Garden Gnomes

[barrie]

I read the other day that two years after kicking Pluto out of the planet club, the planetary powers have reclassified the dwarf, along with all his friends, as Plutoids. So two years after I wrote about the first ‘humiliation’ - viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3599&hilit=pluto
here’s a follow up.



The Ice Giants,
Rocks
and the Gas Giants,
after
showing little Pluto the door,
decided they’d have to re-name him -
humiliate the poor sod
some more.
Now him and his mates
they’ve named Plutoids,
but still keep them
out of their homes,
so to show that their hearts
never harden, they allow them
to orbit the garden
and call them the Kuiper Belt Gnomes.

[arunansu]

Dear Barrie,

Just read your earlier one. Then one too is very witty and sarcastic. No nits really. Very attractive short piece. Pardon me for not being able to provide a detailed critique. I particularly liked :

"so to show that their hearts
never harden, they allow them
to orbit the garden.." - nice!

Cheers.

[barrie]

Cheers Aru - Thanks for the reply.

Barrie

[twoleftfeet]

I love the limeric feel of the rhyme.
Also I'm sure you had in mind, wrt the Ice Giants and dwarves, Nordic mythology.
Asgarden gnomes?

Nice work as ever
Geoff

[dl04]

Very witty, and i kinda felt sorry for the poor Gnome. There's hierachy everywhere it seems, even if you're made of pot!

Nicely written and i think the structure flows beautifully.

dl04.

[barrie]

Thanks Geoff, dl.

Also I'm sure you had in mind, wrt the Ice Giants and dwarves, Nordic mythology.

Believe it or not, I didn't, I was thinking of Neptune and Uranus.

I'm waiting for a meteor to collide with the Earth - 'The Revenge of the Kuiper Belt for a trilogy.

cheers

Barrie

[David]

Ah the ins and outs of astronomy. I do feel sorry for Pluto. To paraphrase Billy Joel, she's always a planet to me.

Did you see that thing recently about the German schoolboy who checked NASA's calculations and discovered that it's 10 (or 100?) times more likely than they'd thought that we'll be hit by an asteroid in about 20 years time? The odds are not as good as I'd like.

Cheers

David

[barrie]

Did you see that thing recently about the German schoolboy who checked NASA's calculations and discovered that it's 10 (or 100?) times more likely than they'd thought that we'll be hit by an asteroid in about 20 years time?

- What was his name, Wernher von Braun (jnr)? We'll be OK - He will with his V2 rocket the asteroid destroy.

The spawn of the doodlebug will save the planet!

Cheers David.

[Travis]

NASA's in the middle of a mission to identify and catalogue potential Earth killers, which are objects over a kilometer in length/width (I think). Their target is 90% of them (again, I think). As long as we have sufficient time to prepare once we know one is coming, then we can potentially do something about it. Options range from pushing it with a special rocket now in development, pulling it with a solar sail, deflecting it with a directed energy beam (seriously) or just plain blowing it up.

Sorry Barrie, but your poem doesn't need a crit. I just enjoyed it, along with your comment on the completion of the trilogy!

[David]

I did a bit more research. Looks as though I was caught out by another internet myth!

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/science/200 ... ffort.html

Good maths by the lad still, though.

[Travis]

I once fell for a Zimbabwean orphan scheme. Don't feel bad.

[David]

I once fell for a Zimbabwean orphan scheme. Don't feel bad.

Travis, I don't. It's that poor Zimbabwean orphan of yours I feel sorry for.

[Travis]

I said I fell for it, not that I adopted. I'm noncommittal, I just believed.

I'm glad you think I'd be a good father though...

To be literary now, your assumption is a good example of something that Tolkien and Steinbeck both did very well, and that's alluding to a thing without ever explicitly defining it in the moment. They utilized the audience in that sense. Tolkien did it with action, and Steinbeck, well he did it with just about everything. Interesting.

Yes, yes, I know your "assumption" was a joke, it just made me think of a particular action scene from The Hobbit and of the generally didactic and allegorical approach of Steinbeck.

Sorry Barrie!

[David]

Yes, sorry Barrie, but interesting stuff Trav. To me that was just an example of wilfully jumping to a wrong conclusion for comic effect (which is what you said), but I wasn't thinking about Tolkien (whom I've read) or Steinbeck (whom I haven't, really).

It doesn't surprise me that apparently simple things can have a complicated literary sense. I remember discovering hendiadys, which is just saying something using the word "and", e.g. (from wikipedia, as usual) "For example, "sound and fury" (from Act V, Scene V of Macbeth) seems to offer a more striking image than "furious sound". In this example, as typically, the subordinate idea originally present in the adjective is transformed into a noun in and of itself."
So there you have it.

[barrie]

Thanks Travis - David.

Good maths by the lad still, though.

- The Deutsche lad never took into consideration the inter-gravitational geometry of the other escapees from the Kuiper belt. This, together with the increase in the speed of Apophis, due to the slingshot effect as it moves around the sun, brings a constant into the calculus in the probability equation.
This constant was discovered by the Irish cosmologist Windsock O’Toole after he scalded himself making a cup of tea whilst on telescope duty.
An easy mistake for a young German to make.

Barrie