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Pastimes : A Poetry Corner -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MSB who wrote (36)	8/28/1998 2:07:00 AM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 1582

Hello, Mike! In less than 300 pages, here is a fragment from a poem and a brief but humorous look at history!!! The Dogsbody Family: An introductory romp "Dawdle with Dogsbody, Peeking at History, Through lenses quizzical - Or with a grin! See how the family, Quasi-ubiquitous, Seems to get into things Up to its chin!" **************************************************************** c.15000 B.C. The Discovery of the Wheel Stone Scratched by Ugg Dugg Budd: Was chipping a flint in the cave when young Mugg came rushing in, very excited, and shouting that he had made a great discovery. Not again! What will become of the lad I do not know. He is continually messing about with bits of trees, earth of different colours and things, instead of gathering berries and beetles like anyone normal of his age. Well, what was it this time? 'Round things roll,' he blabbered. I patiently explained that everybody knew that - otherwise we wouldn't have a word 'roll' in the vocabulary. You can't have words for things you haven't discovered yet. Oh yes, he knew that, he said, but what he had in mind was somehow to get three or four round objects, and put a flat object on top. You could then sit on this, or put heavy things on it, and so move about more easily. Still patient, because you can chip a flint and talk at the same time, I explained that he had evidently forgotten one important fact. What was that? It was that round things roll, right enough, but only downhill. So what happened when you got to the bottom with your contraption, even if you ever managed to fix it together? Did he expect it to roll back up again? Of course, we didn't know why round things rolled downhill and not uphill, but that was beside the point. It was just nature, that was all, and we would just have to live with it. Like, well. . .like having to live with bare feet.. So his idea was preposterous. He hadn't an answer. Pressing home the advantage, I gave him a long lecture about wasting his time on fantasies, instead of doing a useful job for the community, like keeping the food coming in. I ended up with the most absurd example I could think of, to show him the error of his ways. I put it to him: did he think it reasonable to expect that one day we would be able to make a fire right here in the cave, when we wanted it, instead of having to trudge all the way up the bloody volcano in bare feet to get it? That really finished him. But you can't win, with the young. He is still not out gathering with the others, but sits twiddling about with two bits of wood and handfuls of moss. The weakness is on his mother's side. She had a cousin who went raving mad, and tried writing on dried animal skins. We did our best to explain to him that they would rot down in no time at all, so that posterity would get precisely nothing from us. But he couldn't see it. W.S. BROWNLIE from The Dogsbody Papers or 1066 and All This, Compiled and edited by E.O. Parrott