| || blink, outdo, tunnel, oriole, look into it.
Image from the Internet.
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.
11 comments:
If the light at the end of a tunnel
Is a freight train coming fast,
It's best to find some crevice
Before you breathe your last!
If you want to be an optimist
And everything view brightly
Take a lesson from the oriole
And twitter most politely.
If you want to outdo others
You must train and practice heavily.
Or in a blink they'll pass you,
And leave you to your reverie.
If you think these platitudes
Are simply old clichés,
Look at who is into it,
And don't be so blasé.
FLN, Misty ~
Actually that was a true Spoonerism. With maybe a couple of points that need clarification.
What makes it real is the transposition of the initial letters of the key words. That's all it takes.
There is always room for debate over how to handle prepositions--or any "small" words--so you'll see that I kept the initial letter for your "to," although I changed it to "two."
As for the key words, I did switch an "s" onto "thyme," to achieve the near rhyme of "sine," and I switched the "th" onto "so" to make it "though."
Points of debate are whether or not to allow the near rhyme ("sine"/"thyme") and whether the visual letter-combo of a theta "th" can count even though I am making a phonetic change (pronouncing the theta of "though" instead of the "t" sound of "thyme").
But I enjoyed making the hidden "th" come to life as part of this particular switching game--something I'm not always up for.
And I thought the near-rhyme was cool.
Today's solution (not a funny one):
He promised her he wouldn't take a drink, no matter how late she might be. He had sworn to her.
She was only an hour later than usual.
But there he was, passed out on the sofa. She saw the note on the coffee table.
"Sorry, Babe," it read, "took gin, blew it."
Stephan was in training to outdo his bicycling foes
He thought "If I'm in the intersection for just the blink of an eye
My chances are a thousand to one that I'll get by."
For two objects can't occupy one space, or so the saying goes.
But this would prove to be tunnel vision this very day
For Wilbur's shuttle was destined to pass his way
And Wilbur had a video screen mounted on his dash
And he was often prone to look into it though doing so was rash.
So car and bike we're heading on a fatal collision course
The impact would cause injury or perhaps something worse.
Somewhere robins are singing and somewhere orioles cheep
And somewhere Stephan rides again, for Wilbur was not asleep.
WC
So, we have an excellent advice poem today from the Master. I posted at CC about my crossing an obscure RR Xing and seeing the "Light".
In this case it was Amtrak bearing down on me and my Fiat that may have had its front end abutting the track. Backing up would require seconds I might not have so I was down to two choices:
Abandon ship and if worst came to worst there'd still be Wilbur for the world to kick around, or...
Step on the gas and get to the other side which I did much to the consternation of the conductor who responded with furious pulls on his whistle.
Which was the ultimate irony because neighborhood pressure had discontinued the use of said whistles as trains roared through unused(mostly) RR Xings.
And paralleling this is my days driving airport shuttle. On a single weekend I did not kill two bicycle riders. Why. Because I spotted them running stop signs and hit the brakes. Why? Because I was watching the road not something else. The relationship to the above?
The first rider used a faulty physics principle that two objects can't occupy the same space at the same time. eg if he rode fast enough the odds were slender that a car would occupy his space. He was wrong that day and as I hit the brakes inches (ok make it a foot or two) from his wheels, he looked at me in recognition that his life had been spared.
Similar reasoning might say that speeding through RR Xings would result in microscopic odds of getting creamed.
Oh, the second bicyclist? Just a complete dufus who is alive today doing stupid things besides riding a bike which he doesn't know how to do.
I drove that shuttle many years and the sina qua non* is "If it can happen, eventually it will happen".
Poem maybe later. No on second thought, let's put all this into today's Jumble poem. c Above
WC
* was this your spoon, OMK, FLN?
Nothing like dredging up ol' Casey (at the bat, Disney version. Trust me, you'll like this.
Ps, if you'll listen closely a certain Latin phrase is said. I just watched it all, very entertaining
Wow! Wow! What an amazing Wednesday morning Jumble blog! Thank you, thank you, all.
I got all four Jumble words with only the fourth giving me a bit of a challenge. And, of course, the solution popped right up--very easy. Loved the cartoon of the classroom with all the little kids looking at their slides. And very colorful in our paper today.
Then onto Owen's delightful, smooth poem--a real pleasure. Followed by Wilbur's much more complex one, with the Jumble words also cleverly embedded. Two great morning treats.
And then Ol'Man Keith's very kind and helpful explanation of spoonerism. I'm so worried I may not remember it that I found a Crossword puzzle file in my set of files, and entered your comments in there, Ol'Man Keith. Just hope I can find it, the next time I need it to figure out one of your Jumble solution plays. Thank you so much for taking the time to give me this help.
Have a good day, everybody!
As Misty says, "Wow! Wow!" or more in character, "WooHoo!"
This is a busy day.
Thanks, Owen, for life advices en suite. Well said, old sage!
And thank you, Wilbur, for the tension & release of a bike/auto incident.
I was about to remark on the brilliance of the "Casey"-esque conclusion, but you already called your own game!
Misty ~ I'm sorry I went on at such length (the mark of an old pedant), but I surprised myself at how complex a simple switch of letters can become.
To condense my advice I'd say I always favor keeping to the original phonetics, except when there is a particular point to be made.
~ OMK
Was I right about "Sine qua non"? In one of those ultimate odd coincidences, that phrase occurred in of all places the Disney version of "Casey".*
I wrote two Casey takeoffs. The first was "Grogan at the Helm" about a Pat's-Dolphins game in 1986 that decided the AFC East. It was the Monday night game and oddly Cincinnati and KC were watching because the winner decided which of the two would get the wildcard slot.
And Chris Collingsworth was shown watching in a bar "In Covington Kentucky [his] sweet companion has begun to cry".
The Pat's win meant the Bengals sat.
My other Casey was about a Celtics basketball game. But, I know the Jumble gang are not sports fans so I'm boring you. Casey takeoffs became boring too.
But both had that Wilbur fav, iambic pentameter.
Finally. Speaking of irony or paradox. NOT killing two bicyclists gained me nothing. I often thought, if I had killed the first and it was decided that I was blameless it would have been interesting if I then went back on the road the next day and killed the dufus.
Again legally blameless but looking for another line of work. Both incidents within a few miles of each other.
WC
You might want to click the link for 8 minutes of old Disney style entertainment. And see if you hear "Sina qua non" spoken
Wilbur ~
Sorry, I don't get your reference to "sine qua non."
I didn't see it in your Casey-style ending.
But if you were thinking of it because of my use of "sine," that had nothing to do with either the Latin phrase (for "the essential thing," pronounced "see-nay") or with Casey.
I was using it as a calculus function, pronounced to rhyme with "sign."
~ OMK
Oh, I see now where you were connecting it with me.
You changed the spelling to "sina," so I had no luck with my initial searches.
Well, no, now you can see that it wasn't what I had in mind.
~ OMK
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