Oscillations
They may be named for Robert Mogue,
But that name never suited –
So when his synths first came to vogue,
The ‘Mogue’ was quickly booted.
For now the great subconscious found
A name as funky as their sound –
We only had to hear their fugue,
To know we had to call them Moog !
Brolly Dolly
What is it with black umbrellas ?
Only make the weather darker !
When the skies are less than stellar,
Do not make them even starker !
Make our brollies blue and gold,
A private sunbeam to unfold –
The overcast may make us pout,
But when it rains, the sun comes out !
The Bland & The Brutal
This macho rejection of beauty as quaint,
We bask in the ugly in building and paint;
Those worlds of the graceful and subtle all fade,
We cannot return back because we’re afraid.
Tempus Fudge-It
I held my time within my hands,
And tightly cupped its precious sands,
But held it open to the skies:
Alas, when time can’t flow, it flies.
Arachubiquita
Look ! Spiders ev’rywhere !
Scuttling over ceilings,
Hanging from their danglings,
Watching from the walls.
Webbing here, webbing there,
Going ’bout their dealings,
Lurking legs-a-gangling
Or rolled up into balls.
Let them be, don’t let them scare.
Spiders, spiders ev’rywhere !
M-K-G-F-A-B-O
Doctor Hertzsprung, Doctor Russell,
Why is your diagram such a tussle ?
Why is you axis the wrong way round,
Higher to lower, bluer to redder ?
Does it reveal some secret profound,
Hotter to cooler, younger to deader ?
Your sweeping main sequence is mirrored about,
Your plots may be right, but your graph’s up the spout.
Actually, I’m being a little unfair here. The original plot was absolute magnitude (aka luminosity) on the y-axis, and the peak wavelength of light on the x (or ‘spectral type’). Since high-energy blue light has many more waves in the same distance as lower-energy red light, so the length between peaks in red light is longer, and thus a higher number. (Incidentally, Omicron2 Eriadne B was the first white dwarf discovered in 1910.)
When it was later realised that the wavelengths directly related to surface tempurature, the latter was substituted, but now the numbers were going down instead of up, and nobody bothered to flip it. But thanks to the wonders of the internet, I was able to rustle up the following:
As the Crow Flies
So when you turn to pray in the facing-Mecca way
Do you use the Great Circles or the Rhumbs ?
Cos both have got it wrong, for the route that’s shortest-long,
Shall be diving through the mantel as she comes.
