Bad Contamination

The Worst of Perth has recently alerted me to the fact that Bayswater Councillor Sally Palmer has of late been peddling some truly atrocious poetry on the subject of a concrete plant being constructed on Collier road.

I know nothing about Ms Palmer’s politics, and while I have not been aware of plans for a concrete plant on Collier road I can see why such a proposal seems like a bad idea. One thing I do know however is what makes for a half decent poem, and I can say with certainty that “Black Cockatoo Calling” is probably the worst bit of poetry foisted on the people of Bayswater since Gina Rinehart defiled Morley with her poorly composed plea for less government regulation on the activities of disadvantaged mining billionaires.

It is a basic rule of English poetry that you can’t rhyme a word with itself – it’s cheating. Yet Ms Palmer rhymes “lands” with “lands”, “accord” with “accord” and “earth” with “earth”. Another rule is that of meter and scansion – lines should follow a uniform pattern of syllable count and stress. While not as bad as Ms Rinehart in this respect Ms Palmer still breaks meter all over the place. A basic understanding of grammar is also expected – I don’t think the construction “to do contamination” would pass muster in any high school English class, let alone “to do bad contamination”.

The horror engendered by reading Ms Palmer’s poetic burp got me wondering – how is it that apparently intelligent people can spew up the kind of doggerel that would embarrass William McGonagall but then be proud enough to put it on display for all to see? After some thought I think I’ve figured it out…

We all wrote poems in primary school. And almost all of them were awful. Awful, terrible atrocious poetry. But because we were young and just learning how to write and compose, our teachers encouraged us. A poem like “Black Cockatoo Calling” would get any 10 year old a gold star and maybe a special certificate from the school principal, despite its many obvious faults. And there’s nothing wrong with that whatsoever.

The problem arises when the 10 year old internalises the message “I’m a good poet!” and goes on through high school, and maybe university, without ever writing another poem. They never have cause to write more poetry, and never get any feedback that would let them know that their poetic skills have failed to grow beyond the levels of that 10 year old, and are – in a grown adult – simply an embarrassment. Throw in a desire to express strongly held beliefs about mining regulations or concrete plants and the stage is set for a horrible, poorly composed screed to be vomited out into the world, generating untold suffering and trauma.

If I get the time I may rewrite Ms Palmer’s poem into something more acceptable. But then again I may not. I am rather busy at the moment.

Sightings

I saw a UFO this morning.

At this point people are probably going “Oh god! Don’t tell me he believes in UFOs! He’s insane! I’m never reading this blog again!”. To which I say “Of course I believe in UFOs! I’ve seen a number of them over the years, I’d be mad to not believe in them!”

The point of course is that when you say “UFO” you probably mean “alien spaceship”, and when I say “UFO” I mean exactly what it says on the box – an Unidentified Flying Object.

Now I suppose it’s possible that any given UFO could be an alien spaceship, but – as a person with a decent grasp of both interstellar distances and physics – I wouldn’t be holding my breath. While I’m of the opinion that some UFOs may turn out to be anomalous – which is to say they are examples of a phenomena currently uncategorised by science – common sense dictates that the vast, vast majority of sightings are perfectly ordinary objects (such as aircraft, birds, stars, clouds, planets, meteors, etc.) seen from funny angles or under unusual conditions. I’m sure for instance that what I saw this morning was a plane either taking off from or circling to land at Perth Airport, which is only five or so kilometres from the site of my observation, Bayswater Railway Station.

What I saw at 8:33 this morning was a shining, slightly ovoid disc traveling from right to left across the east-north-eastern sky for between 30 seconds and a minute. It kept level at about four fingers above the treeline, and covered a distance of about four fingers before passing behind a cloud and vanishing. A mass of thin, whispy dark cloud was blowing across the sky from left to right, and the object was passing behind it, occasionally vanishing behind pillars of cloud – I was careful to note that the object was moving relative to the ground, not just to the cloud. Its level of brightness varied up and down, but remained constant for the last ten seconds of observation.

There were a large number of people on the platform at the time, but no-one else seemed to notice the object – or if they did they just assumed it was a plane. Which it almost certainly was. I considered taking a photo, but really couldn’t be bothered 🙂

So there we are. UFOs buzzing Bayswater. Tune in next week when I tell you about the thylacine I saw down by the river!

(Note: I have never actually seen a thylacine down by the river or indeed anywhere else :))

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