Looking Back

Remember early info-age
Before 2K & 10,
When genome seqs were run by geeks
On hardware humming hot for weeks;
All brains were simple then.

Recall the days of Hollywood
When starlets ruled the screen,
When flesh-life still had roles to fill
In 2-D movies shot to thrill--
So quaintly pre-machine.

Remember when the snake oil flowed
In PowerPoint plus poise--
The next big thing with QA lingo
Boomed your biz with buzzword bingo
Meaning lost in noise.

Remember when the minds of men
Spent weekends watching jocks,
When freaks of meat with agile feet
Were lionized for sheer conceit
And pimped by idiot box.

Remember when the brightest minds
Were valued overseas,
But strapped for cash, their budgets slashed,
Were treated here like neuro-trash,
Divided by degrees.

Remember how teh stoopid spread,
Infecting unsafe heads,
When fundie fools could castrate schools
And stifle thought with prudish rules
Enforced by covert feds.

The world was hateful-crazy then
Before the New Cognition
With every child from birth beguiled
By ancient myths contrived and styled
On gods and superstition.

It's hard to think of how they coped
With fear-memes running mad;
So few could see how life could be--
That all they had to do was free
The simple brains they had.

[Cross posted from PhaWRONGula.]

Comments

Is this site now dead? I check in now and then, but alas new posts seem to have dried up entirely...

It's not so much dead as lapsed into a coma. I still poke the occasional link into the Wall Spatterings, but I'm struggling for blogging inspiration (and time) at the moment. PhaWRONGula has a similar lassitude.

Thanks for the reminder, outeast. I should make some time.

Well, I'll geep on dropping by, then:) I like the new pome, by the way - not least because of its antipodean take on the whole November theme (the nights are encroaching ever further into the pale days on this side of the ball; a long, cold winter looks likely).

Thanks.
November Defrosted was written as a response to that northern hemispherist, Robert Frost and his poem My November Guest.
http://www.bartleby.com/117/3.html
I stole his rhythm and the last words from each line and dragged them down under. ;-)

I hadn't read that before - thanks. Of course, the November poem I always think of is Thomas Hood's...

Hmmm. It seems I've been missing out on Thomas Hood.

There is something sinister about Hood's sense of humour, a trait that was to reappear in the "black comedy" of the latter 20th century. His pages are thronged with comic mourners and undertakers, and a corpse is always good for a laugh. He was famous for his punning, which appears at times to be almost a reflex action, serving as a defense against painful emotion. Of his later poems, the grim ballads "The Dream of Eugene Aram, the Murderer" and "The Last Man," "The Song of the Shirt," "The Lay of the Labourer," and "The Bridge of Sighs" are moving protests against social evils of the day--sweated labour, unemployment, and the double sexual standard.
(from http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/251.html )

Thanks for bringing him to my attention.