Written while waiting for
his talk to end and yours to begin |
||||
Back to Odds and Ends |
OK, these are called "double dactyls." A dactyl sounds like "radium" or "Nadia" or "harmonize." So a double dactyl sounds like "Nadia Nadia" or "radium radium." The rules are as follows: (a) 8 lines in two stanzas; (b) first line must be nonsense; (c) Line 2 has to be someone's name; (d) at least one line has to be a single word (I used to think, in error, that this had to be Line 6, so all the double dactyls below suffer from this constraint); (e) Lines 4 and 8 must rhyme. If you don't believe me, see Wikipedia.
I Bibbity bobbity Roderick and Harrison Stalking gerontogenes Strain after strain
Clone the old-fashioned way – Heterosexually – Watching their breeding stock Fill most of Maine.
II
Bibbity bobbity Carey and Curtsinger Counting fly carcasses Zillions a day
Find an occasional Drosomethusaleh; Old fruit flies neither die Nor fade away.
III
Bibbity bobbity Nadia Rosenthal, Constructing Mighty Mouse Base after base:
Muscular rodents made Transgenotypically Needn't let hamsters kick Sand in their face.
IV
Bibbity bobbity Michal Jazwinski Pioneer LAG™-meister Leader of yeasts
Claims that his moist little Saccharomyces Resemble, in some ways, Less tractable beasts.
V
Bibbity bobbity Michal Jazwinski Spritzing LAG™-ointment On mama-yeast's gears
Eases his poor, bud-scarred S. cerevisiae Downhill, on spirals, to Well-deserved beers.
VI
Bibbity bobbity Dr. Jan Hoeijmakers Tired of working with Slow-aging beasts
Snips out one deoxy- Ribonucleotide; Now his mice age just as Quickly as yeasts
VII
Bibbity bobbity Edward Lakatta Guarding your heartbeat From time's wear and tear
Shows that the levels of Cardiovascular Adenylcyclase Had Beta be there.
VIII
Bibbity bobbity Vladimir Dracula Used to be shy of The sun's deadly rays
But switching from indoles to Pinealectomy Gets him to Newsweek Undead but unfazed.
IX
Bibbity bobbity Edward J. Masoro All his rats ancient, and None of them stout
Fears that rats sentenced to Near-immortality Given their 'druthers, would Druther eat out.
X
Bibbity bobbity Harmon C. Dunathan Shows, pulling conformers Down from the shelf
B6, which mostly works Co-enzymatically Can, pyridoxically, Schiff for itself.
Notes: Most of these are more-or-less self-explanatory if you've been keeping up with biogerontology. Number VIII is a reference to the linked paper, in which Pierpaoli and Regelson claimed that lifespan of mice could be extended by melatonin-secreting pineal transplants, unaware that the donor strain had an enzymatic defect that prevented it from making any melatonin. Neither author resembles V. Dracula in any way, but I did hope that this discovery, which was featured in Newsweek, might cheer up the Count if he happened to know his indole physiology. Harmon C. Dunathan, my organic chemistry teacher in college (see Number X), was an expert on the action of Vitamin B6 (pyridoxal phosphate), and made his reputation by showing that this molecule can form Schiff bases even without the benefit of enzyme catalysis.
|
|