The divine architect of runny noses,
The wizard of ooze, of two stinky hoses,
You made every man woman a misfit
With appendages and stomach full of shit.
Sexy theater in a messy sewer,
Shame on you unintelligent designer!
Harris, Hitchens, PZ, Dennett and Dawkins:
May their godless fists land where your chin is.
Old man Paley walking by a heath found,
A perfectly wrought Timepiece on the ground.
Inside his skull god's bell went a'ringing,
A wonderful spell! Paley went a'singing.
Dear Mr Paley? Truth by rhetoric?
When there is good science and proper logic?
Teleology is warm and quite fuzzy
But, surely, it's for minds lazy and lousy.
Acknowledgements:
Endless supply of early morning sneezes -
Thank you very much, Rhinoviruses.
Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens and Sam Harris:
Them and others, also our appendix.
Lastly, the mammalian vagina:
What will we do without Pharyngula.
-Selva, 10 May, 2008.
There. Had to write it after many years of silent suffering against the cold virus. A better formatted version along with linked acknowledgements at TheScian.com. If you are a prosodic dude, you may scan the rhyming couplets as iambic pentameter (mostly).
The poem was read by yours truly last weekend when he had rhinoviruses (or, is it rhinovirii?) oozing out of all his pores. Brave souls can try listening to the audio version.
Enjoy.
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Nice. Let Cuttlefish run over it.
Yep, as a prosodic dude I was impressed by the regularity of the meter (mostly). I wonder if there were more poetry devoted to the common cold that might finally eliminate the bugger. I used to be part of a group that met regularly in a hospital library to read poetry and short stories. Called "The Healing Muse" it started out with the idea of literature as therapeutic. Not that we thought it could actually cure anything, but the idea was that people could find comfort or at least distraction from their illness.
Viruses is apparently (that is to say, according to Wikipedia) the correct plural in English. In some other languages, vira is used, at least by those wishing to appear learned. Virii couldn't possibly be correct, since the only words whose plural forms end in -ii are those where the singular ends in -ius.
Yeah the world is shitty in lots of ways, and it appeals to the adolescent mentality to make fun of that at the expense of better things. But would you really, most of the time, rather not exist at all? Do you at least find it interesting that the fine structure constant etc. has to be what it is for even that runny nose to be possible, or perhaps you indulge in imagining "other laws of physics" and we are just lucky. The latter is ironic of course, being untested and perhaps untestable, but I have noticed that logical positivism etc. is only employed against ideas that positivists don't like.
But would you really, most of the time, rather not exist at all?
It happened before, it'll happen again?
Do you at least find it interesting that the fine structure constant etc. has to be what it is for even that runny nose to be possible
Only in the sense that I keep thinking that people who use the argument from fine-tuning have it exactly backwards, and/or that the same sort of people seem to have a weird kind of idea of persistence of consciousness, like asking questions about whether we would care if we didn't exist. How would "we" care if there was no "we" to care whether or not we existed? Come on, fess up, you're a secret Platonist -- you think there's some kind of perfect ideal you out there who just exists and who would care if the you you seem to be inhabiting ceased to exist. Pony up some evidence, and then we'll talk about that one.