h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Yes, of course you are. All the best people are!

You do have a taste for the gloomy, I think?

Oiy! What's wrong with the lovely Sylvia? A poetess of the highest order (and my own personal fave - as IVA knows)!

As for Thomas H - yes, broody and all, but a fine observer of human passions don't you think?

There's a chap on a farm in these parts that is still in love with Julie Christie after all these years (that is since the filming of far from the madding...). Our Tom could have written a corker about that example of unrequited love.

Gloomy? Moi?

'Happy is England! I could be content
To see no other verdure than its own;
To feel no other breezes than are blown
Through its tall woods with high romances blent:
Yet do I sometimes feel a languishment
For skies Italian, and an inward groan
To sit upon an Alp as on a throne,
And half forget what world or worldling meant.
Happy is England, sweet her artless daughters;
Enough their simple loveliness for me,
Enough their whitest arms in silence clinging:
Yet do I often warmly burn to see
Beauties of deeper glance, and hear their singing,
And float with them about the summer waters.'

For myself, I have always enjoyed....

"There was an old man from Nantuckett..."

What, what do you mean "not suitable?" Oh. Ok.

Nowt wrong with that...

Is this turning into poets' corner?

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd--
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainess of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends could see:
A sculptor's sweet comissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
Their air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the grass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone finality
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life ?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off ?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison -
Just for paying a few bills !
That's out of proportion.

Lots of people live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losels, loblolly-men, louts -
They don't end as paupers;

Lots of folks live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines -
They seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets - and yet
No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that's the stuff
That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way into getting
The fame and girl and the money
All at one sitting.

I don't say, one bodies the other
One's spiritual truth;
But I do say it's hard to lose either,
When you have both.

Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of peasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he, laughing, said to me:

'Pipe a song about a lamb!'
So I piped with merry cheer.
'Piper, pipe that song again;'
So I piped: he wept to hear.

'Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;
Sing thy songs of happy cheer!'
So I sang the same again,
While he wept with joy to hear.

'Piper, sit thee down and write
In a book, that all may read.'
So he vanished from my sight;
And I plucked a hollow reed,

And I made a rural pen,
And I stain'd the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear.

Ooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhh,


Ahhhhhhh,


Wizzzzzzzards staff has a knob on the top, knob on the top, knob on the top, a wizzzz

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
I hate your guts
Cos you smell of poo.

The boy stood on the burning deck
Holding a bag of hot scallops
The red hot fat dripped down his chest
And......


Nah, not quite the same is it. Trust me to lower the tone

The boy stood on the burning deck
Whence all but he had fled...


....Twit.

S. Milligan.


and on that note..........

There's a hole in the sky,
Where the rain comes in.
But the hole's very small,
That's why rain's so thin.

Maybe it's time for
A haiku to start the day
Or then again not

But first an act of worship for the morning

Our father, who art in heaven..................

Gosh, those evangelicals get everywhere

AMERICANS

Americans have very small vocabularies.
They don't understand words like 'constabularies'.
If you went up to a cop in New York and said
'I perceive you are indigenous!' he would hit you on the head.

(see, it's not just George Bush! - it's NYPD TOO!)

In the words of Sigmund Freud, "Yes, America is gigantic, but a gigantic mistake."

Yes - and he also said "what do women want?" which anybody can easily answer, really....

This question was posed in the guardian a few years ago now and the overall popular opinion was thirty minutes of cunnilingus a day from a man who also wipes the work surfaces clean after washing up