Cultured Comments

Update: TSO has added another, which I've put at post's end. Other contributions welcome.
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In this blog's tradition of keeping people posted on the really important issues, I thought it incumbent upon me to preserve some comments from Zippy's place that rise to an unusual level of discourse. Appended to a post otherwise dedicated to the intrinsically evil nature of contracepted sex - inspired by TSO's accidental linking to a pro-contraception site (he was sorry, everybody forgave him) - these are the Elysian Fields of comments. For example, I noted that in poking around the offending site, I "couldn't find a name on which to pin the blame. (The rhyme's for TS)." And whaddya know, TS responded:

Bill - like the rhyme, me too this time.

That got the ball rolling. Reader Brandon Field, sympathizing with the cause of TS's original post, the difficulty in convincing a fellow so-called Catholic member of his family to think aright about contraception, offers this:

The hardest group,
(it seems to me),
to evangelize
is your family.

Now, that's good stuff. Brandon also supplied a link to a poetic form called the grook, which you can find here. The grooks are so clever that Peony showed up to thank him for it, because she knows clever when she sees it, although I don't see why she couldn't have said something nice about our efforts while she was in the neighborhood.

So I respond to Brandon's grook with:

Perhaps an even harder group
(If forced to take my pick)
To win to truth
Is your liberal fellow Catholic.

To which reader Marion says: "Oh, Bill Luse! I liked your epigram." She has taste, no?

But Brandon isn't finished:

Bill makes a point
(about Catholics only in name)
who belong to the Family,
perhaps our two groups are the same?

So now everyone wants to get into the act, even Zippy:

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
My readers are poets,
But I'm not.

But no one's offended by this ugliness because the most admirable of men is the one who knows his limitations. And TS, whose only limitation is an excess of humility, jumps back in:

I always think
if my example were better
they'd come to the Church
and I'd be their debtor.

How good is that? Though he almost makes it sound like it's his fault they don't come to church. Trust me, you could be Mother Teresa and they still won't come.

So I concede that Brandon's right:

They are the same,
And all our God will bless,
Once they're in a darkened booth
Determined to confess.

To which Brandon goes all TS humble on me:

And yet, upon reflection,
and a little introspection,
I must in truth offer interjection,
that the sinner most deserving rejection,
is me.

Well, speak for yourself, Brandon,

For when I look inward
to reflect,
Seeking sin
I might detect,
Conscience whispers in my ear,
"Relax, you're almost perfect."

Humble takes a tumble there, doesn't it? And then it all comes to an end because Zippy and Chris start in on that dreary "intrinsically evil" stuff again, which kind of kills the poetry. (Chris is our resident pro-pacifist propagandist prone to parroting papal pronouncements to prop up his position.) Anyway, I just thought I ought to preserve this high point in comment culture before it disappears into that cyber limbo known as the archives. One last parting modernist gift for TS:

He liked my rhyme
This time -
I like mine
with a shot of Tequila
and a slice of lyme...
disease.

Hope Zippy doesn't want to burn that last one, on the presumption that nonsense is intrinsically evil.
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TSO's latest:

Too much prose
spoils the broth
poems draw us
like flames to a moth.

I love it. The thing about his mind is that

His wit pours forth
Most whimsically,
Eschewing all evil
Instrinsically.