Glory Hallelujah!

We only had two days of Saddam Hussein limericks. Maybe after the latest fiasco, Tinsley got on the phone to the syndicate and begged them to pull what was planned to be a week-long series. Or maybe we'll be treated to some really tasteless attempts at poetry in a couple of weeks. The question in Tinsley's mind: "does Iraqization rhyme with decapitation?"

Today's strip carries the implication that with all that's wrong about Mallard Fillmore, apparently what really inspires people to send a letter to Indiana is what the duck has to say about bowl games. I don't know much about college football, I have to admit (I went to a division III school, we had a football team which consistently lost to such athletic powerhouses as, um, actually, I have no idea who they played. Neither did anyone else that I knew). But I do tend towards conservatism when it comes to sports. That means that I'm summarily opposed to sports league expansion, think that their should be ten schools in the Big Ten, and that the super bowl is supposed to be a match-up between the best school in the Big Ten and the best school in the Pac Ten, and who cares about all those other bowls?

So maybe the Boise State punchline really is funny. I have no idea. I suspect not. What would be funny is if Boise State was some bad team that got to play in a big-time bowl, but they apparently went 13-0 and won the fiesta bowl in overtime.

Score today: Right vs wrong? Maybe right. Funny? Not even close.

And I think that this was meant to be a poem with the emphasized rhyming words at the ends of lines 2 and 4, but again, there is no rhythm. Yo Bruce, if you get some rhythm, some music, and your girl, well, who could ask for anything more?

The duck's lead time is 2 weeks

And so he felt compelled to write a poem letting the poor cowering Iraqis who feared his return know that it was safe to stop cowering.

I'm not sure that anyone reallly feared Saddam's return at this point. On the other hand, the poorly handled execution did effectively turn the unpopular secular dictator into a Sunni Muslim martyr. Oops. Fortunately, it doesn't appeared to have sparked an immediate wave of sectarian violence, but his death also didn't put an end to the civil war either.

From the rhyme scheme of Mr Tinsley's attempt at poetry, this is apparently supposed to be a limerick. Of course, I may be wrong, because while it does have the AABBA rhyme scheme of a limerick, it has nothing remotely resembling the metric quality of a limerick. Or the metric quality of, well, anything. This is my English major side coming out. I've done far too much scansion of poetry to take a poorly-written poem like this seriously. Heck, forget trying to get three metric feet out of the A lines and two from the B lines, we're looking at something where we can't even get consistent syllable counts. And while a limerick is a sort of "low" poetry, it does have a very rigid meter to it. Try saying, "There once was a man from Nantucket, etc." but replacing each syllable with a "dah", stressing where appropriate. You can easily feel how the limerick is supposed to go. Now try and read Tinsley's poem the same way. Notice how it really really doesn't work?