Limericks

When I saw today's contribution on Wordsmith.org " A. Word. A. Day." with Anu Garg, I couldn't help myself but copy a god bit over from that amazing site that has enlightened me and my vocabulary for a number of years now. It's free by the way and comes highly recommended. Would you know for example what to sashay means or where it comes from, to promulgate, or opprobrium, mythomane, sitzkrieg or even turgid just to name a few?

There is a new word every day from changing categories, loan words, their pronunciation and etymology explained.
Well, you know the meaning of this one, but here goes:

MEANING:

noun: A humorous, often risque, verse of three long (A) and two short (B) lines with the rhyme scheme AABBA. 

NOTES:

Here’s how someone has described a limerick:

The limerick packs laughs anatomical
Into space that is quite economical.
But the good ones I’ve seen
So seldom are clean
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.

Did you see the one I posted recently on Facebook?

There was a young lady from Riga
who rode with a smile on a tiger

they returned from the ride

with the lady inside

and a smile on the face of the tiger.

        I used to live near Limerick for about over 10 years on lovely Lough Derg on an organic farm and teach at UL (University of Limerick). To my astonishment, the locals were not wildly conversant in limericks or had one up their sleeve. Some never even knew what I meant. The Little book of Naughty Limericks I eventually spotted was  a rare find but not even a particularly good nor naughty one in site of the title.

For Usage, read on!

USAGE:

“First of all, the limerick judges at this newspaper would like contestants to know that we are acutely aware that ‘Journal’ rhymes with ‘urinal’. Almost as much fun as reading limericks was reading excuses from the people who wrote the limericks. It was as if we had caught someone reading the S ex With Aliens Weekly at the supermarket. Diane Harvey, of DeForest, for example, began her entrant thusly:

It is with a deep sense of shame that I submit the following puerile, low-brow limericks, and confess the guilty pleasure I had in writing them. As one who normally leads a completely respectable life, I cannot tell you what an illicit thrill it was to shed the trappings of responsible adulthood and for a ‘brief shining moment’ indulge in rude juvenile humor once again.

“Several writers put the ‘Journal-urinal’ rhyme to obvious use, and a few similarly included good-humored critiques of columnist George Hesselberg, as in the one by Dan Barker, of Madison: 

There once was a parrot named Colonel,
Who read all the papers diurnal.
But his favorite page
On the floor of his cage
Was the Hesselberg page from the Journal.” 

Now bookmark the page and subscribe whether you are a writer or not. I promise you're in for a treat! Ask Anu Lal, my co-editor. Have any good ones?

Let me add one of my own limericks created after a particularly outstanding matchmaking request; however, I couldn't come up with the goods...:)

A virgin farmer from Newcastle West
at 68 want'd to put his genes to the test
with a colleen in her thirties
to produce little Berties
a child anyway, but a male heir at his best.

 A big thank you to this wonderful free site!
Siggy Buckley

Ringing in the New Year

"New Year’s Eve in Germany normally is a noisy affair; people like fireworks and having parties. That was not the case in Ireland, neither on the farm nor in our village. Fireworks were and still are illegal in Ireland unless you have a license- e.g. for a public, official display. Living in the countryside, the most light we would see on a clear night were the stars—unless cloud coverage left us in the dark.  City lights never offer such a spectacular view above your head.

After a long day of work around the yard and tending to the animals, a farmer wants an early night. Every day of the year  has the tendency to be of a similar structure and work schedule because of the critters you take care of. Being early birds and having two small children, our night life suffered. The only sound on New Year’s Eve that I heard while lying awake and thinking of what life in Germany would be like was the ringing of the bells of the Killaloe Cathedral. Our trusted housekeeper, Pauline, had earned the privilege of ringing in the New Year at the old Protestant Church. For her it was the highlight of the season.  Mac, my Ex, usually away with the fairies already would be disturbed by the sound of the bells and mumble in his sleep. ”Can’t they keep it down a bit? I want to sleep.”

Excerpt from my upcoming book I Once had a Farm in Ireland 

 

Happy New Year, everyone, noisy or otherwise…!

The Ex Farmer's Wife

How to Pluck a Goose

by The Ex Farmer's Wife

      

               Germans love their goose for Christmas. Traditionally, the first appear on the menu of restaurants on St. Martin's day, 11 November. In the weeks leading up to our first Christmas in Ireland, word spread in the village where we had bought the farm that we had geese for sale − if only four. Though not a traditional Irish Christmas dish, there were more people interested in getting these rare birds than we could provide. One we wanted to keep for our own Christmas dinner.

          So how do you pluck a goose? This is what you need: a goose, buckets of scorching hot but not boiling water to dip the bird in head down, and some stamina, i.e. not too delicate a nose. I had practiced before in Germany on one, but to do four was a challenge. Each takes at least 90 minutes to pluck.

                                                                               (an AGA)

    
              So my trusted housekeeper and helper, Pauline, put several pots on the stove to heat up the water. On our cooker, an AGA, that would take a while. In the meantime, Mac and I chose and caught the poor first victim straight from the goose hut. When we lifted the roof of the hut carefully Father Goose became extremely aggressive, hissing and nipping at Mac's hands and jeans-clad legs. Their nips hurt! You have to grab the goose by its neck, which pretty much renders it defenseless. 

On the yard, near the compost heap on the wall, we had a timber block for splitting wood for kindling. Mac carried the goose over there, speaking in soothing tones to it, holding it with one hand and patting it with the other. He then put it on the block. I held its neck and Mac grabbed the axe. I didn't really dare to watch, but necessity made me blink and double check that my arm was outstretched far away enough out of the danger zone. With one swift swing, the goose was in goose heaven. In contrast to chickens, you can't wring their necks. They are too strong. But they don't flutter around headless on the yard either as chickens do. 

You have to let the blood drip out completely before you can proceed. Now the plucking can begin. We had an enormous double sink that we had bought from a youth hostel and put a big bucket in both basins. Dip the bird into the hot water and you can pluck away. Pauline and I stood side by side and worked on a goose each while having a good chin wag.

              Geese are much harder to pluck than chickens because their feathers are stubborn.  The worst are the pin feathers. And geese do smell. Raised on a diet of pure grass, it's surprising how much their intestines stink. After about an hour the feathers were done, and my hands, legs, and feet had gone cold and numb. At this stage, the city girl in me chickened out. My hypersensitive nose couldn’t take it anymore. I volunteered to put the kettle on for a tea break, Elevenses as they call it in Ireland. Pauline was made of tougher material. She didn't mind to keep going and always looked forward to her hot cuppa. Next she cut up the animals and pulled out the entrails, a messy and malodorous job. Then she washed them many times under running, cold water and neatly presented them on a plate.

          Grateful, I had the tea and refreshments ready. Most times we had to remove little hairs that stubbornly stuck to the skin with tweezers without tearing the skin. Then one year,  Mac had a brilliant idea: you could actually use a little flame torch like restaurants use for making Crème Brulée and just singe off the remaining fine hairs. Again, one had to be careful not to burn or damage the skin.

         Our price per animal was about 30 Irish pounds ($50 today), of which I had to pay Pauline 10 for her work. Every year, I toyed with the idea of saving the eiderdown and big feathers to fill pillow cases. The thought of cleaning these heaps of feathers, however, sounded like too much work to me. So we never did it. Today I prefer to buy a goose ready for the oven, if I can find them organically grown: plucked and cleaned! Thank goodness, my plucking days are over.

         Here’s my favorite recipe handed down from my mother: Stuffed with a mixture of breadcrumbs, apples and onions, the bird requires slow roasting at 180C/375 F under continuous basting with water, its own juices, and occasional turning. 2-3 hours is recommended. Delicious accompaniments are potatoes, red cabbage and apple sauce. Go for a lean bird: geese can be fatty. Ours never were, because they were grass-fed, free-range--the sporty, muscular type.

(Excerpt of her upcoming book: I once had a Farm in Ireland - An Organic Life Story).  

Siggy Buckley   

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