Sperm

Nowadays my mind wanders ever more capriciously. Yesterday it happened again, whilst looking up the definition of a Spenserian Stanza in the Concise Oxford Dictionary.

It was while pondering this definition that my eye fell upon the run of subsequent entries in my beloved dictionary. The entry for Spenserian is followed by an entry for Spent, and then, by happy happenchance, with another entry for Sperm.















So it followed that at one moment I was thinking about Spenser’s stanza in the Faerie Queene, with eight iambic pentameters and an alexandrine, and in the very next moment my mind was absorbed in Sperm.

Did you know that the word Sperm is either singular or plural? Or that sperm contains spermatozoa, which is the plural of spermatozoon? And that a spermatozoon begins its life as a spermatogonium, after which it develops into a spermatocyte before becoming the mature motile sex cell that looks and moves like a tadpole?

Gadzooks, I thought! All this extraneous information! My mind was swimming. I imagined myself as a spermatozoon, swimming like a tadpole. Suddenly, I rediscovered my erstwhile interest in genealogy, and I realised I had missed a trick. We are all descended from tadpoles, aren’t we?

But not any old ordinary tadpoles, mind you, but winning tadpoles, by which I mean those precious few; those who create the world’s population; those who succeed where countless zillions of others fail.

We should therefore be far more proud of our immediate ancestor – that special tadpole - than all the ancestors that we normally think of. And I think that the humble yet winning spermatozoon (?) should really be given a name of its own, and be known as the spermato-ZOOM.

Credit where credit is due, that is what I say.

Three cheers for the spermato-ZOOM!
Yippee!
Yippee!!
Yippee!!!
:-)

PS
Yesterday, my girlfriend’s youngest daughter announced her first pregnancy. We were the first to know, and I am due to become an honorary granddad again. And in seven months time, I hope to rediscover the extraordinary delight of cradling a new-born baby in my arms again. We'll have to travel back 2,000 miles from our winter retreat to do that, but I’ll probably be browsing my dictionary en route...

PPS
Here’s the opening verse from the Faerie Queene:

LO I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske,
As time her taught, in lowly Shepheards weeds,
Am now enforst a far vnfitter taske,
For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds,
And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds;
Whose prayses hauing slept in silence long,
Me, all too meane, the sacred Muse areeds
To blazon broad emongst her learned throng:
Fierce warres and faithfull loues shall moralize my song.

Argint Cell fur Hilp!

Hilp!!! :-(

Es yua cen sii, O’m hevong truabli typong un my cumpatir. O thonk O mey hevi pat sumi uf my elphebitoc kiys beck oncurrictly eftir O tuuk thim uat tu govi thim e clien. My kiys eri rielly shony, bat ivirythong O typi os luukong solly.

Pliesi hilp – end bi sarprosid - loki O em.

Thenks! :-)

I

I know I use the word I a lot when I write. I think I do it because I is such a simple character, and so am I. As a child I found I could write the character I well before I could write any of the others in the alphabet. And I found I could write the sloping I easier than the upright I.

Gosh, I used the word four times in each of the four sentences above, and I think I avoided using inverted commas by using I and I, so this sentence has five.

I think I like I and I even better than I like I, which is six.

Do you have a favourite word or character ?

The Crack of Dawn

All this adventuring I do is very tiring, especially when it gets me out of bed at ungodly hours. You see, I’m an inveterate sleepwalker, and lots of my adventures happen at night.

The other night I happened to wake up with my head sticking out of the bedroom window. I haven’t the faintest idea why my head was sticking out of the window, because my short-term memory switches off as soon as I awake. But I was greeted by a wondrous sight.

It was daybreak, and my head was turned facing the rising sun. As it rose, the sun passed behind the peak of a small mountain and then came into view again on the other side. I’d never noticed this “double dawn” phenomenon before, but then I’d never had my head trapped under a fallen sash window before.

Anyway, as soon as I managed to extricate myself, it occurred to me that I’d never actually witnessed the absolute crack of dawn. I realised that my bedroom window might be the ideal vantage point, provided I was awake a little earlier the next morning with my head turned in exactly the same position as before.

Well, I spent an exciting day making preparations for the crack of dawn. There were lots of logistics to sort out, including thinking up a plan that would ensure my presence at the window at exactly the right time in the morning. The key issue was to ensure I would not be somewhere else - sleepwalking.

I came up with an ingenious idea. I wound up my alarm clock, set it to the right time, and strapped it to my wrist. Then I got a pencil and paper and listed all the places where I had previously woken up after a bout of sleepwalking. I got a local map, and carefully drew a circle around each of these places. This enabled me to identify the location that was furthest from my home, which happened to be the police station. Remarkably, and for reasons that are beyond me, I seem to wake up there quite frequently.

So off I went, to the police station, where I took a careful note of the time on my alarm clock, and then walked back home. On my return to my bedroom, I again noted the time on my alarm clock. I then set the alarm to ring at sunrise minus the elapsed time taken by my walk.

I reasoned that this would ensure my arrival back at my window in good time for the crack of dawn the following morning. I had even taken the precaution of wearing dark sunglasses on my trial walk back from the police station, to simulate the real night-time conditions that I was likely to encounter.

Well, to cut a long story short, the plan, which had left nothing to chance, worked brilliantly well. I can proudly say I was there. I actually witnessed the crack of dawn. And there were two cracks, not one.

I had propped up the sash window to prevent any further accident, and was knelt down in position at the very moment when the sun appeared. And as it appeared, I rose up in excitement, and heard the two cracks of dawn.

And would you believe it? One crack came from my left knee, and the other from my right. But my girlfriend, who always begs to differ, insists it was my head cracking against the bottom of the open sash window that woke her up.

Ho-hum. It is difficult for me to reason with her, because she says I was comatose at that precise instant in time.
:-)

Farewell, dear Blogs.

It’s not much fun switching on your laptop, following your bookmark to your blog, and seeing that all your posts have vanished. A whole bunch of emotions well up inside you – disbelief, denial, desperation to do something, anything.

You come out of your page, retrieve the bookmark, and click again. Same result. You power down, restart, and repeat, with the same result. Then you follow your links, to the blogs of people you like on the same website, to see if they are OK. And shamefully, you half hope they aren’t, that they are also afflicted by a universal problem, which would be a problem shared. You find they are OK.

Except for one thing – you can’t see any images, like avatars, photos, U-Tube clips, that you know are part of these other blogs. You read a comment about your missing posts, and then another comment about missing images. So there is something wrong with the website! It’s not just you!

Aha! You add your own comments, trying to be happy, hoping that things will be sorted out. And to an extent they are, because later, all the missing images reappear. A temporary glitch!

But your own posts don’t reappear. They stay vanished.

I’m going to skip giving details of my torrid journey through Help facilities. I guess you have experience of these, and maybe you have views that are similar to mine. Somehow, the glorious precision of the English language is lost, and is occasionally replaced by black comedy. “Help! My kitten had crawled over my keyboard and deleted stuff – how can I get it all back?”

Over the next couple of days, it gradually dawned on me that nobody else, kitten-less like me, was screaming about their missing posts. I was alone.

Then, at least I think so, the penny dropped. I remembered using a newly installed internet "café" in the reception area of my apartment block. Just for fun, I’d popped a couple of euro into one of the slots and tried it out. I’d accessed my blog, and hadn’t bothered to sign out, expecting everything on my session to close down when the money ran out.

I’m thinking my session stayed alive after I left, and someone came along and deleted my stuff. Just like the kitten, except I wasn’t around to witness it.

It’s my best guess. And whether I’m right or wrong, I’m a complete nincompoop. :-(

Dawn Chorus

There’s a big mistake that I always make
As I awake in the dawning.
I open one eye and then with a sigh
I wonder why I’m still yawning.

I know I’m awake by the noise I make
And so I fake some more sleeping.
But I don’t know why however I try
My other eye begins peeping.

I see I’m in bed asleep with my wed
But in my head I hear wheezing.
And then for my sins my darling begins
Her own loud dins and starts sneezing.

She sneezes and snores and bellows and roars
As if some wars she is winning.
So I blow my nose and tickle her toes
Inside her hose and she’s grinning.

We sigh and we moan we grunt and we groan
And then her phone begins pinging.
There is no mistake the noises we make
Bring birds awake with their singing!

:-)