No Finer Place for Sure

By John Hertz:  The Los Angeles Downtown News just sent me a packet with a prize in its 2016 St. Patrick’s Day Limerick Contest (“must concern Downtown”).

There certainly are a City and County of Limerick, Republic of Ireland.  There’s a song “Won’t you come to Limerick?”  What, if anything, limericks have to do with them is more than I can tell you.

The DT News (as it calls itself) for 14 Mar 16, p. 12, after printing a winner and eight others, concluded:

Then there’s John Hertz, who sent five limericks, including an intro limerick, three more limericks, and one he sent us for the contest back in 2006.  Here are three of his submissions.  We were so impressed by John’s work that he also gets a prize.

*
I’ve sent limericks in before.
They flew o’er the transom of your door.
You said you might need them.
Then you had to read them.
Heaven help you, now here come some more.
*
“Oh, what shall I do with these strangers?
“They’re so different from me.  What a danger!”
Yet the fact that you’re strange
Means you’ve things to exchange.
It’s more nourishing.  Be a free-ranger!
*
Hickory dickory dock,
Living downtown is nothing to mock.
We’re central.  It’s cool.
Our city’s a jewel.
So the West Side can put in a sock.

The 3rd limerick was printed in the DT News 13 Mar 06.  You may recognize it from a report in Vanamonde 676.

Downtown and the West Side have reciprocal opinions of each other.  The last line incorporates “put a sock in it”.

2 thoughts on “No Finer Place for Sure

  1. As a Limerickman, I can confirm that the city and county of Limerick exists. They’re actually named after the vast orchards of lime trees and the wooden donkey-drawn ricks used to transport the limes to Dublin, which is, of course, named after the practice there of multiplying everything by two.

  2. The second line of the first one doesn’t scan. As a rule, I knock off reading when a writer disregards something so elementary. This has saved me from literally minutes of agony reading the head-smackingly awful doggerel at the Dick Tracy page on GoComics (where I have given myself permanent permission to skip anything once I’ve deduced it’s intended as verse, and generally avoid the rest of the comments so I don’t have to grind my teeth over the whole-hearted praise such wretched, tortured, non-rhyming, non-scanning inanity receives).

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