All hints are in the comments!

Wednesday, May 1, 2019

May 1, 2019


|| || larva, grunt, banter, smooch, branch manager.
Image from the Internet, caption by Owen.

The opening poem contains all the words (or variations of them) from today's Jumble.
Comments are welcomed!
Do not explicitly reveal any of the actual answer words until after closing time, but embedding them surreptitiously in comment sentences is encouraged.

7 comments:

OwenKL said...

Carl Linnæus was a pioneer taxonomist of note.
He decided what was what, no one else got a vote.
He did much grunt-work of collecting specimens.
Plants large and small, even mosses and lichens.

Saved Sweden's navy from some wood-boring larva,
And invented index cards to organize his data.
He would banter in correspondence with Ben Franklin,
Got in trouble for suggesting man and monkey were kin.

If man and woman were created in the image of God,
To say gibbons were kissing cousins was too odd!
That was a smooch too far for Linnæus as blasphemer.
He did outline our races as branch-of-species manager!

Ol' Man Keith said...

A clever crow indeed, and one I should consider deserving of his exalted position. He may perhaps be guilty of some micro-managing, but detail orientation is not so great a sin in a supervisor.
I assume this means all the other birds of his feather--those of his local perch--report to him, while he is responsible only to corporate.
~ OMK

OwenKL said...

Rabbit, rabbit. (It's tradition, not superstition!)

Had to do some research on this one, didn't know much about Linnæus. I learned -- he is credited with inventing index cards, he and Franklin were only 2 years apart in age, and according to Franklin, he did save the Swedish navy shipyards from an epidemic of shipworms, tho oddly I can find no other sources for the story.

BTW, the crow is she, not he. 😉

Ol' Man Keith said...

My bad.
I mis-read her gender.
Talk about unconscious bias...
~ OMK

Wilbur Charles said...

I had to exert myself on #2 . And #4 required jotting down the letters. I've found a 3 or 4 letter word with the remaining letters on top is working

Just looking at the image in the newspaper eg where the birds are standing gave me the riddle

I didn't know that Ben and Linnaeus were pen pals#

WC

#Now which xword just had that. I've started doing sunday again and a wsj was dropped of one day. WSJ was sticky but I can't remember what day.

I see another magazine has folder(ESPN). The death of paper

Misty said...

Well, I had trouble with the third word in this Jumble, even though it looked simple. And as a result I also couldn't get the solution and had to come to Owen's poem for help. It worked. The third word was right there--I should have gotten it myself even though I don't kid around very much. And Tada! that helped me get the clever solution, although again, the poem helped with that. So, many thanks, Owen. The cartoon drawing is pretty simple this morning, with just a lot of banter going on. But still an enjoyable Jumble morning.

Sandyanon said...

The jumble clues came pretty easily; although both versions of the cartoon were cute and relevant, I found the newspaper version led me in the most helpful direction. So the solution came to me from that.

I thoroughly enjoyed your poem, Owen, and also appreciate very much your explanation of the various factual bases for it. Thank you. I enjoy learning new information about almost anything, as it's clear you also do. Probably neither of us would be serious competition for Mr. Holzhauer, but it sure is fun to add tidbits to one's store of knowledge, isn't it?