Brevity by Dan Thompson for January 22, 2016

Redkaycei RepocI didn’t think they permitted filky lyrics. I had the honor of swapping filk with Seeger once. For the audience unfamiliar with filk, he presented the Aphrodite verse above, and I my chorus for Allan Sherman’s Orally (“When you take vaccine, be sure / You take it orally, / For the other way, you see, / Is more painfully.” “Orally, orally, gives you far less fuss, / Than to be stabbed right in your / gluteous maximus.” Somewhere around “right in”, Seegar had figured out the rhyme, and he almost fell down laughing..The reporter on Murphy Brown claimed one couldn’t claim to be a journalist without having a personal Hemingway story. I claim the same for folk singers’ Seeger stories. I can claim both, although the Hemingway was post mortem. As their stable camping author, Scribners had me double check the weight of listed items of camping gear, for a Hemingway book they were publishing. His figures were reasonable. I thought the whole thing ridiculous. The story was somewhat autobiographical, and he had undoubtedly done more camping than I.