The Best Thread in the History of the Internet

by Doctor Science

... or this week, anyway. Chris Clarke and Abi Sutherland are having an old-fashioned jammin' and stampin' poetry SMACKdown.

It began thus:

Abi Sutherland - May I serve you a peach, sir? I do like the way you're wearing those white flannel trousers; rolling them definitely suits you.

The beach? Why, it's this way.

Chris Clarke - this is just to say
I have fenced
the lawn
that was in my yard
and which you were probably hoping to be on.

Abi Sutherland - "You are old, Mr Clarke," the woman said, stunned,
"And your music has gone out of style;
Yet your circles are full and your comments +1'd
Have you been on the net a long while?"

"In my youth," Mr. Clarke replied to the lass,
"Our flamewars used genuine fires.
I still carve my zeroes; my ones are hand-cast.
They barely fit through the wires."
...

and proceeded to riff on --

Four women composing poetry, possibly as a competition, by Eishi Hosoda. The Library of Congress notes say it's from a series of Tale of Genji prints.

-- Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird:

I.
Among twenty spammy newsgroups,
The only moving thing
Was the yap of the newbie.
...

-- The Second Coming:

Raging and raging in the lengthening thread
The mood will not heed the moderator;
Rules sprout loopholes; the FAQ cannot answer;
Mere trollery is loosed upon the site,

-- Sonnet 18:

Shall I compare thee to a Summer's Eve?
Thou art more trollish and intemperate:
Rough words don't slake your need to vent your peeve,
And someone here is past their sell-by date:
...

-- Dulce et Decorum est:

Bent double, web designers without slack,
Ache-wristed, hacking with tags, we cursed each kludge,
Till on the table cells we turned our back
And toward semantic code began to trudge.
...

-- The Lyke-Wake Dirge:

This ae site, this ae site,
So long as screen-light glowes,
Joke and jest and fire-fight,
The web preserve thy prose.
...

My quotes are partial; remarkably, each riffed poem is the length of the original. Look on their works, ye witty, and admire.

More playing is going on at Making Light.

Comments

[Slartibartfast]

I like.

I especially like the proper spelling applied to kludge.

[Randinho]

A few years ago I saw a comedian recite "The Love Song of J. Fredrick Flintstone." I don't remember most of it, but the end was something like this:

In the room the women walk right through -

Saying yabba dabba doo.

[Gary Farber]

I prefer this iteration.

[Gary Farber]

No, wait, strike that! I meant this version.

[Scott wyant]

found on the blog:
http://fowlerjones.blogspot.com/

The Love Song of J. Frederick Flintstone
Let us go then, Barney and I
As the Bedrock sun is spread out against the sky
Like a Brontoburger laid out upon a table
And in the cave the women come on through
Speaking of the Great Gazoo
I am not Joe Rockhead nor was I meant to be
A stone quarry worker willing to bowl a frame or two
I grow old, I grow old
Shall I wear my saber-toothed tiger suit rolled?
Shall I prepare bronto ribs to eat? Power a car with my feet?
I hear Pebbles and Bam-Bam singing each to each
And in the cave the women came on through saying
Yabba...Dabba...Do

[Hartmut]

The net is one of the topics I have not covered with my 80 sonnets.
They run more along these lines:

Poète maudit

Shall I now sing of sex or violence
Of rabid rapist, pious pedophile
Or psychopaths that mangled corpses pile?
I know in each case some will take offence

I love to sing of whores not abstinence
Of ev'rything that's putrid, foul and vile
And if the moralists through that I rile
It will my satisfaction just enhance

The bard of boredom I don't wish to be
So spare me laurels, you keep them for those
That fill your ears with 'wholesome' poetry

Her thorns are what for me define a rose
Of poison ivy weave the wreath for me
My song shall praise whatever you oppose

[evilrooster (Abi Sutherland)]

You missed my (admittedly brief) riff on Dust of Snow.

Need to get my next move on the board instead of reading blogs...

[Randinho]

Scott Wyant,

Thanks!

[joel hanes]

(Doctah Kurtz, he dead. A GOTO for the old guy.)

Let us go then, you and I,
For fast Chinese and talk of years gone by,
Filled with random jumps and custom cable.
Let us go, recalling joys of FORTH and MUMPS,
The cluttering lumps
Of threaded code in frantic ten-hour hacks
To get that midterm project off our backs:
With code that twisted, doubled-back and bent
And set into cement
But came through with an underwhelming "B" ...
Oh, do not ask, "What was it?"
I don't care what it does, just how it does it.

On BIX the expert systems come and go,
Bragging about how much they know.

Over yellow chad that chattered out from teletype machines,
Over yellow tape that rattled out encoding fever dreams
that curled into the data center trash;
We lingered, inventing novel sort/merge schemes,
Or ways to thwart collisions when we hash--
At last we looked up, to the tube's insistent feep,
And, seeing we'd been logged in since late last week,
Took one last slug of Jolt and fell asleep.

On BIX the expert systems come and go,
Bragging about how much they know.

No! I am not Bill Gates, nor would I want to be;
I'd rather parse the fish than own the knife;
(Imagine! Having moby bux but chained
to forty million lusers, what a life...)
Am a flamer, goateed, pallid, overweight,
Willing to pull two shifts, then (hell) a third,
To save a session from a deadlocked state;
At times, (to put it mildly) unrestrained--
Almost, at times, a nerd.

I grow old...I grow old...
dBASE II and Wordstar are no longer sold.

Shall I start a BBS? Do I dare to try to teach?
I shall take my palmheld portable and hack upon the beach.
I have heard the networks passing packets, each to each

They have no traffic for the likes of me.

I have seen the Altair live and die
And software startups score on sorry score--
And millions made by men like Mitch Kapor.

We hackers linger by our leading edge
Forgetting what is pending in the cache
Till practice hurtles past us, and we crash.

Jeff Duntemann 1991

[joel hanes]

"The time has come, the Poet said,
to speak of many things;
Of metaphors, and similes,
and whether Feet have Wings;
How cummings lost his shift key,
and parody that stings."

-- Anitra L. Freeman