Pub poetry

[simont]

Crashety-bashety
Microsoft Windows is
badly in need of a
UI that's nice.

Some feature filed under
‘Accessibility’
makes it superb – but you
can't find it twice.

(Brought to you by several pints of Kopparberg and fanf praising the ‘mouse trails’ feature in Windows.)

Comments

[pseudomonas]

Excellent!

[atreic.livejournal.com]

:-)

Ah, it is too late and my brain is too dead to remember what that's a pastiche of...

[writinghawk.livejournal.com]

It's a double dactyl (qq).(*)

(*) I invented this acronym by analogy with 'qv'. It stands for 'quod quaeste' and invites the reader to google for the term in question. It has yet to gain wide appeal.

[writinghawk.livejournal.com]

(Random thought during the afternoon while doing something else) I think I mean 'quaere'. But you get the idea.

[simont]

As writinghawk implies, it's not intended to pastiche any specific poem; it's just something I dreamed up myself in a relatively standard (if not usually serious) form.

If you thought it was based on something in particular, I'm interested to know what you might have had in mind. The highest-profile double dactyl I know of myself (in that it's the only one I'd encountered before I found whole websites of the things on the Internet) is the one in Gaiman's Stardust, sung to Tristran by fairies:

Hankety-pankety
Boy in a blanket, he's
Off on a goose-chase to
Look for a star

Incontrovertibly
Journeys through Faërie
Strip off the blanket to
See who you are.

But that doesn't sound particularly like mine...

[gerald_duck]

To me, it's strongly reminiscent of A.A. Milne, though I can't put my finger on any specific poem.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

Yes, me too. I think I may have in mind this (http://ingeb.org/songs/christop.html)

[atreic.livejournal.com]

Nope, the one that I still can't remember is Dorothy Parker, or someone like her.

[Although I almost certainly have the stardust on in my subconscious as well]

[htfb.livejournal.com]

You're thinking (with probability approaching 1) of Wendy Cope on Emily Dickinson:
Higgledy-piggledy---
Emily Dickinson
Liked to use dashes--- in
Stead of full stops---
Nowadays, faced with such
Idiosyncrasy,
Hard-headed editors
Send for the cops.

[atreic.livejournal.com]

You are 100% right. I'm very impressed!

[writinghawk.livejournal.com]

Brilliant! Please go to the pub more often :-)

[gerald_duck]

OK, so why was fanf praising the "mouse trails" feature in Windows? Once upon a time, when laptop screens had a persistence measured in seconds not milliseconds, they were occasionally useful, but on a modern display?

[j4.livejournal.com]

*applause*

[twigletzone.livejournal.com]

LOLZ0R.