HELD pending PUBLICATION

UPDATED SHAKESPEARIAN HAIKU  *

 To be; not to be; 
These options nail the question, 
"Why bear Fortune's woes?"

Lead samurai-SEALS 
Against Hokusai's "Great Wave", 
Or halt tsunamis?

Death curtails REM-sleep,
Avoids defibrillation, 
Cures anginal bouts.

The consummation?
End ills that flesh is heir to; 
Devoutly that's wished.

Make your quietus --
Bare bodkins, available,
Provide an off-ramp.

(A few may prefer
The rite of harakiri,
Per Clavell's "Shogun").

Otherwise, why bear
Badly sung karaoke,   
Life's weary fardels, 

Whips and scorns of time,
Head honcho's contumely,
The crowded onsen, 

Smart-alec geishas,
Lawsuits' judicial delay,
And long-lived phone-queues?

Die, sleep; dreams might loom, 
When mortal coil's shuffled off,
As grim show-stopper. 

Post-mortem --  we dread 
Puzzling lack of videos, 
Cancelled return flights.

Un-Googled country --
Dubious travel ratings,
Makes wimps of us all.

Currents turned awry,
Even pithy enterprise 
Scares off investors. 

 * Author's Note: These verses fit with "CHAIKU", our tongue-in-cheek designation for the rigid 17-syllable haiku-in-English format taught to schoolchildren. We have used this format personally for dozens of verses appearing recently on our blog "Daily Illustrated Nonsense", and remotely in a 2003 medical journal presentation entitled, "Seventeen haiku verses ... " You can read more about chaiku HERE.

Readers might also enjoy our illustrated poems "Hamlet at the pub", and "Hamlet's fardels", and our earlier songs "The Play's A Sting" and "The Wreck of the Danish Royalty". 

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ADVENTURES OF LINGUIST LESLIE MOORE

compact summary:

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Authors' Note: The Greek myth of Pandora addresses the question of why there is evil in the world. Zeus had Pandora created as the first human female. She was given a jar (misinterpreted millenia later as a box) that contained all of life's evils, with careful direction to guard them. She opened the jar out of curiosity, releasing most of its regrettable contents, thereby infesting subsequent generations of humanity. But one item — hope — was kept inside.

In various ethnic superstitions, apotropaic (protective) magic is invoked to counter a malevolent spiritual force that takes away human good fortune if it is celebrated too loudly. This influence presumably underlies the popular Yiddish expression keyn ay(i)n horah (corrupted to keneinahora or kinahora, even KH in Anglo-Yiddish) translated directly as "no evil eye"; this expression is often invoked when a praiseworthy person or attribute is mentioned.

Authors' Note: The conclusion of this imaginary placebo-controlled trial of magic in the prevention and treatment of ILLS can be stated as follows:

Parenteral administration of a low dose (1 gram) was found uniformly effective in prevention. For oral treatment of later established cases, the dosage requirement was found to be higher by a factor of 16 times (95% confidence interval: 9 — 25).

The above conclusion could, with inherent limitations of proportionality, be converted back to older units: "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."