A Little Joy For Today Blog

Joneses Or Norbergs? Easy Success
By ERIC SHACKLE, in Sydney, Australia

More than 1200 people, all named Jones, (but not all related) crowded the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff on November 3. Next day, a capacity crowd of Rugby football fans in the Millennium Stadium cheered the Welsh team led by Stephen Jones (captain), with Duncan and Adam Jones, Mark Jones and Alun Wyn Jones as they ran on to the field to play against Australia.

At the Centre, Joneses from all over the world congregated in a successful bid for a world record gathering of people with the same name, previously held by 583 Norbergs in Sweden (are there more Icebergs than Norbergs?). They were entertained by famous singers named Jones.

An observer from the Guinness Book of World Records carefully counted the Joneses, and certified that there were 1224 of them, so they had knocked out the northern Norbergs.

Interviewed by Jane Hutcheon, on the ABC’s national radio program Saturday AM, organiser Graham Jones said that the world-famous Welsh singer Tom Jones, whose recorded voice could he heard over the Cardiff public address system, was originally named Tom Woodward, so he was not sure if he was a genuine Jones.

GRAHAM JONES: If he hasn’t changed it to Jones legally, then he wouldn’t be eligible, and we might have to turn him away.

JANE HUTCHEON: While just one per cent of the British population is surnamed Jones, in North Wales it’s one in 11. But as Professor Steve Jones, a genetics expert from the University College of London explains, they are not all part of the same family.

STEVE JONES: The name Jones comes from the Welsh habit of calling yourself after your father, and in the 18th century there were a lot of people called John, so anybody whose father was called John would become Jones. They’d be no more related than say the son of John Major is to the son of John Travolta.

What next? Will the Smiths of the world challenge the Joneses for the title? (Smiths outnumber the Joneses in most English-speaking countries). Or will some of the 108 million people named Li or the 100+ million Changs (the world’s two most common surnames) get together in China in a show of strength?

Links
World record seekers
Famous Joneses
Welsh surname Jones
Rekordförsök lyckades (Swedish )
Welcome to Norberg (Swedish)
Keeping up with the Norbergs
Most common surnames

Written by Eric Shackle

Bees’ brains for robot planes?
By ERIC SHACKLE, in Sydney, Australia

Bees use their brains, the size of sesame seeds, so cleverly that an Australian scientist believes humans may manage to adapt the tiny insects’ methods when designing pilotless flying machines. It sounds like a fanciful dream - but NASA and the US military are backing his research with substantial grants.

Dr. Mandyam Srinivasan, biological science researcher at Australian National University, has won the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science - a gold medal and a $300,000 cheque.

Presenting the award, Prime Minister John Howard said “Designs for robots are often expensive and complex. A bee can take off, find targets, fly through tunnels, navigate home and land without any of that complexity.

“What started 23 years ago as basic research with no apparent application is now followed closely by robotics experts around the world. Professor Srinivasan is looking at bee emotions, work that is also likely to find application in the design of the machines of tomorrow.”

Dr. Srinivasan said “When we started this basic work on bees, we had no idea that the applications to flying machines would be imminent. I had no idea at all, so it was others who told me, ‘Look, there are actually things you can do that can be useful to mankind’.”

Six years ago, the professor presented a lecture entitled “Small brains, smart minds,” to the annual symposium of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (ANZAAS).

“Anyone who has tried to swat a fly, or marvelled at a bee going home from a flower patch several kilometres away, will know that insects have a visual system that is fast, reliable and accurate,” he said. “How do they do this with such small brains? If they use short cuts, could the methods be used in the design of machines and robots?

He described his research aimed at understanding the mechanisms underlying honeybees’ visual perception, navigation, learning, memory and ‘cognition’ and comparing these with human performance.

“Bees are not automatons, but lessons learned from them can be applied to automatons.” he said. “Robots are a good way to explore remote, inhospitable terrain, such as the surface of Mars, or areas containing land mines. With a large number of small robots (like an army of ants), the search will be more efficient and robust than it would be with one expensive robot. A distributed system is better than a centralised one.”

At question time, a schoolboy scientist in the audience asked: “How much variance was there in the bees? Are some more stupid than others?”

Professor Srinivasan replied: ” There was a variance of 20 per cent in performing the tasks. My wife called one bee Srini because when he was faced with a choice he took such a long time to make up his mind.”

At a National Science Week conference last year, he was asked, “When a fly lands on the bottom of a horizontal surface, does it do a barrel role or a loop-the-loop?”

He replied, “Nobody knows for sure, but the few high-speed movies that have been taken of flies landing on a ceiling suggest that they do something similar to a ‘loop-the-loop’. Actually it is not a fully flying loop-the-loop: the fly approaches the ceiling from below and when it is close enough to the ceiling it stretches out its front legs so that its front feet touch the ceiling. Then it flips over, pivoting about its front feet — it does a back somersault.”

Mandyam Srinivasan gained an undergraduate degree at Bangalore University and a Master’s at the Indian Institute of Science, both in Electrical Engineering. Later, in the US, he earned a Ph.D. by studying the visual behaviour of flies. Then, as a Research Fellow at the Australian National University, he learnt how to record the electrical responses of nerve cells in insect brains. He accepted an Assistant Professorship at the University of Zurich, where he switched from flies to bees and returned to the Australian National University in 1985. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and an Inaugural Australian Research Council Federation Fellow.

Links
The buzz in science is what makes the bee so smart
Insect brains inspire prize-winning work
Profile
Small brains, smart minds
National Science Week, 2005

Written by Eric Shackle

“If you can read this, thank your teacher”

By ERIC SHACKLE, in Sydney, Australia

To be a teacher is to touch a life for ever. Those who pursue this noble profession nurture the future generation, generation after generation. What we learn from them becomes a part of us. - Pratibha Umashankar.

We should all spare a thought on October 5 for those patient chalkies who guided us through school. It will be World Teachers’ Day, which UNESCO inaugurated in 1994 to focus attention on the extraordinary contributions and achievements of teachers.

“A glance at history will tell us that many achievements of mankind - great inventions, discoveries, Art and poetry - have been inspired by great teachers.,” says Pratibha Umashankar, a journalist on the staff of the Khaleej Times* in Dubai, United Arab Republic. “Teachers not only uphold time-tested traditions, but they also inspire youngsters to think differently. Either way, they are the barometers of a society - its culture, values and thought.

“From the alphabets we learn in our first classroom to the most complex concepts we grasp about at higher levels of learning is owed to teachers. We learn valuable lessons in life from them. They are the beacons of light guiding us in the formative years of our life. They mould our minds, cultivate our character and shape our future.

“Yet, a teacher’s work is often thankless. Teachers are the unsung and unheralded heroes of a country. So, today, let’s take a moment to express our gratitude to our teachers. Remember, if you can read this, thank your teacher.”

The world has more than 55 million teachers, nearly one per cent of its population, training more than a billion students.

Not all countries celebrate Teachers’ Day on October 5. In Australia, World Teachers’ Day is held on the last Friday in October. In the United States, it’s celebrated on the Tuesday of the first full week of May, and in Thailand on January 16.

In China, Teachers’ Day began at the National Central University in 1931. The central government of the Republic of China adopted the idea the following year. In 1939, the day was changed to August 27, Confucius’s birthday, and in 1985 moved to September 10.

Iran selected May 2, to commemorate the day in 1979 that Professor Ayatollah Morteza Motahhari, scholar, cleric, professor and politician was assassinated.

*
With a multinational readership of 450,000, the Khaleej Times is the leading English language daily newspaper in the Gulf area. Published in Dubai, it circulates throughout the UAE and covers Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia It is also sold in the UK, India and Pakistan.

The Khaleej Times website says its Young Times magazine, published every Tuesday, appeals to youth of the Indian sub-continent and expatriates living in other parts of the world. “It gives the youth of the UAE a platform of their own to discuss and read about issues that matter most to them.”

In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the
rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing
civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest
honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have.
-Lee Iacocca, US automobile executive (1924- ).

Written By Eric Shakle

Links

Education International’s WTD page
Khaleej Times
Can you solve this puzzle?

Rain raineth, but who wrote it?

The Rain it Raineth Every Day, 1889 by Norman Garstin
Oil on canvas: Penlee House Gallery & Museum, Penzance, Cornwall, UK.

Does anyone know for sure just who wrote this much-quoted verse? It’s posted on dozens of websites without its author being named:

The rain it raineth every day
Upon the just and unjust fella,
But more upon the just because
The unjust hath the just’s umbrella.

Elsewhere, the poem has been attributed to (a) Lord Bowen, (b) Hilaire Belloc, (c) US Senator Sam Erwin Jr. and (d) Ogden Nash.

Its origin can be traced to Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, as recounted in the Bible by St. Matthew, Chapter 5, verses 44 and 45:

But I say to you, Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you. That you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven, who maketh his sun to rise upon the good, and bad, and raineth upon the just and the unjust.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) seized on that last phrase, and composed these verses in his play

Twelfth Night, Act V, scene 1:

CLOWN sings:

When that I was a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came to man’s estate,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
‘Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came, alas! to wive,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
By swaggering could I never thrive,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came unto my beds,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
With toss-pots still had drunken heads,
For the rain it raineth every day.

A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that’s all one, our play is done,
And we’ll strive to please you every day.

Shakespeare used the phrase again in King Lear, Act 3, Scene 2:

Fool [Singing]

He that has and a little tiny wit–
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,–
Must make content with his fortunes fit,
For the rain it raineth every day.

Then, in the 19th or early 20th century, one of four famous literary figures, Lord Bowen, Hilaire Belloc, US Senator Sam Erwin Jr., and Ogden Nash. all noted for their witty epigrams, wrote the still popular verse quoted at the top of this page. But which one?

Let’s deal with them one by one.

Lord Bowen. Sir Charles Synge Christopher Bowen, Baron Bowen of Colwood (1835-1894) was an English judge. Son of a curate in County Mayo (Ireland), he won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford (where Belloc was to graduate in 1895). While studying law, he contributed articles to The Saturday Review and The Spectator.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia, says of him:

Lord Bowen was regarded with great affection by all who knew him either professionally or privately. He had a polished and graceful wit, of which many instances might be given, although such anecdotes lose force in print.

For example, when it was suggested on the occasion of an address to Queen Victoria, to be presented by her judges, that a passage in it, “conscious as we are of our shortcomings,” suggested too great humility, he proposed the emendation “conscious as we are of one another’s shortcomings”; and on another occasion he defined a jurist as “a person who knows a little about the laws of every country except his own”.

Another quotation attributed to him is: “When I hear of an ‘equity’ in a case like this, I am reminded of a blind man in a dark room looking for a black hat that isn’t there.”

Hilaire Belloc. We remember having read the rain raineth poem aeons ago in an anthology of humorous verse that attributed it to Hilaire Belloc. But the Little Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (second edition) says: “From the oral tradition, attributed in slightly different form to the 19th-century Lord Bowen by Walter Sichel in Sands of Time, 1923.”

Sichel (1855-1933) was an English biographer and lawyer. He, like Bowen and Belloc, graduated from England’s venerable Balliol College, Oxford (founded 1283).

French-born Belloc (1870-1953) lived in England and wrote many popular novels in English. He also wrote a great deal of droll verse, notably The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts.

An interesting biography published by Britain’s Alliance of Literary Societies says:

His first book was a small volume of verse, published in 1896, and from then on a torrent of books, pamphlets, letters etc. poured from his pen.

It astonishes, not only in its bulk but in its diversity; French and British history, military strategy, satire, comic and serious verse, literary criticism, topography and travel, translations, religious, social and political commentary, long-running controversies with such opponents as H.G. Wells and Dr. G.G. Coulton, and hundreds of essays, fill over one hundred and fifty volumes. It is little wonder that A.P. Herbert described him as “the man who wrote a library”.

Today, Belloc is remembered for a dozen priceless epigrams, including:

When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
“His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”

The Microbe is so very small
You cannot make him out at all.

Physicians of the Utmost Fame
Were called at once; but when they came
They answered as they took their Fees,
“There is no cure for this disease.”

I’m tired of Love: I’m still more tired of Rhyme.
But Money gives me pleasure all the time.

Whatever happens we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not.

Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight,
But Roaring Bull (who killed him) thought it right.

Oh! let us never, never doubt
What nobody is sure about!

Living in Sydney, the capital city of New South Wales, we were particularly amused by this Belloc verse:

Lord Lundy

Sir! you have disappointed us!
We had intended you to be
The next Prime Minister but three:
The stocks were sold; the Press was squared;
The Middle Class was quite prepared.
But as it is!…My language fails!
Go out and govern New South Wales!
- Hilaire Belloc, Cautionary Tales (1907).

US Senator Sam Ervin Jr (1896-1985) was the author of the Rain raineth verse, according to the Brainyquote.com website. However, he can be ruled out, since the verse was popular in the early 20th century, when Ervin was too young to have written it.

Some of his memorable remarks were:

I’ll have you understand I am running this court, and the law hasn’t got a damn thing to do with it.

If the many allegations made to this date are true, then the burglars who broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate were, in effect, breaking into the home of every citizen.

I used to think that the Civil War was our country’s greatest tragedy, but I do remember that there were some redeeming features in the Civil War in that there was some spirit of sacrifice and heroism displayed on both sides. I see no redeeming features in Watergate.

I’ve always been worried about people who are willing to work for nothing. Sometimes that’s all you get from them, nothing.

There is nothing in the Constitution that authorizes or makes it the official duty of a president to have anything to do with criminal activities.

Polygraph tests are 20th-century witchcraft.

Divine right went out with the American Revolution and doesn’t belong to the White House aides. What meat do they eat that makes them grow so great?

Ogden Nash. A US blog called Behind the Stove, written by two women in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, attributed the verse to Ogden Nash. But he lived from 1902-1971, far too recently to have been the author.

To end this review of rain raineth, we offer you this bilingual pun:
La reine reigneth.

Links

Hilaire Belloc
Lord Bowen (scroll down to Christopher Synge…
British literary societies
Balliol College history
BrainyQuote
Sam Ervin Jr.
Twelfth Night, Act V, scene 1
King Lear

Garstin’s Painting
Ogden Nash

No more “Press button one”?
By ERIC SHACKLE, in Sydney, Australia

Paul English must have felt he was a canary surrounded by hungry cats, or Daniel in the lion’s den, when he addressed 1000 representatives of the telephone and speech technology industry in New York last month.

Paul is the helpful computer genius who has publicly disclosed secret codes used by America’s big businesses, so that anyone in the US viewing his website can ensure that a phone call goes directly to a real live person instead of to a recorded voice telling them to “press button one” (or two, or three…).

He gave the keynote address at the 12th annual SpeechTEK International Exposition and Educational Conference in New York City. “It was fun,” he said later. “Most of these folks have hated me for the past year for my gethuman “rage against the machine” project, but my talk was well received.

“I recently wrote up a new proposal for how phone systems should work, and am designing a new gethuman ‘earcon’– an auditory signal– a brief set of tones that companies can play at the start of their phone system to alert callers that the phone system is gethuman compliant. Microsoft and Nuance (a leading voice technology company) have both backed the new gethuman standard.”

The first three guidelines are that companies adopting the standard agree that

If a human operator is available when a consumer calls, the human should answer the phone
When a human is not available to answer the call, the caller must always be able to dial 0 or to say “operator” at the top level menu to queue for a human
Estimated wait time should always be given
Let’s hope that Paul or some other public-minded computer nerd will crack and display the secret codes used by big organisations in Australia and other countries, so that all of us consumers can speak directly to a living person… although if everyone takes the direct path, we’ll still be kept waiting in a queue for our call to be answered.

Paul English is Chief Technology Officer/cofounder of www.kayak.com travel search.

Links

Dial a secret code and get straight to a human being!

GetHuman Earcon Standard
Paul English’s blog
Stuck in a phone tree
Paul English, IVR Consultant?

Positioned For Success -
The Refined Art Of Taking A Chance

ARE YOU IN… OR OUT?

Are you in or out of your comfort zone, that is?

Remember a simple principle: action leads to results.

One decision.
One small action.
One step outside of the comfort zone…

Can be the beginning of a series of decisions and actions that lead to a better lifestyle, a feeling of “I can do this,” and a host of other possibilities.

SO WHY NOT TAKE A “STRETCH BREAK”?

A stretch break for success.
A small “break away” from your comfort zone into the world of personal responsibilities.

All the best to you,

Josh Hinds

Josh Hinds of Get motivation specializes in helping people to achieve maximum success and live the life of their dreams He is also the co-founder of AudioMotivation

Would you like to have a twike?

We’ve never spotted a twike in Australia, but we stumbled across a reference to it on the internet. Intrigued by the name, we sought more details Could you eat it, or did it bite, we wondered.

We quickly discovered that a twike is an electric-powered twin bike, hand-assembled in Switzerland, where several hundred have been sold.

“The contraption looks like an airplane cockpit crossed with a tricycle,” Thomas Strohmeyer, a database analyst from St. Louis, Missouri, now living in Guam, wrote in his blog. “It features an electric motor capable of doing 85 km/h with a range of 130 km and optional bicycle pedals to extend that range.

“It… costs a bundle (around $20,000), and looks pretty cool - but that sure is a silly name. Get used to gizmos like this, I firmly believe this is the future of automobiles, at least for city driving. Will people in the US adopt such a funky looking thing willingly? Not as long as gasoline remains cheap. But once prices skyrocket, vehicles like this will become attractive alternatives to walking or riding a bike around in the rain.”

That prediction was written three months ago. Since then, prices HAVE sky-rocketed. Petrol (gasoline) costs around $1.30 a litre in Australia these days, and many motorists are looking for cheaper transport.

Ron Manganiello and his wife Ellen, of Burlington, Vermont (US) are proud owners of what they claim was the fifth Twike in the US. They’ve “piloted” it thousands of miles in the US and Europe.

“The Twike is about 4 feet high, 4 feet wide and 8 feet long, with three wheels - two drive wheels in the rear and one front wheel,” says Ron. “Its aluminum space frame is covered with a tough, lightweight plastic shell, and the windshield is made of Plexiglas (or safety glass with heating wires). The motor, transmission and batteries are all in the rear, creating excellent traction similar to the old Volkswagen bug.”

In a magazine called Recumbent Cyclist News, Victor Muñoz wrote: “There is a vast gap between a 30 lb. bicycle and a 3,000+ lb. car. And balancing on two wheels at automotive speeds is a bit too much of a thrill for many non-motorcyclists.

“The Twike was developed precisely to help fill this void of options. It was designed by engineers and architects concerned to combine some of the extreme energy efficiency of a bicycle with many of the comforts, performance and safety characteristics of a car.”

Six Twikes made a 17-day tour of eastern Europe in July 2005. The Twike.com website offers this account, translated from German by the literal-minded computer, Babelfish:

We are again at home. Stories and pictures to the return journey are to be found immediately on this side.

After 5 weeks and 5000 abenteurlichen kilometers on 14 August the TWIKE with its lucky pilots landed again in Switzerland.

Without large problems the vehicles mastered the fastidious distance. The message for a lasting and futurable mobility was carried about the TWIKE with the necessary sportyness to South-east Europe and understood without explaining words. With open arms, large interest and enthusiasm we became receiving and experienced a marvelous hospitality.

Twinkle, twinkle little twike
You’re so much better than a bike.
With the rising cost of gasoline,
Many more twikes may soon be seen.

Links
The Twike Challenge
Pictures of twikes
East of the sun, west of the moon (Thomas Strohmeyer)
Twike fever (Ron Manganiello)
Twike Challenge 2005 photos
Twike.com website

Check out other stories from Eric Shackle’s e-book:

Eric Shackle’s e-book

Story first posted November 2005
Copyright © 2005
Eric Shackle

You could call this a Jake Hammer

by Eric Shackle

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), American essayist, poet, and philosopher

Today’s hammer was probably invented by a clever Barney Flintstone long before the year dot. The basic design remained unchanged for thousands of years.

Then, 13 years ago, Jake Tyson, an 18-year-old apprentice carpenter in Sydney, Australia, found that his hammer didn’t hit nails very effectively (yet they say a good workman never blames his tools) and the reverberations sent uncomfortable shocks up his arm.

So he set out to design a better hammer. For the next three years, working in his father’s shed, he tried out different designs. He decided not to change the metal head of the conventional hammer, but to give it a radically different handle, with an arc in the neck.

After much trial and error, he invented a tool he called the Maxistrike, and patented it worldwide. Then he offered his former boss a partnership, and they formed a company, Redback Tools, to manufacture the new hammer.

“Due to the arc shaft it has transferred the energy, so instead of when you’re hitting the object the energy coming back up your arm, it’s transferred directly into the hammerhead through the balance of the arc shaft and into the object you’re hitting,” he told Rebecca Martin in an ABC Catapult interview early this year.

In a later interview , he said “The design is innovative with the balance the hammer has, and the way it hits the object is about 50% harder than a standard hammer will.”

Ten years after Jake first thought of the idea, he persuaded a few hardware stores to sell it.

The Maxistrike took off like a space rocket. Carpenters acclaimed it as the best hammer they had ever used. Its fame spread overseas. Last year Jake’s hammer gained the award for the best new item at the National Hardware Conference.

“We’re the first non-US company ever to win this Dealers’ Pick award, and for the Americans to admit that anyone does something better than them you know it has to be innovative” said Jake when he returned to Sydney. “The design is innovative with the balance the hammer has and the way it hits the object is about 50% harder than a standard hammer will.”

Radio Australia’s science and technology specialist Desley Blanch asked him how multi-national tool manufacturers had reacted when he approached them. He replied “The big guys –basically these are multi-billion dollar companies — [first say] ‘Come see us, let’s have a look at your product.’

“[They try to] dishearten you because they know it’s going to cost a lot of money, so they’ll say ‘Move on’ or ‘We’ll give you x per cent for your idea’, so if nothing’s hurting them in their sales, they’ll just put it in a bottom drawer and they don’t have to worry about it.

“So they’re in their cushy jobs making their hundred thousand dollars or whatever and they don’t want to put their necks on the line in case it fails, so that’s why you’ve really got to do it yourself.”

Check out other stories from Eric Shackle’s e-book:

Eric Shackle’s e-book

Links
Hammer to drive nails around the bend
Striking it big
Redback Tools
The Hammer in History
History of hardware tools

Young American children will learn about Australia’s kangaroos and wombats when their parents or grandparents read them a delightful book released on October 1.

Written by Sallie O’Donnell, a 76-year-old Florida grandmother and former teacher, Animals, Vegetables And Minerals - From A To Z links an animal and a nutritional concept to each letter of the alphabet, in a four-line verse.

“The humorous alliterative verses enhanced by the colorful witty illustrations make learning about a healthy life style fun for kids and delightful for parents to read to them,” says the publisher’s blurb. “In view of the national concern about childhood obesity this book is not only educational but particularly timely.”

Reviewing an advance copy of the book, Laura Parente, assistant principal of a New York intermediate school, said “[It] has all the qualities of becoming a classic. Kids will love it. Parents will love reading it to them.”

Dr. Steven R. Sabat, Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. was even more enthusiastic. “There is a Dr. Seuss quality to the humorous and educational verses which teach healthy nutritional habits early in life,” he said.

Responding to an email request, Sallie kindly gave us permission to quote these Australian verses:

K for Kangaroo
Vitamin K is the choice of the spry kangaroo
Chewing leafy green vegetables and alfalfa too.
She plans a long life filled with good health and vigor
And will hop in the Olympics when she gets a bit bigger.

W for Wombat
The wise wombat while wooing the weasel’s wee daughter
Took a might big sip from a glass of fresh water.
He did this quite often as one who does think
That there’s no doubt that this is the world’s greatest drink.

Check out other stories from Eric Shackle’s e-book:

Eric Shackle’s e-book

Story first posted October 2005
Copyright © 2005
Eric Shackle