Arnold Zwicky's Blog

🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to bring in October, a month that embraces: Hangul Day (10/9), a linguistic holiday (celebrating the excellent Korean orthography); NCOD, National Coming Out Day (10/11), a gay holiday (also, not accidentally, the JHT-AMZ wedding-equivalent anniversary, from the time long before same-sex marriage); and Halloween (10/31), a strange religiocultural holiday — the three occasions together in this parody of the Gunpowder Treason rhyme:

Roll over, Roll over
The first of October
Hangul, coming out, and black cat;
I have no doubt
That coming out
Is something to celebrate at!

The Gunpowder Treason, or Guy Fawkes, rhyme comes in many variants, in particular this one (which served as the model for my parody):

Remember, remember!
The fifth of November,
Gunpowder treason and plot;
I know of no reason
Why Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!

Some discussion of the rhyme in my 11/5/12 posting “Gunpowder treason”.

While I have your attention, I can provide an explanation for something I tossed off at the very end of yesterday’s posting “Garden Days”, something that readers might have found mysterious:

Meanwhile, you can think good thoughts about your pussycat, but I’m thinking evil thoughts about my squirrel Écu .

The allusion is to New Yorker cartoonist George Booth’s 1983 collection Think Good Thoughts About a Pussycat:

The book cover, featuring the Booth Dog, seized up in cross-eyed annoyance

There’s a Page on this blog with links to my postings about George Booth’s cartoons.

This entry was posted on October 1, 2024 at 8:19 am and is filed under Allusion, Books, Holidays, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Parody. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.