Sunday 6 January 2013

Picture



        Does anyone have, or know someone who has, a cat with macular degeneration?







The "Everyday Knights" Series






"Typos" series




Another Rhyme





An        An Absent-Minded Professor Gets a New Job

(in which         (In which the apocryphal story about Norbert Wiener becomes even more apocryphal)

There was a prof. whose name was Wiener;
No professor could be finer.
Maths and Logic were his game
And Cybernetics made his fame.

Ones and noughts and bits and bytes,
He could take them to the heights;
Into the mental stratosphere,
Which was the world that he held dear.

This mundane place beneath his feet,
Was not a meaningful retreat.
He never gave a single thought
To seeking things that others sought.

Wealth and fame were not his gods,
But, rather, calculating odds
And, mentally, his massive brain
Was calculating on the train.

But when he got off at his stop,
The station caught him on the hop.
It wasn’t like the one before -
A different pattern on the floor.

He then remembered, just in time,
To get the right bus in the line.
He made his way to his new job,
A different Chair, a different mob.

He sorted papers through the day
And made new friends along the way.
However, when he came to go,
He found the bus was much too slow.

It missed his train; he had to catch
A diff’rent bus to Grandby Hatch.
And just when he got up to leave,
The driver grabbed him by the sleeve.

“Now don’t forget to go down there.
It gets you to Museum Square.
The number seven’s what you want.
It drops you off at Yarby Front.”

At Yarby Front he had to roam,
To find the house that now was home.
Sadly for him, they’d all been made
In sim’lar style.  He was dismayed

To find he had no memory. 
“Which one of these belongs to me?”
A child was playing in the street.
He hastened on, the child to greet.

“Please tell me, kiddy, if you know,
Where does Professor Wiener go
When he comes home at night from college.
Which house is his? D’you have that knowledge?”

The little child, without a doubt,
Raised his right arm to point it out.
“Are you quite certain, little laddie?”
“Course, I’m certain. You’re my Daddy.”

(Sadly, for the ‘poet’, the real Professor Wiener only had daughters!)