the Daily Whale - the world’s favorites

The twenty most often viewed Whales over the full year of 2020, according to my web statistics, in order of popularity (except that I reversed the first two so that you could read them in order). The one at the top has not many more views than the one at the bottom. There are thousands of Whales to choose from, after all.

I draw lessons from this list. First, I should write more poems. Second, I should have given up after about 2004. Or does history always overshadow the present?

3 May 1992 Yeah, I wanted to go burn down some buildings too. But then I remembered how long the future is.
4 May 1992 Not enough circuses.
25 February 2001 If we could learn only from people who knew more than us, there would be no people who knew more than us.
14 May 2018 How Long Before We Return to This Debate?

Dove: It can’t be won!
Hawk: It could be, too!
Weird: It might be three or four or more!
Chiefs: What’s been done? And what to do?
All: That’s the new Korean War!

30 November 2001 Oh say, can you see, by the light’s early dawn,
That daring young man on the flying dugong?
There seldom is spurred a less probable bird
Till Willie comes home from the war!
13 October 2004 Proposed New Air Force Motto

Ours is not to reason why.
No one does that any more.
Ours is but to bomb from high
Till everybody else is poor.

28 April 2001 Thank you, Sappho. Thanks for the gorgeous stanza.
Thanks for dropping down in a whir of wings to
Bless the free-verse age with expensive doodads.
How did you ever

Find a way to write in Aeolic Greek that
Works in English? It’s a completely different
Rhythmic system! You, young woman, are plainly
Some kinda genius.

Say the white implacable textbook authors,
“Iambs, trochees, dactyls and anapests are
All there is.” But where is the wild disorder?
You and me, let’s offer the prosy dogs a
Kick in the booty!

21 February 2001 If the only tool you have is a hammer:

A. Every problem begins to resemble a screw.
B. You’re gold. Somebody else will have to solve it.
C. Make sure it’s a big one.

27 March 1999 The Serbian Ethnic Cleansing Song

Let the firebrand awake!
Call on demon, duck and drake!
There’s no time to rape and pillage
As we charcoal every village,
But still we’ll slaughter like Stallone,
Till these ashes are our own.

15 April 2001 This, Now, This Is A Double Dactyl

Higgledy piggledy
President Double-You
Utters his speeches to
Utter delight.

Misunderestimate!
Neighborhood hemispheres!
Partial aphasia was
Never so right.

10 July 2001 A Note to Artificial Language Designers

Put out your eyes as if they were a fire.
Put out your eyes as if they were the trash.
Put out your eyes: They’re just a metaphor.
Now let’s get down and mosh.

10 December 2005 Lunch comes in at the mouth,
And weight goes onto the thighs,
And all we learned in our youth
Is hatred of exercise.
I lift my fork to my mouth,
While reaching for the fries.
30 March 2007 Beauty has teeth, teeth beauty; farewell, wits,
That’s all you know as you are torn to bits.
6 December 2003 Oompa Loompa Land Located In North Korea

Itsy, Bitsy, Tiny and Few,
We have a nuclear weapon or two.
Itsy, Bitsy, Tiny and Free,
If you are cowed you’ll listen to me.

What do you get when you conquer the Earth?
Way too much cash and a sense of self-worth.
How do you act when you’re such a fat cat?
Who do you think’s at fault for that?
Always the United States.

Itsy, Bitsy, Tiny and Bomb,
Give us the cash and you can stay calm.
You will starve in poverty too
Just like Itsy, Bitsy, Teeny, Tiny and Few.

11 September 2008 Her caloric makes her hot,
but cholera makes her skinny.
I don’t think I would call her a lot,
but I might call her a ninny.

In fact, I’d collar a collie’s flea
to serve as our color bearer
before—mistaken identity?
Sorry. Cholerical error.

22 March 2003 The Ballad Of Frightening Small Children, Or, Better Loud Noises In The Night Than Secret Police

Over the hills and over,
Under the darkest sky,
I fly in a batwing bomber,
And nobody asks me why.

To George it is for the voters.
To the colonel it’s for the dead.
To me it’s so that my daughter
Can grow up free of dread.

There are the flames of Baghdad,
Aligned with the target grids.
I know as we kill the terror
We terrify the kids.

10 January 2001 The ancient Greeks still hold the world championship of making up words for figures of speech. Metaphor and simile and metonymy and synecdoche are a drop in the bucket of the dawn of the very start of the list. I mean, they had a word for distracting the teacher from your bad haircut by saying that the llama ate your homework.

My principle is to make everything as funny as possible, but not funnier. I wrestle daily with sinewy questions like, “What’s a bigger hoot, string cheese hysteria or nuclear brain fungus?” I want every Daily Whale to be like a chapter in a John Sladek novel. When you read it it’s funny, then when you think about it it’s funnier.

Let me explain what I’m explaining here. Diaporesis, from yesterday’s so-called clue, is pretended doubt.

8 November 2016 Squirming and squirming in the brightening glare,
The public hears an executioner;
They’re not sure who; the center is long gone;
Extremism is loose like Genghis Khan;
The best are unconvinced, although the worst
Say that they are on balance unconvicted.

I think there’s something scary going on.
I think there’s an election going on!
Election! I have hardly said the word
When an old cartoon produced by Thomas Nast
Comes to my mind: A fat malignant vulture,
Born wealthy and still thinking of itself,
Is brooding its cash eggs, while all around it
Details are indistinct. I have to think
That eight fair years of cautious governance
Have blocked no nightmare snakes from vexing us,
And which tough leech, their power come home to roost,
Crouches over Washington like a storm?

16 April 2001 You know when actors get it down cold? Get it down too cold, and it’s icy.

The same goes for everything else. The people who have the most fun are those who’ve never figured life out.

21 February 1992 Where stupidity is not allowed, it becomes obligatory.

the Daily Whale || copyright 1992-2021 Jay J.P. Scott <jay@satirist.org>