Seen on Facebook:
Dear Mr. Grim Reaper, So far this year you have taken away my favorite dancer and entertainer Michael Jackson, favorite actor Patrick Swayze, and favorite actress Farrah Fawcett. Just so you know, my favorite politician is Barack Obama. Thank you.
Hmmm, reminds me of a lil ditty by W.H. Auden:
As poets have mournfully sung,
Death takes the innocent young,
The rolling-in-money,
The screamingly funny
And those who are very well hung.
Well, The 0! is certainly rolling in money, but he’s not all that young anymore, and I don’t have any idea how well hung he is, so everyone: please send him your best jokes. Two out of four ought to do the trick…
Why does this post put Kipling’s “The Explanation” in my head? Not that I’d smear Kipling by even using his name in the same sentence as some … obamanations I could mention, but here goes:
Love and Death once ceased their strife
At the Tavern of Man’s Life.
Called for wine, and threw — alas! —
Each his quiver on the grass.
When the bout was o’er they found
Mingled arrows strewed the ground.
Hastily they gathered then
Each the loves and lives of men.
Ah, the fateful dawn deceived!
Mingled arrows each one sheaved;
Death’s dread armoury was stored
With the shafts he most abhorred;
Love’s light quiver groaned beneath
Venom-headed darts of Death.
Thus it was they wrought our woe
At the Tavern long ago.
Tell me, do our masters know,
Loosing blindly as they fly,
Old men love while young men die?
Oh, good reference! Was it perhaps at RY that I was last reminded of this piece of Kipling? Always a good one (well, nearly anything of his) to be reminded of!