Lyrics for Singable Satire: Bob Dylan Sings " A FICKLE TWIST OF VERSE", part#2

 PARODY-LYRICS, based on traditional poetry (limericks)

ORIGINAL SONG: "Simple Twist of Fate" Bob Dylan 1975; covers by Diana Krall and Sean Costello are recommended.
ORIGINAL POETRY: At Wikipedia (click here), you can find a discussion of limericks dealing with the 'man from Nantucket'.
PARODY COMPOSED: Dr. G.H. and Giorgio Coniglio, July 2016, followup to an earlier post.

UKULELE and GUITAR-FRIENDLY LINK: All our songs can be found in a friendly format for ukulele (and guitar)-players on our sister blog  "SILLY SONGS and SATIRE". Click here to proceed to that site, and you'll find chord-charts for uke and guitar for both the parody-song and the original, and some more illustrations.

PRIOR OFFERINGS: (as per the initial post of April 10, 2021)
1. "There once was a man from Nantucket" (clean version) - 3 verses, unattributed.
2. "There once was a man from Nantucket" (dirty version) - cleaned up by G.C.
3. "A dozen, a gross and a score" - Leigh Mercer

4. "There was an old miser named Clarence" - Ogden Nash

5. "There was a brave girl of Connecticut" - Ogden Nash 
6. "There was a young belle of Old Natchez" - Ogden Nash

 Chorus. "People say it makes them sick" - Giorgio Coniglio

CURRENT CONTENTS: (more limericks from the classic repertoire, as interpreted by Bob Dylan.)

7. "A flea and a fly in a flue" - author unknown, often attributed to O.N.

8. "There was a young lady of station" - Lewis Carroll 
9. "A wonderful bird is the pelican" - Dixon Merritt 
10. "There was a young lady named Bright" - Reginald Buller
11. "There was an old man of Peru" - Edward Lear 
12. "There was a young fellow of Wheeling" - traditional 
13. "Hickory dickory dock" - traditional
 Chorus. "People say it makes them sick" - Giorgio Coniglio

A FICKLE TWIST OF VERSE, part #2

(to the tune of "Simple Twist of Fate")

7. A flea and fly within a flue

Felt flustered, they were in a stew; 

Didn’t know just what to do 

And finally they saw -  

The flue had a flagrant flaw 

To flee or fly – no worse, than 

To fuss with a fickle twist of verse. 

8. “I love Man” – sole exclamation

Of a young lass high in station 

(“Isle of Man” her explanation); 
“You flatter”, men believed,  
And yes, they were deceived. 
“No matter” if she flirts,
As she asserts in this Lewis Carroll

 verse.  

9. A wondrous bird – the pelican    
His bill holds more than his belican 

I’m damned if I see how the helican 

Take all that in his beak -  

Food enough for a week;  

I guess the bird rehearses   

Weekly, for this simple twist of verse. 

10. A lady traveller named Miss Bright

Exceeded ‘c’, the speed of light, 

Returned from trips the prior night  

That she’d started the next day, 

In a relative way.  

That’s Einstein’s universe  

Reflected in a fickle twist of verse.

11. There was an old man of Peru;

One day his young wife made a stew. 

Folks thought she knew just what to

   do,

Cause from their house she ran.  

He was found in their stewing pan;  

Which triggered some alerts 

For older guys in this simple twist

  of verse. 

12. A sensitive young guy from

  Wheeling 
Found the coach-door sign revealing. 

So he jumped, spat on the ceiling; 

Rather than the floor,  

As instructions did implore:  

Train signage known for terseness   

Spoofed in this twisted lim’rick verse.

13. Hick’ry dick’ry dick’ry dock

A timid mouse ran up the clock. 

The time had come for taking stock; 

So when the clock struck ten,  

He ran down the clock again,  

For better or for worse;   

As Dylan sang in this twisted nursery verse.

 

CHORUS: People say it makes them sick

To hear too many limericks;
I fear it had become my shtick,
But now I've lost the knack,
With no good jokes to crack --
A tendency perverse;
Blame it on a fickle twist of verse.

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CANADIANA (verse, photos, Scrabble-boards, and misc. nonsense)

 

Authors' Note:

centre: word-form used for 'population hubs' in the majority of English-speaking countries, exactly equivalent to the American center

traveller: ditto (American = traveler)

   The American visitors were not quite correct. We Canucks, if we were so motivated, would "practise pre-empting dissenters". But, as Canadians are inherently mannerly, few among us would ever consider such a response, eh? 

Authors' Note: The metaphorical use of 'borrowing' in the context of speech and ideas continues, often without payback/return, in the examples of 'borrow a word/phrase', 'borrow a page', 'borrow an idea', etc.

  

 Characteristic differences in speech between Canada and adjacent regions of the United States involve words such as eh, out, borrow and sorry. Exposure to a flood of American-based media has eroded some of these differences; but as our national anthem says, "We stand on guard for thee."

  

 Readers may note that, as an intentional measure of international friendliness, the above verse maintains its rhymes when read with either a Canadian or American accent.

Authors' Note: This verse was incited by a character named Lou, who in a verse by Chris J. Strolin railed against the use of the incorrect term 'Canadian goose'.

In fact, when Bruce was insightfully contemplating the introduction of moose into suitable environment in Newfoundland (NEW-found-land), the island was a separate British colony. As railway building had recently opened the island's interior, it was hoped that hunters would be attracted in search of a species in decline in the US and parts of Canada. Ultimately Newfoundland, including its burgeoning population of moose, joined the Canadian confederation in 1949.

In 1904, four eastern moose from New Brunswick (that subspecies is known as Alces alces americana) had been set loose on the island. The rest is history, eh? Newfoundland now (2023) has the densest population of moose in North America, accounting for 150,000 of the continent's million remaining large ungulates.  

Authors' Note: 

hinterland: a geographic term for 'interior', derived from the German adverb hinder = 'behind'.

The author contends that the summary he received overemphasized the adverse climatic conditions faced by Canadians, the majority of whom live in the more temperate southern portions of the country.

mid-November in Toronto

Authors' Note: 

Buffalonian: a native of Buffalo, New York, in the northern tier of American cities, located 90 miles (150 km) from Toronto, Canada

northern cities vowel shift: linguistic term for the key element in a regional accent whose use peaked in a band across the northeastern portion of the United States. Its use there is apparently now declining, but it has never been used in adjacent parts of Canada; the dialect is known as the Great Lakes dialect, Inland North dialect, or Inland Northern American English.

Buffalo Bisons: a class AAA minor league baseball team (Toronto Blue Jays affiliate). 

Authors' Note (originally written in 2016):  

   Growing marijuana seems to be a major activity on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, centred in the city of Nanaimo (nuh-NAHY-moh). Exemptions from restrictions on the substance are given for certain medical conditions, termed compassionate use; however, the criteria appear loosely applied, and overlapping recreational and medicinal use of the substance underlies the region's laid-back attitude.

   It is unlikely that Nanaimo will successfully challenge the dominance in limericks currently held by Nantucket. The island of Nantucket has been the setting for a number of limericks; the most famous clean one deals with a crotchety old man whose daughter rips off his poorly hidden cash.

Authors' Note: Ron, the anthropomorphic trumpeter swan, first appeared on this site in the verse 'trumpeter swan' in a blogpost dealing with waterfowl.

Authors' Note: In ice hockey, a hat trick denotes the scoring of three goals in one game by a single player. 

  The second verse is a spoof on the iconic Nanaimo limerick (the whole collection of these intriguing parodies can be found HERE).

  Hockey has a unique role, said to function as a foundation of national identity, as well as Canada's national sport. Beyond cheering the professional league players and national teams, there has been major growth in recreational hockey, both amateur leagues and informal games. The wide demographic now includes seniors and women. Reserved time at local ice-rinks, even in the wee hours, is a highly cherished commodity.

Authors' Note:  There is no satisfactory explanation for the similarity of the words encumber and cucumber.

   Kim Jong Un, third successive member of his family's ruling dynasty, became leader of North Korea in 2011. He has since garnered world attention by his blustering role in his country's programs to develop missiles and nuclear weapons; the latter are widely known informally as nukes.

   In the northern Canadian territories (Northwest Territory, Nunavut and the Yukon), the soil is poor in organic components and prone to salinity and permafrost. Cucumbers, known informally as cukes, must be imported into the Yukon from crops grown further south. The reader may well agree that these territories should remain nuke-free as well as cuke-free.

Authors' Note:

coyote: wolf-like wild dog,  with range recently extended into southern parts of Canada, and into Carolina coastal communities; a member of the canid family, as are dogs and wolves

cuanto: Spanish for 'how much?’

Pierre (PEER): town named by French explorers, capital of the U.S. state of  South Dakota, located due west of Toronto (2,100 km or 1,330 miles by highway).

  

  In the United States, nicknames (official or unofficial) for individual states are important for aspects such as vehicle licensing plaques, sports team designation and political bloviation. Geographic features and indigenous plants and animals may be so used, as in South Dakota, 'the coyote state’, and South Carolina, 'the palmetto state’.

Authors' Note: 

Acadia (uh-KAY-dee-yuh, as here, or uh-KAY-dyuh) or  l'Acadie: (French), name given in colonial times to the region corresponding to today's Atlantic Canada (the Maritime provinces)

tofurkey: a vegetarian substitute for turkey made from tofu

Action de grâce (ak-syon-duh-GRAS): literally action of grace; name derived from continental France for a harvest festival

habitants: French colonial settlers, a term honored in the title of Montreal's professional hockey team

   Thanksgiving Day, or Action de grâce, is a statutory holiday in the majority of Canadian provinces and territories, observed on the second Monday of October.

web-photo

Authors' Note:

snowbird: a Canadian retiree seeking a warmer venue to spend the wintry months

  The Queen Charlotte Islands are a Canadian archipelago situated between 

the northwestern tip of Vancouver Island and the Alaska Panhandle, with landmass one-third that of the Hawaiian Islands (the latter located considerably further south). They had been the heartland of the aboriginal Haida people, who numbered thirty thousand at the time of first contact with European explorers in the eighteenth century. Their territory has a unique environment based on moderate temperatures and heavy rainfall. The province of British Columbia renamed the islands Haida Gwaii (HIE-duh GWIE[-ee], 'islands of the people') in 2010.

Authors' Note: Accent is a word written similarly, but spoken very differently in French and English. Joual (ZHWAHL) is the name for the accent, grammar and even spelling used naturally by many speakers in the Canadian province of Quebec; this dialect had evolved over several centuries separately from the language spoken in France. In schools, businesses and media in Quebec and other francophone areas of Canada, 'québécois' (kay-bay-KWA), more standard French, with a local inflection and local vocabulary, now predominates. In Canadian English and French, residents of the province are known as Quebeckers or Québécois respectively.

You can review poems, pictures and diverse nonsense related to Canada on the post "Canadiana" on our full-service blog "Edifying Nonsense".

RELATED VERSES:

Trent-Severn (Ontario nostalgia)

 

If you want to resume daily titillations on our blog 'Daily Illustrated Nonsense', click HERE. Once you arrive, you can select your time frame of interest from the calendar-based listings in the righthand margin, and check the daily offerings for any month in the years 2020 and 2021. (There are now almost 800 daily entries on the Daily blog, and most of these are also presented here on 'Edifying Nonsense' in topic-based collections.)

PORTRAITS of COUPLES, #2

 Continuing from the initial post of February 10, 2021 ....

The above slide, displaying two male domestic turkeys in the state of Connecticut, honors the LGBT community.

If you want to resume daily titillations on our blog 'Daily Illustrated Nonsense', click HERE.

A short time after competing this series on Couples in the animal world, I rediscovered some old song-lyrics I had written for "Pairs", the introductory parody-song for a series about Word-Pairs, (based on the BeeGees' "Words"). It's a bit tangential, but you might like to review it here.

American Satire: A TERM OF ENDIREMENT #2

This post provides a follow-up to 

"AMERICAN SATIRE (A Term of Endirement) #1"

Author's Note: Rex Tillerson, formerly a petroleum-industry executive, served for just over a year as Secretary of State under the contentious 45th president. Tillerson disagreed with his chief on a number of issues, the press reporting that Tillerson had referred to his boss as a "moron". Although this report was denied, Tillerson was publicly challenged by his leader to an IQ contest, and then was summarily fired in March 2018.

Authors' Note:  In the midst of the Trump-Russia investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in February 2018, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee issued the 'Nunes Memo', a four-page document that alleged that the FBI had conspired against President Donald Trump.

   Nunes has proceeded in the same vein in his later career, organizing the Republican Party’s role in the politically-charged 2019 House of Representatives Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings, as the Ranking Minority Member. 

Author's Note: NAFTA is the acronym for the North American Free Trade Agreement, a pact formed by the U.S., Canada and Mexico in 1994. The trilateral pact has been the target of invective, and the subject of renegotiations by the Republican administration in 2017 to 2019.

FOLLOW-UP

Owing to intense demand for more verses of this type, we have worked hard to accommodate your wishes; in fact there are now six such collections! So, you can view another collection of these philosophically-charged limericks by clicking this link !

DIRECTION FOR WEB-TRAVELLERS: 

To resume daily titillations on our blog 'Daily Illustrated Nonsense', click HERE. Once you arrive, you can select your time frame of interest from the calendar-based listings in the righthand margin, and check the daily offerings for any month in the years 2020 to the present. (As of September 2022, there are 1000 entries available on the Daily blog, and most of these are also presented here on 'Edifying Nonsense' in topic-based collections.)