Saturday, 20 May 2023

"A VERY STABLE GENIUS": Theme, variations (97 anagrams), and versification


SATIRE COMPOSED: Giorgio Coniglio, January, 2020. 


BACKGROUND INFORMATION: An important book describing the administration of the White House under the forty-fifth President  was released for publication. The book, entitled "A Very Stable Genius", is the result of extensive reporting by two Pulitzer-prize winning journalists. The phrase used for the title derives from a description by the President himself of his own mental abilities.

ANAGRAMS:   Phrases composed by rearrangement of the 17 letters of the original.
In this case, the 17 letters of each new phrase must include:


     E E E
     A A 
     S S
     V R Y T B L G N I U. 
  
  The meaning of the resultant new phrases are, not surprisingly, sometimes in keeping with the tone suggested by the original title, but are often directly in opposition, and may even fly off and explore new tangents. They are best imagined, in this case, as further utterances by the book’s protagonist, as asides by the authors, or as comments by startled readers. 
 The editors have concocted innumerable possibilities, and selected almost 100 of the most intriguing anagrams for your enjoyment. Our experience suggests that the phrase “A VERY STABLE GENIUS” is a unique mother-lode for such wordplay; there are thousands of results, but most defy logical interpretation. If you discover additional examples that appeal to you, please indicate them in the ‘COMMENTS’ section.


\

"A VERY STABLE GENIUS" - theme and variations (anagrams)








1. Every suitable snag.
2. "E.g., saintly US beaver."
3. Basal reinvest. YUGE!
4. Believe, as gutsy NRA.
5. Average bluesy snit.
6. Gave tribunal 'YES'es.
7. Ugly stains bereave.
8. Leverage: sub-sanity.
9. Salvages by retinue.
10. Best value? A syringe.
11. I've lusty Arab genes.
12. Uneasy? Give re-blast.
13. Sanitary bug-sleeve.
14. Age unveils, betrays.
15. Lease averts buying.
16. Basely negate virus. 
17. Beget silvery sauna.
18. Senegal: sub-variety.
19. Slavery’s bet? Guinea.
20. Ably stage universe.
21. U.S.A. never gets Libya.
22. Geese variably stun.
23. Venerable gay suits.
24. Avenge lusty Serbia.
25. Vintage ruble essay.
26. Rites began suavely.
27. UN is salty beverage.
28. Elevate Syrian bugs.
29. Naively urge basest.
30. Rage sent, abusively.
31. Generals' vitae - busy!
32. Revise, snugly abate.
33. Elegy -- bet USA vs Iran.
34. Reveal beauty signs.
35. Anger abuses levity.
36. Veritable easy guns.
37. Barely vegan suites.
38. Blurt, "Envisage Ayes."
39. A 'believery' stang us.
40. Sublet gayer navies.
41. Bras? Negatively sue.
42. A buyer ingests veal.
43. Save by agile unrest.
44. Release a vying bust.
45. Ably energise USA-TV.
46. "Reality," a Venus begs.
47. Bi-nasal every guest!
48. Liberty? A vagueness.
49. Resign, beauty slave!
50. Abrasively use gent.
51. Albeit gravy ensues.
52. Sunlit savagery-bee. 
53. Televise sugary ban.
54. Evaluate by Signers!
55. Leaves tangy bruise.
56. "Re 'By genitals': suave!"
57. Glassy bait? Revenue.
58. Vile un-greasy beast.
59. Virtue: beg analyses.
60. A bevy salutes reign.
61. Viral absentee guys.
62. Survey elegant bias.
63. Base given US realty. 
64. Serve lye, as anti-bug.
65. By a versatile genus.
66. "Guilty" never abases.
67. Eagerly bus natives.
68. Lesbian/gay vet ruse.
69. I gave tuneless bray.
70. Sustain every bagel.
71. I vaunt largesse. "'Bye!"
72. Salute any big verse.
73. Eye subtler vaginas.
74. Bring ye asset value.
75. Svelte binary usage. 
76. Severity as a bungle.
77. Virus beats an elegy.
78. Bite easy lung-saver.
79. Gala; i.e. seventy rubs.
80. I evenly teargas bus.
81. “Senile gab”: Suave try.
82. A VA bulges serenity.
83. Buy entire Las Vegas.
84. Evil be gusty arenas.
85. I say, “Veterans, bugle.”
86. I.e., seat guns bravely.
87. Taser even a Lib, guys.
88. Suitably, as revenge.
89. See Tulsa: Angry vibe.
90. Airbag-style venues.
91. Viably sane gesture.
92. Russian bag tee levy.
93. Nasty elusive bra, e.g.
94. Eleven Arab guys sit.
95. Easy bungle. Vast ire.
96. I bulge a nervy asset.
97. Lying: A beaut serves.

Update: G.C., self-isolating
  on his return to Canada, June 2020



 







FOLLOW-UP: Subsequent to this material being published here, more anagrams were generated by various mysterious processes, possibly involving aliens. You might want to review those anagrams for further enlightenment.

WORDPLAY LINK: If you enjoyed this post, you might also want to take another look at a series of edifying and informative posts entitled entitled, "Political Palindromes". 


If you want to resume daily titillations on our blog 'Daily Illustrated Nonsense', click HERE. Once you arrive, you can select your time frame of interest from the calendar-based listings in the righthand margin, and check the daily offerings for any week in the years 2020 and 2021. (There are now over 600 daily entries on the Daily blog, and most of these are also presented here on 'Edifying Nonsense' in topic-based collections.)

Monday, 15 May 2023

CANADIANA, part #2

This post is a continuation of a collection of stuff that we shared in May 2021, dealing with Canadian history, places, concepts and habits. 

previous posted poems (part#1) 
Canadian spelling
speech borrowings
Canadian moose
Canadian weather
Torontonian / Buffalonian
compassionate use
overwintering waterfowl
seniors' hockey

CURRENT CONTENTS(part #2)
Kim Jong Un's visit
Snow-biota
Thanksgiving, Canadian
Haida Gwaii
Joual
Prairie home
Mounties
Canadian raising (linguistics)

prospective verse
Nanaimo bars
Founding cultures (Canadian origins)
Crept and leapt
Dontinental unification -- 'fifty-first'
Newfoundland potato famine (3 verses, a 'brief saga')






Authors' Note:  There is no satisfactory explanation for the similarity of the words encumber and cucumber.

   Kim Jong Un, third successive member of his family's ruling dynasty, became leader of North Korea in 2011. He has since garnered world attention by his blustering role in his country's programs to develop missiles and nuclear weapons; the latter are widely known informally as nukes.

   In the northern Canadian territories (Northwest Territory, Nunavut and the Yukon), the soil is poor in organic components and prone to salinity and permafrost. Cucumbers, known informally as cukes, must be imported into the Yukon from crops grown further south. The reader may well agree that these territories should remain nuke-free as well as cuke-free.






Authors' Note:

coyote: wolf-like wild dog,  with range recently extended into southern parts of Canada, and into Carolina coastal communities; a member of the canid family, as are dogs and wolves

cuanto: Spanish for 'how much?’

Pierre (PEER): town named by French explorers, capital of the U.S. state of  South Dakota, located due west of Toronto (2,100 km or 1,330 miles by highway).
  
  In the United States, nicknames (official or unofficial) for individual states are important for aspects such as vehicle licensing plaques, sports team designation and political bloviation. Geographic features and indigenous plants and animals may be so used, as in South Dakota, 'the coyote state’, and South Carolina, 'the palmetto state’.






Authors' Note: 

Acadia (uh-KAY-dee-yuh, as here, or uh-KAY-dyuh) or  l'Acadie: (French), name given in colonial times to the region corresponding to today's Atlantic Canada (the Maritime provinces)

tofurkey: a vegetarian substitute for turkey made from tofu

Action de grâce (ak-syon-duh-GRAS): literally action of grace; name derived from continental France for a harvest festival

habitants: French colonial settlers, a term honored in the title of Montreal's professional hockey team

   Thanksgiving Day, or Action de grâce, is a statutory holiday in the majority of Canadian provinces and territories, observed on the second Monday of October.




web-photo


Authors' Note:

snowbird: a Canadian retiree seeking a warmer venue to spend the wintry months

  The Queen Charlotte Islands are a Canadian archipelago situated between 
the northwestern tip of Vancouver Island and the Alaska Panhandle, with landmass one-third that of the Hawaiian Islands (the latter located considerably further south). They had been the heartland of the aboriginal Haida people, who numbered thirty thousand at the time of first contact with European explorers in the eighteenth century. Their territory has a unique environment based on moderate temperatures and heavy rainfall. The province of British Columbia renamed the islands Haida Gwaii (HIE-duh GWIE[-ee], 'islands of the people') in 2010.



Authors' Note: Accent is a word written similarly, but spoken very differently in French and English. Joual (ZHWAHL) is the name for the accent, grammar and even spelling used naturally by many speakers in the Canadian province of Quebec; this dialect had evolved over several centuries separately from the language spoken in France. In schools, businesses and media in Quebec and other francophone areas of Canada, 'québécois' (kay-bay-KWA), more standard French, with a local inflection and local vocabulary, now predominates. In Canadian English and French, residents of the province are known as Quebeckers or Québécois respectively.






Authors' Note: In its evolution from poem to unofficial anthem, the iconic American song "Home on the Range" was known for a time as "Western Home". The lyrics evoke the wilderness surrounding settlements on the "High Plains" in the old west, but do not mention the construction techniques for homebuilding. With little timber available to build cabins in some areas, thick prairie grass could be used as a covering for dwellings, even allowing the cutting of standard door and window openings.

   In Canada, the geographically similar area bordering the American plains has been known almost exclusively as the Prairies. The author imagines that living in a sod hut on either side of the border would be a more inviting prospect for settlers once the herds of buffalo had been thinned out by overhunting (an environmental desecration that occurred in the latter part of the nineteenth century).

    Readers are reminded that they can, if so desired, sing the poem's lyrics to the tune of  "Home on the Range", and on our daily blog you can find suggestions for doing so HERE

For further reading; 1)https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/sod-houses

                                 2)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_on_the_Range


 Alberta, 1908
web-photo: Glenbow Archives







Authors' Note: Spokesperson "Miki" is a Canadian woman of Japanese extraction who is a "Mountie", common moniker for a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a name deriving from the service's early days. Horses now play only a minor role in the RCMP's primary goal, the enforcement of federal criminal law; they are still used for crowd-control maneuvers, and in public spectacles, including the well-reputed "Musical Ride". Since 1966, however, horseback riding is no longer a mandatory skill required in the training of new officers. 
  Under contract, the RCMP also provides policing service to eight of Canada's ten provinces (Ontario and Quebec being the exceptions), the three Canadian northern territories, and 600 indigenous communities. Under its purview are towns such as Whitehorse, Yukon, and Hay River, Northwest Territories. 

 


Authors' Note: This is a mostly true story.
The Canadian internist in question had moved south to undertake a fellowship at an American medical school. As an introduction to potential staff mentors, he was asked to prepare a lecture on aspects of gout.
The transcriptionist, a southern woman, was victimized by her unfamiliarity with "Canadian raising", a speech variation altering and shortening the sounds of vowels in words like houserice and out; this pattern affects the speech of many speakers in the northern US, as well as in Canada.  


To view more verses dealing with Canadiana, check out this later post (part #3) by clicking HERE.



 
DIRECTION FOR WEB-TRAVELLERS: 
To resume daily titillations on our related blog 'Daily Illustrated Nonsense', click HERE. Once you arrive, you can select your time frame of interest from the calendar-based listings in the righthand margin, and check the daily offerings for any month in the years 2020 to the present. (As of September 2023, there are over 1200 unique entries available on the Daily blog, and most of these are also presented here on 'Edifying Nonsense' in topic-based collections.) The 'Daily' format has the advantage of including some videos and other material that are not shown here on this topic-based blog.


Wednesday, 10 May 2023

Inspired by OGDEN NASH -- Nash's limericks, and spoofs on poems including "Trees" and "The Purist"









 Authors' NoteThe above verse represents an anapestic rehash of the story, originally told in rhyming couplets, of Ogden Nash's well-known ten-line work "The Purist". (The anapest is the basic unit of poetic meter in which each 'foot' has the pattern da-da-DA.)    







KILMER'S "TREES" UPDATED, (Giorgio's version)

 I fear that I shall never view

inspiration:
Ogden Nash,
poet and humorist
 A spoof that gobbles CO2.

 Rough drafts - their scribbled nest o’erflows

 The Blue-Box prest against my toes.

 And spoofs get hungry – ask their sire -

 For watts that flow down printer wire.

 Both home and office still it seems

 Consume their daily MegaReams.
  
 Once de-composed, spoofs’ souls will pass

 Into the stock of greenhouse gas.

 (The ozone loss from page and line

 Intimidates the Northern Pine).

 God’s Earth will fry ere Hell may freeze;

 Save forests, don’t print parodies. 






,
The author revels in a small reforestation project,
Port Bruce, Ontario








HERE ARE SOME OF NASH'S ACTUAL LIMERICKS





Authors' Note:  Ogden Nash, the prolific humor contributor to the New Yorker, and author of many compendia of humorous poetry, has inspired countless wannabe authors, including the present writing-team. His short poems, often anthropomorphic comments on the lives and habits of animals, have been imitated but seldom equaled.  Today's poetic offering by GC and Dr. GH relate to a popular near-limerick, whose authorship has been attributed incorrectly to ON. But, Nash did contribute a number of classics to the limerick genre, as we displayed here.




(Note that the three verses of this "brief saga" can be found in more readily legible format on the blog "Daily Illustrated Nonsense"; click HERE.) 



DIRECTION FOR WEB-TRAVELLERS: 
To resume daily titillations on our related blog 'Daily Illustrated Nonsense', click HERE. Once you arrive, you can select your time frame of interest from the calendar-based listings in the righthand margin, and check the daily offerings for any month in the years 2020 to the present. (As of September 2023, there are over 1200 unique entries available on the Daily blog, and most of these are also presented here on 'Edifying Nonsense' in topic-based collections.) The 'Daily' format has the advantage of including some videos and other material that are not shown here on this topic-based blog.






Friday, 5 May 2023

PINKOS: FORWARD THINKERS


CURRENT CONTENTS:
Communist church
Vegetarianism
Gamophobic socialist
More to follow



Authors' Note: Liberal thinking seized Europe towards the middle of the nineteenth century. Emboldened by the partial successes of the politically-targeted Chartists, intellectuals were drawn to idealistic social movements such as communitarianism. According to Wikipedia, John Goodwyn Barmby (1820 – 1881), one of its principals, introduced the term 'communist', based on the French le communisme and founded a revue called The Communist Chronicle. Seeking a spiritual path, he later founded the Communist Church, a sect that had congregations numbering in the teens at its peak. When the church folded in 1849, Barmby became active as a Unitarian minister.




Authors' Note: The authors, Ontario anapestrians, have not eaten meat in two decades. The restaurant scene in Ontario, as in some other world-wide destinations, has gradually become more hospitable to vegan and vegetarian preferences, such as Theresa's and the authors'. This development can be attributed in part to our influx of newcomers from south and east Asia. Meat-eaters can still be readily accommodated, however.







Authors' Note:   Gamophobia is an irrational fear of getting married, or of interpersonal commitment. Gamophobic individuals, or gamophobes, whatever their political views, are people who harbour such neurotic anxieties.

The slogan "better red than dead" was mentioned in a book that British philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in 1961, in the face of a potential East-West nuclear confrontation; it was subsequently adopted by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, an organization that Russell helped found. The slogan has been used in both directions, with hardline rightwingers sometimes proclaiming "Better dead then red".

Note that a related disorder, gynophobia, is discussed in another of our intriguing and informative verses.                                                                                 



DIRECTION FOR WEB-TRAVELLERS: 
To resume daily titillations on our related blog 'Daily Illustrated Nonsense', click HERE. Once you arrive, you can select your time frame of interest from the calendar-based listings in the righthand margin, and check the daily offerings for any month in the years 2020 to the present. (As of September 2023, there are over 1200 unique entries available on the Daily blog, and most of these are also presented here on 'Edifying Nonsense' in topic-based collections.) The "Daily" format has the advantage of including some videos and other material that are not shown here on this topic-based blog.