Post by brimfin on May 6, 2017 1:36:10 GMT
Oh, the weekend is finally here, but I’ve so much to cover. I’ll do these one at a time:
The peacock poem:
The peacock poem:
First, let me join with salzmank in saying I wasn’t mad at you, pete, just a little annoyed at the puzzle. I thought it was supposed to be a riddle to solve, not just something to say, “Gee, it sounds cuter if you punctuate it differently”.
I admit there’s a certain poetry to “As big as the moon and higher, I saw the Sun” or even “out in the midst of night, I saw a man.” However, I would never use phrases like “swallow up a whale, I saw an ocean,” “creep along the ground, I saw a spider,” or especially “drop down hail, I saw a cloud.” I would only use the last one if I was trying to warn my friend Hailie that an electrical storm was coming and we should get down on the ground. “Drop down, Hail! I saw a cloud!” Hey, life is full of all kinds of experiences, and this was something different at least. I still think your first puzzle, the one you made up, was awesome!
But let me add something about rhymes and rhyme schemes from my own experiences. I like to watch movies all the way to the end of the credits. Sometimes I get a treat, like at the end of ARMEGGEDON, when they played a new version of “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane” by Chantal Kreviazuk. But when I stayed to the end of MEET JOE BLACK, I got my first taste of a truly awful song – a reggae version of “Over the Rainbow” It could have been a great song, except the moron singing it mixed up the lyrics and completely messed up the rhyme scheme for no good reason. It was like listening to a five-year-old sing a song. Sometimes, they mess up the lyrics but hey – they’re only five years old. When I heard this adult sing, “Somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly. And the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true,” I was mortified. “It’s ‘skies are blue, you idiot’ I felt like screaming. As I left the theater, I hoped to never hear that dreadful song again. But unfortunately it pops up again and again, at the end of 50 FIRST DATES (an otherwise adorable movie), on American Idol (from an pitiful singer who stayed on way too long) and my brother-in-law even used it on someone’s memorial tape. Needless to say, I could only watch it with the mute button on. To this day, I literally hate that song! But it does make me appreciate just what a wonderful song the original version of “Over the Rainbow” was.
So is messing up a rhyme scheme always fatal? No. Take “Big Yellow Taxi” by Joni Mitchell, a bouncy song about not realizing what we have until it’s gone. Late in the song came these lyrics:
“Late last night
I heard the screen door slam
And a big yellow taxi
Took away my old man.”
I was very young when I first heard those lyrics. I thought it meant that they took her father away. Wasn’t sure if they took him to an old age home, or maybe it had become a totalitarian society what with putting the trees in a museum and paving over paradise and they simply took him away to be killed.
Fast forward about 40 years, and a new version of the song came out by Counting Crows with a male lead singer. When they came to that line, he said.
“Listen, late last night, I heard the screen door slam
And a big yellow taxi took my girl away.”
At that point, I realized the lyric meant that his girl friend had voluntarily taken a cab and left him. Now I realized “old man” was the vernacular for boy friend in the original song. It made sense now. Now notice, since they had a male singer they couldn’t make that line rhyme anymore. So he sort of changed the bouncier style of the earlier verses and made this more like a sad, poignant little speech within the song. It’s a touching moment and it works. And it fits well with the message of the song. Most of what he talked about earlier was about changes in the world, but suddenly it was something that affected him on a very personal level. So I enjoy this song very much – both versions of it, even if one doesn’t always rhyme.
And that’s my riff on rhymes.
I admit there’s a certain poetry to “As big as the moon and higher, I saw the Sun” or even “out in the midst of night, I saw a man.” However, I would never use phrases like “swallow up a whale, I saw an ocean,” “creep along the ground, I saw a spider,” or especially “drop down hail, I saw a cloud.” I would only use the last one if I was trying to warn my friend Hailie that an electrical storm was coming and we should get down on the ground. “Drop down, Hail! I saw a cloud!” Hey, life is full of all kinds of experiences, and this was something different at least. I still think your first puzzle, the one you made up, was awesome!
But let me add something about rhymes and rhyme schemes from my own experiences. I like to watch movies all the way to the end of the credits. Sometimes I get a treat, like at the end of ARMEGGEDON, when they played a new version of “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane” by Chantal Kreviazuk. But when I stayed to the end of MEET JOE BLACK, I got my first taste of a truly awful song – a reggae version of “Over the Rainbow” It could have been a great song, except the moron singing it mixed up the lyrics and completely messed up the rhyme scheme for no good reason. It was like listening to a five-year-old sing a song. Sometimes, they mess up the lyrics but hey – they’re only five years old. When I heard this adult sing, “Somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly. And the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true,” I was mortified. “It’s ‘skies are blue, you idiot’ I felt like screaming. As I left the theater, I hoped to never hear that dreadful song again. But unfortunately it pops up again and again, at the end of 50 FIRST DATES (an otherwise adorable movie), on American Idol (from an pitiful singer who stayed on way too long) and my brother-in-law even used it on someone’s memorial tape. Needless to say, I could only watch it with the mute button on. To this day, I literally hate that song! But it does make me appreciate just what a wonderful song the original version of “Over the Rainbow” was.
So is messing up a rhyme scheme always fatal? No. Take “Big Yellow Taxi” by Joni Mitchell, a bouncy song about not realizing what we have until it’s gone. Late in the song came these lyrics:
“Late last night
I heard the screen door slam
And a big yellow taxi
Took away my old man.”
I was very young when I first heard those lyrics. I thought it meant that they took her father away. Wasn’t sure if they took him to an old age home, or maybe it had become a totalitarian society what with putting the trees in a museum and paving over paradise and they simply took him away to be killed.
Fast forward about 40 years, and a new version of the song came out by Counting Crows with a male lead singer. When they came to that line, he said.
“Listen, late last night, I heard the screen door slam
And a big yellow taxi took my girl away.”
At that point, I realized the lyric meant that his girl friend had voluntarily taken a cab and left him. Now I realized “old man” was the vernacular for boy friend in the original song. It made sense now. Now notice, since they had a male singer they couldn’t make that line rhyme anymore. So he sort of changed the bouncier style of the earlier verses and made this more like a sad, poignant little speech within the song. It’s a touching moment and it works. And it fits well with the message of the song. Most of what he talked about earlier was about changes in the world, but suddenly it was something that affected him on a very personal level. So I enjoy this song very much – both versions of it, even if one doesn’t always rhyme.
And that’s my riff on rhymes.