Notes, Notings, and Common Refrains

So -- it boils down to this: the central thesis of Plato's Nightmare / Aesop's Dream (if a blog can be said to have a thesis) is that modern society's attitudes and official policies toward the disabled classes are rooted in ancient superstitions and fear of evil, which advanced science has done nothing to overturn. That:

A) Those with unexplained differences (especially physical, visible, differences) were believed to be omens sent by the gods, rather than actual people in their own right.

B) That ostracizing people so marked became standard policy, in a vain attempt to fool the gods and averting punishment for sins.

C) That over the last several millennia, scientific knowledge has gradually, through a series of minute steps, replaced the Divine explanations of disabilities with tangible, empirically understood causes, but that there has been no parallel refutation of the assumptions that were originally based on those primitive explanations. So society is still working with the policy that "Ostracizing the Disabled Classes is the best way to protect general society from evil."

BTW, this doesn't come up in the blog itself, but I firmly believe that it's the Medical-Industrial complex that is still the greatest promoter of this philosophy (Did you know that the Rx symbol for prescriptions was originally a written prayer to the Roman god Jupiter -- Rex Deii?)

Anyway, with the Disabled being marked by society as living omens, I've become intrigued by those hints about the disabled acting in the role of storyteller -- i.e. someone with a direct, eerie, connection between the Supernatural and Humanity. According to (some) legends, "Mother Goose" was a tenth century queen who either: a) had one human foot, and one goose foot, or b) gave birth to a human son with a goose's head -- these are the legends that don't try to make her a mortal woman who lived in New England in (relatively) modern times, around when the first book of nursery rhymes were published.

And that's where my asking for advice comes in. I'd love to write up a post for "Plato's Nightmare" about these legends about M. Goose. But all my Googling leads me to websites where the paragraphs about Queen Bertha Broadfoot have all the exact same wording, and they all lead back to the same Wikipedia Article, which is both a stub, and lacking in references.

So I posted the question as a thread on Mudcat. And I got a few responses, but the first few of them just repeated the tidbits of info I'd already found... until November, when an anonymous poster gave me a new version of the "Goose-footed" legend, with details I'd not come across before, and it was juicy and actually had the structure of a story. But the story was also brief, and, since the poster was anonymous, I could not engage a in private correspondence asking for more detail. And a never came back. So I left that tantalizing bit as another dead end.

And then, today, another anonymous poster chimed in with one line, claiming to be the queen's direct descendant. So here's my question: should I just post the thread, itself, as a blog entry, with notes and comments, even if I can't cite textual source? Or, maybe just selected messages from the thread?

So, anyway, to help you decide, here is ( The nine-message thread in its entirety, dating from June 23, 2011 to March 28, 2011 )

I don't have a computer mouse. Instead, I've configured my Windows to use Mouse Keys -- which allows the keys of the number pad on the computer to move the cursor (On Windows: Press Cntrl+Shift+Num Lock together to toggle it on/off). I've stuck with this system for a while, now, because the advantages outweigh the disadvantages for me. And sometimes, even the disadvantages can be fun. To wit:

Sometimes, I accidentally hit click button instead of a movement button, so I open Web pages I never intended to.

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Last night, I accidentally clicked my "Mother Goose" tag, on this here journal, and opened some postings of favorite Nursery Rhymes that I'd completely forgot about. I'd originally posted them to cheer myself up. And finding them by surprise cheered me up again last night.

So now, I'm reposting some of them to offer cheer to all who may need it today:
(quote)

The Ghosts

Three little ghostessis
Sitting on postessis
Eating buttered toastessis,
Greasing the fistessis
Up to their wristessis.

Oh, what beastessis,
To make such feastessis!

(end quote)

(quote)

The Guinea-Pig
There was a little guinea-pig,
Who, being little, was not big.
He always ran upon his feet,
And never fasted when he eat.

When from a place he ran away
He never at that place did stay,
And while he ran, as I am told,
He ne'er stood still, for young or old.

He often squeaked, and sometimes vi'lent,
And when he squeaked, he ne'er was silent;
Though ne'er instructed by a cat,
He knew a mouse was not a rat.

One day, as I am certified,
He took a whim, and fairly died;
And as I'm told by men of sense,
He never has been living since.

(end quote)

I'll leave the postings of respectable sonnets, haiku, odes, and lays to others.

I'm going to post "Mother Goose" rhymes: an amorphous collection of ditties and satire that have been memorized through generations, and sung for the amusement of small children (and sometimes, adults).

I've decided to do this, because there are more Mother Goose rhymes than the dozen or so everyone knows, and they deserve to be shared.

In honor of the flailing and racing around I did, yesterday, here's:

Anna Elise

Anna Elise
She jumped with surprise
The surprise was so quick,
It played her a trick.
The trick was so rare,
She jumped on a chair.
The chair was so frail,
She jumped in a pail.
The pail was so wet,
She jumped in a net.
The net was so small,
She jumped on a ball.
The ball was so round,
She jumped on the ground.
And ever since then,
She's been turning around.

At least, I'm satisfied that the tune is actually singable, now; I'm including the ABC tune format with the lyrics, this time. Here's what I have, so far:

Oh, the Man in the Moon,
he went into a swoon
For his cellar was empty of claret
'Til he looked to the Earth,
And saw wonder and mirth
And he thought to himself: "Why not try it?"

So he then did descend
down the stairs of the wind
And both hither and yon he did saunter.
And it opened his eyes
for he sure was surprised
by the strange and fantastical wonders.

Chorus:
Oh, a traveling lad
he will never be sad.
So the Man in the Moon, he went walking.
And the stories he told
of the things to behold,
Well, the Loonies back home are still talking!

Oh, he met with a cat
in a fine derby hat
oh, there stood a man made of wrought iron
there a gate blocked his path
with a deep belly laugh
then the engineer stoked up the fire!

And he saw butterflies
with the tiniest eyes
there were needles all made of fine velvet
there a curtain hung down
over all of the town
there the glistening snow made a carpet.

(Chorus)

Then he saw a fine house
in the jaws of a mouse
just a crumb of cheese dancing the samba
there a woman the size
of a fine grain of rice
still that nugget of gold saved the gambler.

And then down by the shore
He went walking some more
and he saw a ship covered in feathers
there a bird flew away
with the talk of the day
then the jester confounded his betters.

(Chorus)

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To hear the tune copy the bolded text below, and paste it into the text window at ABC Convert-A-Matic. Then, click the [submit] button. This will bring up a new webpage; click [MIDI music file].

X:1
T:The Man in the Moon Went Walking (and Lost His Punctuation)
C: Ann Magill
Q:1/4=120
M:4/4
K:F
||:CC F2 FF E2|EE D2 DD C2|CC B,2 B,B, C2|
CC D2 C3 z|DD F2 FF E2|EE G2 GG F2|
FF E2 DC D2|EF G2 F4:||z4 DD G2|
GG A2 AA G2|FG F2 FF E2|DC D2 DE D2|
C3 z CC F2|FF G2 GG A2|BA G2 GF E2|
DC D2 EF G2|F4 z4|]

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I still need at least one more verse to get him home again. Maybe I'll conclude with him deciding to switch to brandy. But I'm completely stumped.

Help? I need pairs of words that rhyme and yet are complete incongruous (but still make sense once they're untangled, even if the language is awkward). Ack!

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( The sentances unscrambled, just for fun )

Took me a while to figure out what I wanted my central concept to be. At first, I thought of going along the lines of "Froggy went a-courting," But really, that's been so done (someone over at Mudcat counted 300 different versions, and then gave up).

So in the end, I decided to do something with the Man in the Moon -- literature's first whacky alien: long before Mork, or ol' Teeth n' Curls. I just needed a Plot!Device to get him down from the moon, so that hilarity on Earth could ensue. So I decided to take away his claret.

This is what I've got so far:

Oh, the Man in the Moon,
he went in-to a swoon
For his cel-lar was emp-ty of cla-ret
'Til he looked to the Earth,
And saw won-der and mirth
And he thought to him-self: "Why not try it?"

So he then did des-cend
on the tail of the wind
And both hi-ther and yon he did saun-ter.
And it o-pened his eyes
for he was quite sur-prised
by the strange and fan-tas-tic-al won-ders.

I'd like the "Wonders" to be something along the "missing commas" nursery rhyme; I'm thinking of changing the wording from "I saw a" to "There was a," which, I think, would fix the grammatical wrongness. The challenge is, now, to come up with odd pairings that rhyme and fit the meter... That should be at least as good as counting sheep, when insomnia hits.

And then I have to decide if he raids a stash of someone else's claret, or decides to go sober, or to switch to cider and brandy, as has been suggested.

Not explicitly Yuletide-themed, but it certainly strikes me as having that feel:

There was an old woman
Tossed up in a basket
Seventeen times as high as the moon.
Where she was going,
I couldn't but ask it,
For in her hand, she carried a broom.

"Old woman, old woman, old woman!" quoth I,
"Where are you going to, up so high?"

"To sweep the cobwebs off the sky."

"May I come with you?"

"Aye... by-and-bye."

Do not watch any of the C.S.I. franchise, except when you are in such a jolly mood that you're bordering on ecstatic. This is especially true for C.S.I.: Miami.

Watched C.S.I.: Miami, tonight. Is there any character, in all of Fictiondom, that is more self-righteous, sarcastic, and paternalistic, than Horatio Caine? I'm scanning the character cache in my brain, right now, and I can't find his match in these traits.

Really. And yes, I get it, Mister Bruckheimer. You are pro-life.

Just wondering: does anyone know Bruckheimer's religious orientation? It's just 'cause I noticed something with the PAX, Christianist, television network, too: When they weren't doing television movies about angels and miracles, they were doing television movie adaptions of dime-store thriller novels about murder and sin -- that was them "letting their hair down." But even those so-called "edgier" stories still underlined the basic sinfullness of Man, and how lost we all are without God's grace (And Pax's successor, ion, will be airing reruns of 48 Hours|mystery, come 2008). And I'm noticing the same tone in the C.S.I shows.

To counter that all that sin and righteous paternalism, and raise my mood a little, before I try sleeping, here is a random rhyme from Mother Goose (and yes, I opened to this page in the dark):

THE MAD FAMILY
There was a mad man and he had a mad wife,
And they lived in a mad town;
And they had children three at birth,
And mad they were, every one.

The father was mad, and the mother was mad,
And the children were mad beside;
And they all got on a mad horse,
And madly they did ride.

They rode by night, and they rode by day,
Yet never a one of the them fell;
They rode so madly all the way
Till they came to the gates of Hell.

Old Nick was glad to see them so mad,
And he gladly let them in;
But he soon grew sorry to see them so merry
And he let them out again.