Ce-Cg
In Edinburgh, folk at a ceilidh
Play bagpipes and fiddles, sing gaily,
And dance through the night.
(A less usual sight
Is a Scotsman who plays ukulele.)
The kilted hula is another rarity.
Celebrity offspring must grapple
With laughable forenames, like “Apple”
(The lovable fruit).
Moms reckon they’re cute,
But classmates will tell ’em they’re crapple.
You’re part of celebrity culture,
Which means, Tiger, as a result, yer
Affairs are fair game
For our show—can you blame
Us? And honestly, who here’s the vulture?
So you wish me to speak of the cellar?
It’s the haunt of the underground dweller,
Where funguses grow
And the spiders all go...
Little Sally’s there now; shall I tell ’er?
The slime moulds, not fungi or plants, are
Eukaryotes, and there’s a chance a
Guy could confuse some
With amoebae. How come
Those are cellular? God knows the answer.
God, for the purposes of this limerick, being a dictyostelid who looks like an individual amoeba, who under stress aggregates with His kind to form a multicellular assembly called a pseudoplasmodium, migrates to a new location, forms into a fruiting body, and releases spores, thus creating new cellular slime moulds in His own image.
On Wimbledon’s famed Centre Court,
Some of tennis’s finest have fought,
With success, to be best
Of the year; for the rest,
It’s the place where their dreams came to nought.
He’s at one with himself, his contentedness
A result of his focus and centredness;
But emotional oneness
Removes all the funness
Of acting with utter dementedness.
Metric units are simple and neat.
Take a prefix, and simply repeat:
Centi-’s .01 metres
Or .01 litres.
A centipede? .01 feet.
No, no, no: a metric centipede is clearly a hectopede.
The centigram isn’t much used
In Australia, because we perused
Both the kilo- and milli-
gram, found them less silly,
And centigrams simply refused.
Someone must use hundredths of a gram, but it ain’t us. Maybe entomologists use them when weighing centipedes.
When converting a hundred and twenty litres
Into small metric units—say, centilitres—
You should multiply first
By a hundred; the worst
That can happen’s you end up with plenty litres.
Thirty centimetres: that’s an LP
Or a ruler. Divide it by three,
And you’ve got you a deci-
metre. Yes, metric’s messy,
But neater than inches to me.
LPs were actually 30.5 cm in diameter, but what’s half a centimetre among friends (apart from one two-hundredth of a metre).
What’s centralize mean? It’s a riddle
That’s teased us for eons; we twiddle
Our thumbs as we wonder
What page it goes under...
Not really. It’s “move to the middle”.
Our centralized means of production
Enable far greater construction
Of homes for the workers!
(You land-owning shirkers
Will suffer some bank-account suction.)
This bloke down at Centrelink tol’ me
“Try harder or else lose yer dole”—me
Sole means of support!
Well, I’ll dance for ya, sport,
When I feel like it. You don’t control me.
Unfortunately, the staff at Centrelink, the Australian government agency responsible for JobSeeker and other social security payments, do in significant measure control the lives of people who depend on them. In the case of people looking for work, this means reporting to them every fortnight, applying for an agreed number of jobs in that time, and attending all job interviews and any required training, in order to receive an income equivalent to around 75% of the poverty line.
I sent ’em a centum or more—
A bundle! A hundred! Five score!
Two fifties! Ten tens!
A whole parcel of pens!
Whatcha mean, they can only find four?
Gotta heat up some grub for your gob?
This stovetop of glass does the job:
Its ceramic glows red
When it’s heated. Instead
Of induction or gas, try this hob.
In Britain, the arrangements of elements on top of a stove, oven or cooker are called hobs rather than stovetops (US) or cooktops (US, Australia). Ceramic hobs have any array of ceramic elements under a sheet of black glass, which are heated by electricity. Unlike induction or gas hobs, their surfaces remain hot for a while after being switched off.
A bowl of cold-milk-covered cereal
Has a taste you’d describe as ethereal:
Every satisfied munch
Has that wonderful crunch.
(What it does to your waist’s immaterial.)
Good heavens! My terrible niece
Is wearing a dress that’s cerise!
Pink-red can’t be seen
In a setting that’s green!
Quick, call the Aesthetic Police.
This certificate says you are now
One of us: a true citizen. How
You will love your new passport!
But hey, not so fast, sport:
To get it, first utter this vow.
A certifier certainly knows
What’s correct and what isn’t, and goes
To some lengths to attest
You were duly assessed
On the stuff your certificate shows.
Her cervix was slow to dilate,
So delivery just had to wait;
But her son didn’t mind
Being further confined:
Sleeping in a bit longer was great.
How I long for the total cessation
Of hunts for the noble cetacean!
This barbarous game
Brings immeasurable shame
To an otherwise civilised nation.
Peter Falk, what on earth are you on?
Don’t refer to that place as Ceylon!
They call it Sri Lanka,
You ignorant wanker.
Now get to Colombo! Begone!
To explain what cf. means, I shall
Put it plainly: "compare", it is, pal—
Though you cannot see that in
Its letters; they’re Latin.
(Cf. i.e., n.b., and et al.)
The abbreviation comes from the Latin confer.
Thanks to all this superb CGI,
You’ll believe that our hero can fly!
Our computer can draw
Him with nary a flaw.
Super scripts, though, it couldn’t supply.