A Redneck Love Song

I hauled my ol' gal off the porch

Yee-haw, darlin! Yee-haw!

And sawr her grinnin' 'neath the torch

Yee-haw, darlin, yee haw.

We puht 'ur signs an' t-shirts on

Jump-start the truck and then we're gone

Yee-haw, darlin! Yee-haw!

The skoal we dip is cool and moist

Yee-haw, sugar, Yee-haw!

And Sarah Palin's in fine voice

Yee-haw, honey, yee-haw!

The angus bull' s nary as proud

As I git when my gal protests loud.

Yee-haw, darlin! Yee-haw.

I look at her peepers, she caught mine, too!

Hot dog, darlin, yee-haw!

And I reckoned what we oughter do:

Yee haw, sweetheart, yee-haw!

Is pawn her fourteen carat pendant,

Sell hogs, pitch hay, vote "independent,"

End the FED an' repeal the fourteenth amendment.

Yee-haw, Darlin, Yee haw!

TEA PARTY, n. A do si do to quote De Toqueville.

This is my stab at Susan's microfiction Monday, but not concise and on the intermittent Wednesday. You can (and should) read the original of this poem by clicking the post title. And TLP gets her wish here.

Temptation, and its causes

Temptation holds a pride of place

In man and his endeavors

Gold and flesh e'er turn our knobs

And pull on all our levers.

In youth the shining, soft or certain

Drives the young to draw the curtain

And conspire against the very things

To which our hearts appert'in.

And then as we grow sad and wiser

Eternity inspires the miser

To prepare a lasting legacy

As life churns him to fertilizer.

But with my youth by now gone by

Through older eyes I see,

A sinful motor may turn my eye

But the devil driving is irony.

-Cyrus Moody

TEMPTATION, n. The nearest thing out of reach.

The Greater Grouch

A man I met upon a trail,

Bearded, bent and grim

He seemed so weary and so frail,

I thought at once of him,

That age will neuter every male

And so it's always been.

Sympathy rose in my eye

And must have reached the brim

For the old man looked up to reply

And raising a withered limb

Growled "youth falls from an empty sky

And thus it's ever been!"

-Labfej László

TRADITION, n. Coiled novelty.

Tzetze (or Tsetse) Fly

TZETZE (or TSETSE) FLY, n. An African insect (Glossina morsitans) whose bite is commonly regarded as nature's most efficacious remedy for insomnia, though some patients prefer that of the American novelist (Mendax interminabilis).

2009 Update: A large fly native to sub-saharan Africa, principally known for spreading somnolence among vertebrates and alacrity among crossword puzzle solvers.

Turkey

TURKEY, n. A large bird whose flesh when eaten on certain religious anniversaries has the peculiar property of attesting piety and gratitude. Incidentally, it is pretty good eating.

2009 Update: A creature that, by domestication, caging and overfeeding has evolved from a wild fowl into a symbol for American gratitude and ambition. The turkey retains enough power of flight to avoid a "flightless" description but not enough to avoid a recipe.

Happy Thanksgiving to all Americans, foreign and domestic.

Trinity

TRINITY, n. In the multiplex theism of certain Christian churches, three entirely distinct deities consistent with only one. Subordinate deities of the polytheistic faith, such as devils and angels, are not dowered with the power of combination, and must urge individually their claims to adoration and propitiation. The Trinity is one of the most sublime mysteries of our holy religion. In rejecting it because it is incomprehensible, Unitarians betray their inadequate sense of theological fundamentals. In religion we believe only what we do not understand, except in the instance of an intelligible doctrine that contradicts an incomprehensible one. In that case we believe the former as a part of the latter.

2009 Update: A Christian formulation for one being in three persons. Examples include the divine trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit; the earthly trinity of sinner, neighbor and pagan and the ecclesiastical trinity of the Fellowship Committee.

Tope

TOPE, v. To tipple, booze, swill, soak, guzzle, lush, bib, or swig. In the individual, toping is regarded with disesteem, but toping nations are in the forefront of civilization and power. When pitted against the hard-drinking Christians the abstemious Mohammedans go down like grass before the scythe. In India one hundred thousand beef-eating and brandy-and-soda guzzling Britons hold in subjection two hundred and fifty million vegetarian abstainers of the same Aryan race. With what an easy grace the whisky-loving American pushed the temperate Spaniard out of his possessions! From the time when the Berserkers ravaged all the coasts of western Europe and lay drunk in every conquered port it has been the same way: everywhere the nations that drink too much are observed to fight rather well and not too righteously. Wherefore the estimable old ladies who abolished the canteen from the American army may justly boast of having materially augmented the nation's military power.

2009 Update: To seek temperance in the bottom of a bottle. To be lush in view of the withered. To err among accountants or sin before the prim.

A lighter dark

Troubles in a troubled mind

Silently might lead to crime,

In days of yore, forlorn and noir,

Or evanesce in a brawl-strewn bar.

The modern world's a softer place

Imperiled only with disgrace

Where violence, misery and grog

Can now be lumped up on a blog.

TROLL, n. Once a monster made of stone, now of sand.

Truce

TRUCE, n. Friendship.

2009 Update: A repatriation of hostilities.

Table D'Hote

TABLE D'HOTE, n. A caterer's thrifty concession to the universal passion for irresponsibility.

Old Paunchinello, freshly wed,
Took Madam P. to table,
And there deliriously fed
As fast as he was able.

"I dote upon good grub," he cried,
Intent upon its throatage.
"Ah, yes," said the neglected bride,
"You're in your table d'hotage."
—Associated Poets

2009 Update: A menu with limited choices and a fixed price, which can be a bargain if the choices are different and the price fair- two unlikely conditions beneath a French title in an American restaurant.

Truthful

TRUTHFUL, adj. Dumb and illiterate.

2009 Update: Indulging humanity's oldest vanity, exploiting its darkest deception.

Trichinosis

TRICHINOSIS, n. The pig's reply to proponents of porcophagy.

Moses Mendlessohn having fallen ill sent for a Christian physician, who at once diagnosed the philosopher's disorder as trichinosis, but tactfully gave it another name. "You need and immediate change of diet," he said; "you must eat six ounces of pork every other day."

"Pork?" shrieked the patient — "pork? Nothing shall induce me to touch it!"

"Do you mean that?" the doctor gravely asked.

"I swear it!"

"Good! — then I will undertake to cure you."

2009 Update: A former restraint on the chef's art that required specific foods to be examined carefully for thorough of the cooking.  Trichinosis no longer constrains the Western diet as few foods remain specific, even upon examination. The worm is no longer in our meal but in our selves.

Tomb

TOMB, n. The House of Indifference. Tombs are now by common consent invested with a certain sanctity, but when they have been long tenanted it is considered no sin to break them open and rifle them, the famous Egyptologist, Dr. Huggyns, explaining that a tomb may be innocently "glened" as soon as its occupant is done "smellynge," the soul being then all exhaled. This reasonable view is now generally accepted by archaeologists, whereby the noble science of Curiosity has been greatly dignified.

2008 Update: A musty palace for the freshly innocent and recently wise.

Theosophy

THEOSOPHY, n. An ancient faith having all the certitude of religion and all the mystery of science. The modern Theosophist holds, with the Buddhists, that we live an incalculable number of times on this earth, in as many several bodies, because one life is not long enough for our complete spiritual development; that is, a single lifetime does not suffice for us to become as wise and good as we choose to wish to become. To be absolutely wise and good — that is perfection; and the Theosophist is so keen-sighted as to have observed that everything desirous of improvement eventually attains perfection. Less competent observers are disposed to except cats, which seem neither wiser nor better than they were last year. The greatest and fattest of recent Theosophists was the late Madame Blavatsky, who had no cat.

2008 Update: A society founded to form the nucleus of a universal family joined by wisdom, consciousness and perfectibility rather than the folly, chance and corruption from which all other things derive kinship.

Take

TAKE, v.t. To acquire, frequently by force but preferably by stealth.

2008 Update: To lend a debt.

To my American friends: Please amuse your poll-workers today.  In this and only this lies the virtue of democracy.

Tail

TAIL, n. The part of an animal's spine that has transcended its natural limitations to set up an independent existence in aworld of its own. Excepting in its foetal state, Man is without a tail, a privation of which he attests an hereditary and uneasy consciousness by the coat-skirt of the male and the train of the female, and by a marked tendency to ornament that part of his attire where the tail should be, and indubitably once was. This tendency is most observable in the female of the species, in whom the ancestral sense is strong and persistent. The tailed men described by Lord Monboddo are now generally regarded as a product of an imagination unusually susceptible to influences generated in the golden age of our pithecan past.

2008 Update: The speech apparatus opposite the tongue to which credibility is allocated. Woe becomes the species with tongue and no tail for such are never to be believed at all. 

The Cold War

When my generation first got whupped

Our parents thought war would erupt

Between the capitalist West

And socialists from Budapest.

We're whupped again, sure and true,

And I can tell you how I knew:

Grampa's voice back in my head

And reds once more beneath the bed.

The coldest war, it seems to me,

Is that we wage on history.

TRANSFORMATION, n. Camouflage, the wage of patience.

Tights

TIGHTS, n. An habiliment of the stage designed to reinforce the general acclamation of the press agent with a particular publicity. Public attention was once somewhat diverted from this garment to Miss Lillian Russell's refusal to wear it, and many were the conjectures as to her motive, the guess of Miss Pauline Hall showing a high order of ingenuity and sustained reflection. It was Miss Hall's belief that nature had not endowed Miss Russell with beautiful legs. This theory was impossible of acceptance by the male understanding, but the conception of a faulty female leg was of so prodigious originality as to rank among the most brilliant feats of philosophical speculation! It is strange that in all the controversy regarding Miss Russell's aversion to tights no one seems to have thought to ascribe it to what was known among the ancients as "modesty." The nature of that sentiment is now imperfectly understood, and possibly incapable of exposition with the vocabulary that remains to us. The study of lost arts has, however, been recently revived and some of the arts themselves recovered. This is an epoch of renaissances, and there is ground for hope that the primitive "blush" may be dragged from its hiding-place amongst the tombs of antiquity and hissed on to the stage.

2008 Update:  A professional informality incorporated into the uniform of dancers, "consultants," spouses and pharmaceutical representatives after hours.

Tortoise

TORTOISE, n. A creature thoughtfully created to supply occasion for the following lines by the illustrious Ambat Delaso:

TO MY PET TORTOISE

My friend, you are not graceful — not at all;
Your gait's between a stagger and a sprawl.

Nor are you beautiful: your head's a snake's
To look at, and I do not doubt it aches.

As to your feet, they'd make an angel weep.
'Tis true you take them in whene'er you sleep.

No, you're not pretty, but you have, I own,
A certain firmness — mostly your backbone.

Firmness and strength (you have a giant's thews)
Are virtues that the great know how to use —

I wish that they did not; yet, on the whole,
You lack — excuse my mentioning it — Soul.

So, to be candid, unreserved and true,
I'd rather you were I than I were you.

Perhaps, however, in a time to be,
When Man's extinct, a better world may see

Your progeny in power and control,
Due to the genesis and growth of Soul.

So I salute you as a reptile grand
Predestined to regenerate the land.

Father of Possibilities, O deign
To accept the homage of a dying reign!

In the far region of the unforeknown
I dream a tortoise upon every throne.

I see an Emperor his head withdraw
Into his carapace for fear of Law;

A King who carries something else than fat,
Howe'er acceptably he carries that;

A President not strenuously bent
On punishment of audible dissent —

Who never shot (it were a vain attack)
An armed or unarmed tortoise in the back;

Subject and citizens that feel no need
To make the March of Mind a wild stampede;

All progress slow, contemplative, sedate,
And "Take your time" the word, in Church and State.

O Tortoise, 'tis a happy, happy dream,
My glorious testudinous regime!

I wish in Eden you'd brought this about
By slouching in and chasing Adam out.

2008 Update:  A thievish stone.


Happy birthday to Minka.  Verloren aber nie vergessen.  

Tree

TREE, n. A tall vegetable intended by nature to serve as a penal apparatus, though through a miscarriage of justice most trees bear only a negligible fruit, or none at all. When naturally fruited, the tree is a beneficient agency of civilization and an important factor in public morals. In the stern West and the sensitive South its fruit (white and black respectively) though not eaten, is agreeable to the public taste and, though not exported, profitable to the general welfare. That the legitimate relation of the tree to justice was no discovery of Judge Lynch (who, indeed, conceded it no primacy over the lamp-post and the bridge-girder) is made plain by the following passage from Morryster, who antedated him by two centuries:

While in yt londe I was carried to see ye Ghogo tree, whereof I had hearde moch talk; but sayynge yt I saw naught remarkabyll in it, ye hed manne of ye villayge where it grewe made answer as followeth:

"Ye tree is not nowe in fruite, but in his seasonne you shall see dependynge fr. his braunches all soch as have affroynted ye King his Majesty."

And I was furder tolde yt ye worde "Ghogo" sygnifyeth in yr tong ye same as "rapscal" in our owne.

—Trauvells in ye Easte

2008 Update:  A tall bush that may bear fruit or nuts and to which these return.  Southern trees have been shown to bear strange fruit while Californian trees frequently bear actresses.

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

Nor have I found a campaign solution

That inhales air pollution.

Nor a bumper sticker of Chief Seattle

That I can climb to hide from battle

Neither an environmental slogan

I might chop down to build a hogan.

And no fervent social movement

Counts on maps for an improvement

But if I edit over time

At least a good quatrain can rhyme.

--Grouse Kilmer