue-related items on the ground, doubtless while on their way home to begin an exciting craft project using glue. But enough Clag to cause you to be stuck in it? One would begin to suspect the presence of a sinister Clag factory, lurking in the background, waiting for you to perambulate by, whereupon said Clag factory would upend its contents onto you, the innocent passerby, thereby causing you to be riveted to the spot, as it were, and also, well, stuck. In Clag.

An obviously distressing incident, whatever it happened to be: so distressing, that, if I am not mistaken, I heard the unfortunate person whom this happening happened to happen to mispronounce her words, so that the 'ST' in 'STUCK' appeared to sound more like 'F' and the 'C' in 'CLAG' seemed to be said more like 'S', and the whole phrase, indeed, sounded less like 'STUCK IN CLAG' and more like...

Oh.

Following this embarrassing misapprehension, I let the goodly woman cheerfully walking down Plenty Road continue walking cheerfully down it, and turned instead to Beatrice and attempted to teach her how to miaow in Chinese. It was not easy.

*Or variations on that theme involving the letters 'a', 'r', 'g', 'h', and 'y', and on rare occasions, one of the standard Mongolian plosives.

The!

ALBANY PRIMARY SCHOOL, SATURDAY - Scandal has once again erupted during the election campaign, when Opposition Leader Tony Abbott uttered a definite article in the course of a press conference. The fatal 'the' occurred after Abbott had feasted on the brains of several journalists, offered up the heart of Annabel Crabb as a sacrifice to his zombie-demon master, and delivered copies of his just-announced education policies to the rest, and drooled witlessly over Albany School floor.

Commentators are now saying that the occurrence of Abbott's 'the' has called into question his fitness to lead, his ability to understand women voters, his integrity, the consistency of his policies, and his talents at witless drooling while saying nothing of substance whatsoever. Political advocacy group GetUp! has already released a five minute video of women saying the definite article 'the' over and over again in a patronising tone, and several union and Labor attack ads are also said to be on the way.

However, the attention of the media may already have been distracted due to the release of yet leaked Labor document. The document, apparently transcripts of a Labor cabinet meeting, feature several Cabinet members screaming in a horrified and tortured fashion, and Gillard and Rudd gargling meaninglessly as they feast on their carcasses. According to several media reports, the Labor leak calls into question Labor's stability, capability of dealing with fine policy details, its economic credentials, and commitment to whatever it is that cannibalistic monsters with anthropophagic tendencies are supposed to be committed to.

Whatever the public may conclude about all these definite articles, Labor leaks, et cetera, one thing is clear: Australian democracy is the real winner.

UPDATE! - While we're talking politics, this just occurred to me: since Julia Gillard's so eager for debates, why doesn't she debate herself? Real Julia v. Fake Julia. I'd watch it.

Important information

My underpants have four holes in them: two for my legs, one for my waist, and one is a speed hole. It makes the underpants go faster. Why I should want my underpants to go faster than the rest of me, I have no idea.

My jumper also has an extra hole in it, but it's not a speed hole. It's just for decoration.

Anyway, now that I have divulged this vitally important information to you, you may carry on living your lives in a completely ordinary fashion. Thank you for your time.

His beard was curly-whirly

His beard was curly-whirly
And the wind was high,
It was stormy hurly-burly,
But his beard was curly-whirly,
So silken, soft and swirly,
That he laughed into the sky:
For his beard was curly-whirly,
And the wind was high.

Cheering little tomes

Just lately I've been a little bit obsessed. Depressed, even. With some manic mood swings, lurching from fear to a state of relative complacency, in which I am unaware that fear lurks around the corner once more. I've been staying up late, and when I have gone to bed I've found myself waking up an hour or two later, thinking over the recent cause of my fear.

No, in case you're wondering, I'm quite healthy actually. I haven't been suffering from any mental illness, I've just been reading a book. This book, by Kirstyn McDermott, who you may know if you know people in the Melbourne SF community. Basically, I've been in a completely ordinary state of utter-obsessive-depressive-manic-compulsive-schizoid-paranoid-delusive-insomniac-normality, all held together by this cheering little tome containing such themes as suicide, Satanism, witchcraft, and possession, with one or two suitably lurid and blood-drenched scenes to provide a little light and colour along the way.

Reading is good, kids! It's so life affirming!

Anyway, you should all go out and grab a copy of Kirstyn's book too; it's a gripping read and one of the most intelligent fictional explorations of love and grief that I've encountered for a long time. Me, I'm moving on to another book, another cheering little tome that begins with one of the main characters being 'skewered to the floor', through the heart, with a long-knife, and ends on a point of relative ease and stability, in those carefree few months before the start of the first world war.

They never told me it would be like this when they started me on The Happy Man and His Dump Truck, did they...?

You're wearing my dress, bitch!

Noticed at work today that two of the alpha males appeared to be wearing exactly the same shirt.

Oh, they seemed to be conversing happily and completely at ease with the world. But I wasn't deceived. It probably came to fisticuffs over the water cooler moments later. Oh, wait, we don't have a water cooler... so maybe just passive aggressive sticky notes on one another's desk.

Kitty Katter

This ad for Bob Katter is cute, but I think it needs a slight rewrite:



When Kennedy needs a strong politician
When a battle requires a man on a mission
Just like Chernobyl needs some nuclear fission
When the roads are flooded and the cyclones blowin
When our farmers are down and the crops just aint growin
When yer pants are down and yer arse crack's showin
When there’s crocs on the loose or a cow’s gone astray,
Yer property rights are being stripped away
When the fruit needs pickin when its dark in the mines
When its tight on the till or yer stop at the signs
When yer nose needs pickin but it’s too dark to see
When the loo’s got a hole and it can’t hold yer pee
When you need someone who can put up a fight
A voice in Canberra that stands up for what’s right
Bob’s on the job all day and all night.
DON'T VOTE FOR KATTER! HE'S ABSOLUTE SHITE!
(Via The Punch)

The moley sonnets, v. VIII, p. 109

How firft mine eyef begin to twitche
When JULIA her fkirt doth hitch
And blazonnes bare
Her SKINNE fo faire
And vigoroufly ftarts to itche.

How fervently my heart doth beate
When then I fee her ankles neate
When from her heels
She NYLON peels
That clafps unto her aunckles fweete.

How I with ftille more raptour gaze
Af JULIA unclafps her ftays
And fcratcheth muche
With lightfome touche
The BOSOME that fhe wide difplays.

But o! How like a newbloomed rofe,
My love for her, it gladfome grows,
When I efpy
With mine own eye
Her FINGER float forth to her nofe...

Another piece from Erick Herrick, estranged cousin of Robert Herrick. Read it and weep, fchmucks!