The Hokey Pokey (as written by W. Shakespeare)

It’s been around a while, but SteveP Sent me this.
WASHINGTON POST STYLE has a con­test in which read­ers sub­mit instruc­tions for doing vari­ous things, their choice, as writ­ten by fam­ous authors. Jeff Brech­lin of Potomac Falls recently won with the fol­low­ing:

The Hokey Pokey (as writ­ten by W. Shakespeare)

O proud left foot, that ven­tures quick within
Then soon upon a back­ward jour­ney lithe.
Anon, once more the ges­ture, then begin:
Com­mand sin­is­tral ped­es­tal to writhe.

Com­mence thou then the fer­vid Hokey-Poke,
A mad gyr­a­tion, hips in wan­ton swirl.
To spin! A wilde release from Heav­ens yoke.
Blessed dervish! Surely canst go, girl.

The Hoke, the poke — ban­ish now thy doubt
Ver­ily, I say, ’tis what it’s all about.

Awe­some! Out­stand­ing! Cut ‘n’ pas­ted from Wil­liam Gib­son, who is still blog­ging.

Barb Wire and Cliffhanger! and Buried Alive!

Over the last few days, I have read Barb Wire the nov­el­isa­tion of the movie by Neal Bar­rett Jr. It was very light read­ing, but I quite enjoyed this. I haven’t seen the movie so I can­not com­pare them. I’ve also read Bur­ied Alive! and Cliff­hanger both by Jac­queline Wilson. I’d bor­rowed these kid’s books from Jamie. Very enjoy­able, quite funny, I espe­cially liked the two main char­ac­ters, Tim and Bis­cuits. Great!

The Know

A col­league of mine, Jeff, has set him­self up a web site over at www.theknow.co.uk. It’s a Post­Nuke based site with an embed­ded Wiki, forum, and chat.

“TheKnow is an exper­i­mental Opin­ion­at­ing and Com­munity site based upon an advanced con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem com­bined with a state-of-the-art “Wiki” engine and the pop­u­lar phpBB bul­letin board.”

Go check it out, its looks to be pretty cool. Lots of poten­tial. It already has some inter­est­ing con­tent too.

Flatulence Helps Fight Disease

I abso­lutely must post a link to this story! Flatulence Helps Fight Disease.

"British scientists say a hi-tech test focused on flatus -- the pungent gas emanating from stool -- is highly effective in quickly identifying tough-to-spot viral or bacterial infections of the gut."

"While flatulence may be the stuff of jokes, the fight against dangerous gastrointestinal infections is no laughing matter.
World­wide, over 600,000 chil­dren die each year from chronic diarrhea, most of them in poorer coun­tries without easy access to soph­ist­ic­ated med­ical laboratories.”

“So far the tech­no­logy has dis­played impress­ive accur­acy, cor­rectly identi­fy­ing the poten­tially life-threatening bug, Clostridium dif­fi­cile, 100 per­cent of the time and the Nor­walk virus — respons­ible for last year’s highly pub­li­cized cruise-ship out­breaks — 93 per­cent of the time. The test was also highly accur­ate in spot­ting rota­virus, a major cause of diarrhea in children.”

Hmmm… I won­der if I’ll be able to claim ‘med­ical research’ the next time I ‘let one go’?