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An Ode to Pizza (and Other Sillinesses)
Because the conversation drifted that way (with a little nudge here and there, perhaps) – and because @arahant pointed out that we had in fact arrived there through the pizza grove – I found myself drafting odes to that prince of foodstuffs. Oh, all right, it’s a fair cop, it doesn’t take much to start me riffing poetical and, falling among good company (ahem), a couple of parodies were but the work of a minute or three:
O, for a flice triangular! that hath been warmed
A decent while in the earthen oven,
Tasting of sunlit slope and thyme-flowers green,
Good cheese and not the box, and companionable talk!
But not with a beaker of faery wine,
Which twinkles, bubbling, at the brim,
Or else I should slip,
Like old Rip, drifting in to the Pizza Grove,
And fade far away into the forest dim …
There should be warning figns up:
Beware the Pizza Grove, my son,
The salmon that wafts, the pansy to catch,
Beware the Arugula Leaf, and shun
The frumptious Dandelion Patch!
(With apologies to Messrs. Keats and Carroll.)
So, good friends, draw up a chair and a slice, if you will; cut yourself a piece of the pie, be you so inclined.
What bad (or good) poetic riffs, parodies, or songs might you have to share? What anecdotes on that noble dish might you have the crust to advance?
Come one, come all, gather round – have a coffee (or something stronger if it’s getting later) or a nice cup of tea, and gather ’round the fire and chat.
(Thanks again go to Monsignor Arahant for ſetting my typography ſtraight here.)
(Edit: Oh, and before I forget, thanks and acknowledgment are due too to @percival whose remarks on the dangers of suspicious salading helped inspire the latter riff.)
Published in Humor
Love the tags.
Thankee indeed, kind sir. You probably helped inspire at least half of them, be it fairly ſaid.
As for poetry pizzetical, let me ſee what I can dredge up from the murky deeps of the ſwamp.
What have I unleaſhed?! Kind friends, I knew not what I did! (Only in good humour, of courſe, you underſstand.)
There once was a fellow from Greenwich,
Whoſe given name was Heneage.
Be that as it may,
Though the cauſe ſome ſay,
He preferred his pizzas with ſpinach.
Though I cannot but deplore this ſpinacheous tendency, a fine addition to the pantheon of pizza poetry, be it rightly said!
I went back and fixed the eſses. 😜
A welcome improvement, but oh deary me, what have we started?
Or ſtarted?
ſsteady … (How doeſ one deal with the capitals and ſtill give it the welcome olde-time ſavour, one wonders?):
Now that one’s going to be written down and uſed againſt me …
The reason it was called a medial ſ, is that it was in the middle, meaning in the middle of a word or at the beginning if not capitalized. Capital S was always just a capital S. Then there was the terminal s, which was used at the end of words or sometimes as the second s in a pair. For instance:
or:
You live and learn: Another post on orthography and typography beckons? (And not juſt ’cos yours truly is hoping to ‘overhear education without paying’, to borrow another wee dram from The Wee Free Men, which surely needs its own poſt too in the near future.)
Could include the yogh (ȝ) and the thorn (Þ) and eth (ð), too. Bring all the good ones back.
A title occurs: Out of Print?
I actually used the yogh in my Jack the Magicless series in Bryce McKenȝie’s name.
There’s no reason not to use them with modern resources.
Hmm, an idea is bubbling away … The Ricocheteer’s Intelligencer (or something like that), a weekly “magazine” post (perhaps with a monthly summary) of sorts, bringing to the attention of the diſcerning lady or gentleman some intereſting developments of the week just paft, Main Feed or no.
Indeed, developing on the theme — because it’s often difficult to go back and find a favourite post or a useful post or something you’d like to read again, and as a way of developing the medium of posts and links and so on …
It’d probably require a little bit of thought on typography and WordPress formatting and so on, but you could have overall “catalogue” posts, linking to summary posts by year or month, a little like we have with Group Writing.
It’d also be a nice way of linking things up and of providing some encouragement all round. Food for thought.
Indeed, ſomething a little like thiſ, perhaps:
But this of course is a side tangent: On with the sillineſs!
Edit: But in essence (and in summary) to contain a magazine (with hyperlinked Contents section) in the space of a blog post, and to take discarded artefacts of the printing press and bring them back to life here.
(A lufcious fmoked falmon pizza, cut–af if proper–into fqwares.)
To all those naysayers against ſpinach, be warned, it can be worſe! Salmon waits just outſide the door, biding its time!
Spinach is good on pizza.
All this is good, but perhaps not as good as an actual pizza as my wife or youngest son makes them.
Yes, we know. But some do not. The subject comes up often in the PIT.
All good people know
It’s an abomination
Spinach pizza bad
Fine. Order a pizza with spinach on it. We’re still gonna make you sit on the curb in front of the restaurant while you eat it.
Heathen.
Yesterday I planted a 27-foot row of spinach in our garden. I hope some of the crop ends up on pizza, though it’s good in other ways, too.
So, there.
In February 2020 Mrs R and I visited the Spinach Capitol of the World (Crystal City, Texas) and took photos of the Popeye statue, though that visit was more for the sake of sugar beets than spinach. It was shortly before I posted “Go West, Young Man, and be a Migrant Worker.” Crystal City supplied a lot of the migrant workers who would come north to work in the beet fields of the Red River Valley in North Dakota.
It’s nice to see you, Judge.
Arr, it’s a fair crop, guv.
’Twas ever thus, even on the streets of Jerusalem and Acre back in the old Crusading times. A dusty, travel-worn wanderer easing himself into a seat in the shade with the clink of chainmail, grasping a refreshing cup of something or other, looking around furtively and asking — “Yes, we serve it. But outside in the gardens, if you please, friend. We want no trouble here.”