All The Best Limericks Are Lewd (revisited)

Abraham was a wily old Jew
Who kept company with the Chosen Few
By forswearing sin
And his own foreskin
The entire world he proceeded to screw

It was a limerick that got me my first job as a junior copywriter. I had just turned 20 and was living with my parents in the house where I was born. I knew it was time to leave the family nest and learn to stand on my own feet - so when a friend mentioned that an ad agency in KL was looking for new blood, I immediately wrote to them. A few days later I received a test in the mail and was asked to compose a limerick; then write a news report about it, followed by an editorial. This was the limerick I came up with (of course I had to keep it clean):

A grand gourmand named Gus
Decided to devour a bus
But as he began to chew
He said, "Oh no, this won't do,
The passengers are making a fuss!"

Needless to say I got the job and soon found myself turning into a professional wordsmith, churning out readable text by the column inch. It didn't take long for me to realize I wasn't cut out to be a hack. Within 18 months I quit, after winning $5,000 in a slogan writing competition for Hall's cough drops, and began a checkered career as a freelancer and creative consultant. I continued to compose the occasional limerick - but somehow they were never quite lewd enough...

A fair mädchen was having her lüncheon

In a very chic cafe in München

Well, I got bold and told her

I wanted to rock'n'roll her

"Ja ja," she said and we got engaged pretty sünchen

As clean limericks go, this one ranks as an all-time winner (unfortunately I didn't write it and I don't know who did): 

A wonderful bird is the pelican;

His beak can hold more than his belican.

He can hold in his beak

Enough food for a week,

Though I’m damned if I know how the helican!

But enough of clean limericks! Bring on the best and lewdest ones I have collected over the years. I must mention here that some of the dirtiest limericks ever written came from Isaac Asimov, acclaimed writer of sciencefiction novels. Here are a couple I like:

Said an ovum one night to a sperm,

"You're a very attractive young germ.

Come join me, my sweet,

Let our nuclei meet

And in nine months we'll both come to term."

------------------------------

"We refuse," said two men from Australia,

"Bestiality this saturnalia.

For now, we bethink us,

The ornithorhynchus

Is our down-under type of Mammalia."

And I have a gut feeling we owe this classic to Asimov:

The astronomer's crime was heinous:

"We mustn't let convention restrain us;

Though I've made a career

Out of Venus, my dear,

I'm tempted to switch to Uranus."

Let's open the floodgates of debauchery and prurience, shall we? But first, a limerick defining what limericks are really about...

The Limerick's furtive and mean, 

To be kept under close quarantine, 

Or she'll sneak to the slums, 

Where she promptly becomes 

Disorderly, drunk and obscene!

It's almost impossible to trace limericks back to their source. The memorable ones tend to get circulated and recirculated over time till they end up attributed to Anonymous (presumably an obscure Greek lyricist). Here's the rest of my collection to date:

There once was a girl from Ealing,

Who said she had no sexual feeling.

Until a cynic named Boris,

Touched her clitoris,

And they’re still scraping her off the ceiling.

-----------------------------------------

There was a young fellow from Kent,

Whose prick was so long that it bent,

To save himself trouble,

He put it in double,

And instead of coming he went.

---------------------------------------

A lesbian girl from Khartoum
Took a gay young man up to her room. 
At the start of the night 
She said "Let's get this right. 
Who does what? And with which? And to whom?"

-----------------------------------------

There was an old bishop from Buckingham 
Who spoke of young girls and of fucking 'em 
But a bishop from Wales 
Took the wind from his sails 
When he spoke of young boys and of sucking 'em

From the crypt of the Church of St. Giles 

Came a scream that carried for miles 

Said the Vicar, "Good Gracious, 

Has Brother Ignatius 

Forgotten the Bishop has piles?"

-----------------------------------------

There once was a man from Peru 

Who fell asleep in his canoe 

As he dreamt of Venus 
he played with his penis 

And woke up with a handful of goo.

---------------------------------------------

There was a young woman from Yale 

Who offered her body for sale 

For the sake of the blind 

She had her behind 

Tattooed with her prices in Braille

--------------------------------------------

There was a young fellow from Leeds,
Who swallowed a package of seeds.
Great tufts of grass,
Sprouted out of his ass,
And his balls were all covered with weeds.

-------------------------------------------

There was a young man from Lynn,
Whose prick was the size of a pin.
Said his girl with a laugh,
As she fondled his staff,
“This won’t be much of a sin.”

---------------------------------------------

There was a young lady from Maine,
Who enjoyed copulating on a train.
Not once, I maintain,
But again and again,
And again and again and again.

------------------------------------------

There was a young actress from Crewe, 

Who remarked as the vicar withdrew, 

The Bishop was quicker 

and thicker and slicker, 

And two inches longer than you.

-------------------------------------------------

There was a young plumber from Lee 

who was plumbing his girl with great glee, 

she said,  "Stop your plumbing, 

I think someone's coming..." 

Said the plumber, still plumbing, "It's me!"

-------------------------------------------------

A kinky young girl from Coleshill, 

Tried a dynamite stick for a thrill, 

They found her vagina 

in North Carolina, 

and bits of her tits in Brazil.

-------------------------------------------------

There was a young man from Pitlocherie, 

making love to his girl in the rockery, 

she said, "Look you've cum 

all over my bum, 

This isn't a shag, it's a mockery."

-------------------------------------------------

There was a young lassie from Morton, 

who had one long tit and one short'un, 

on top of all that 

a great hairy twat, 

and a fart like a six fifty Norton.

----------------------------------------

There was a young man from Harrow 

who had one as big as a marrow. 

He said to his tart, 

"Try this for a start. 

My balls are outside on a barrow."

------------------------------------

There was a young girl from Hitchin, 

who was scratching her crotch in the kitchen. 

Her mother said "Rose, 

It's crabs, I suppose." 

She said "Bollocks, get on with your stitchin'."

-----------------------------------------

There was a young girl from Devizes, 

who had tits of different sizes. 

One was quite small, 

almost nothing at all, 

But the other was big and won prizes.

--------------------------------------

There once was a young man from Brighton,

Who said to a young lass, “You’re a tight’un!”

She said, “Listen, Hon,

You’re in the wrong one.

There’s plenty of room in the right one.”

------------------------------------

A lady while dining at Crewe,

Found an elephant’s dong in her stew,

Said the waiter, “Don’t shout,

Or wave it about,

Or the others will all want one too!”

--------------------------------------

There was a young woman of Croft,

Who played with herself in a loft,

Having reasoned that candles,

Could never cause scandals,

Besides which they did not go soft.

----------------------------------------

There was a young woman named Sally, 

who loved an occasional dally, 

she sat on the lap

of a well endowed chap, 

Crying, "Gee, Dick, you're right up my alley!"

----------------------------------

There was a young gaucho named Bruno 

Who said "If there is one thing I do know, 

A woman is fine, 
a donkey divine, 

But the llama is numero uno."

---------------------------------------

There once was a man from Nantucket

Whose schlong was so long he could sucket

He said with a grin

Wiping spunk off his chin

"If my ear were a cunt I could fucket!"

Nantucket seems to have inspired more than its fair share of limericks, not all of them lewd - but they do merit a passing mention, if only for their literary value:

There once was a man from Nantucket

Who kept all his cash in a bucket.

But his daughter, named Nan,

Ran away with a man

And as for the bucket, Nantucket.

This soon spawned a sequel...

But he followed the pair to Pawtucket,

The man and the girl with the bucket;

And he said to the man,

He was welcome to Nan,

But as for the bucket, Pawtucket.

What better way to end this post than with a mathematical limerick composed by Leigh Mercer (1893-1977) who came up with this poetic equation:

Translated into plain English it reads:

A dozen, a gross, and a score

Plus three times the square root of four

Divided by seven

Plus five times eleven

Is nine squared and not a bit more.

[First posted 26 April 2017, reposted 18 September 2018, 31 March 2019, 25 August 2019,

16 September 2021, 18 February 2023 & 27 June 2024]

Circumcision is a bad idea (reprise)

By Sam Sugar

In Europe, outside certain religious communities, it’s hard to find someone who doesn’t think cutting the end off an infant’s dick is a bad idea. In America, as any Euro who’s dated there knows, opinions differ. With a good urologist making $300 a procedure, and doing up to five circumcisions a day (it’s the most commonly performed surgical procedure in America), the reasons foreskin’s slightly less hip in the US than members-only jackets are clear. Most American women who’ve never experienced a natural penis claim to prefer the cut version they’re used to. The dice are loaded.


The British Journal of Urology’s new study (commissioned by NOCIRC), “Fine-touch pressure thresholds in the adult penis” explains:

“The study shows that the foreskin is the most sensitive portion of the penis,” said study coauthor Robert Van Howe, a pediatrician at the Marquette General Health System in Marquette, Michigan. “It’s not like you’re chopping off plain old skin. The analogy would be like removing your lips, because the lips are more sensitive than the skin around them.”


And

“…the study authors say they’ve achieved something new with their study: a comparative sensory mapping of the male organ.

This new cartography of the penis proffers nineteen zones. Missing from the circumcised male are eight of these penile destinations, four on the dorsal side (the outer prepuce, the orifice rim, the muco-cutaneous junction, the ridged band) and four on the ventral (frenulum near ridged band, frenulum at muco-cutaneous junction, orifice rim, and outer prepuce). Missing from the uncircumcised anatomy are two regions on this new map, and they’re both scars.


In the areas that cut and uncut men have in common, the study showed a sensitivity deficit of between two and thirty-three percent. In those areas peculiar to the intact penis, the deficit is by definition 100 percent. And it’s in those areas, the study concludes, where most of the sensory action is. Perhaps the most salient of the report’s findings is that “the transitional region from the external to the internal prepuce is the most sensitive region of the uncircumcised penis and more sensitive than the most sensitive region of the circumcised penis.”

The porn industry plays a part. Manned by lilliputian intellects, and with Jewish men making up a large portion of all male talent, uncut cocks are seldom seen. The American public’s feeling that uncut means unclean feeds a myth about disease and foreskin which people tend not to question. Even if a cut penis is fractionally easier to clean and therefore slightly less likely to carry harmful bacteria, a vagina’s easier to clean when it’s sewn shut and we don’t generally favor that.

With a generation seeing more strange cock on the web as teens than our parents did in a lifetime, the feeling that ‘US porn cock’ IS cock will spread. With the US advocating circumcision in Africa as an HIV prevention measure (ignoring the fact condoms work better) it’s a good time for people who care about free-will and sexual pleasure to point out starting every boy's life by amputating the most sensitive part of his body lies somewhere between unwise and criminal.


Change comes from the young, the young watch porn, and porn has categorized uncut cock as an exclusively gay fetish. Time for a change?

[Read the informative comment on circumcision left by Mark Lyndon of Doctors Opposing Circumcision (D.O.C.)]

CIRCUMCISION PERMANENTLY ALTERS THE BRAIN

We tightly strapped an infant to a traditional plastic “circumstraint” using Velcro restraints. We also completely immobilized the infant’s head using standard surgical tape. The entire apparatus was then introduced into the MRI chamber. Since no metal objects could be used because of the high magnetic fields, the doctor who performed the surgery used a plastic bell with a sterilized obsidian bade to cut the foreskin. No anesthetic was used.

The baby was kept in the machine for several minutes to generate baseline data of the normal metabolic activity in the brain. This was used to compare to the data gathered during and after the surgery. Analysis of the MRI data indicated that the surgery subjected the infant to significant trauma. The greatest changes occurred in the limbic system concentrating in the amygdala and in the frontal and temporal lobes. A neurologist who saw the results postulated that the data indicated that circumcision affected most intensely the portions of the victim’s brain associated with reasoning, perception and emotions. Follow up tests on the infant one day, one week and one month after the surgery indicated that the child’s brain never returned to its baseline configuration. In other words, the evidence generated by this research indicated that the brain of the circumcised infant was permanently changed by the surgery.

[First posted 26 March 2009, reposted 21 February 2020 & 18 July 2021]

Is the universe a fractal? ~ by Amanda Gefter (reprise)

WRITTEN ACROSS THE SKY is a secret, a hidden blueprint detailing the original design of the universe itself. The spread of matter throughout space follows a pattern laid out at the beginning of time and scaled up to incredible proportions by nearly 14 billion years of cosmic expansion. Today that pattern is gradually being decoded by analysing maps of the distribution of the stars, and what has been uncovered could shake modern cosmology to its foundations.

Luciano Pietronero: "It's fractals, fractals all the way!"

Cosmology is founded on the assumption that when you look at the universe at the vastest scales, matter is spread more or less evenly throughout space. Cosmologists call this a "smooth" structure. But a small band of researchers, led by statistical physicist Luciano Pietronero (pictured right) of the University of Rome and the Institute of Complex Systems, Italy, argues that this assumption is at odds with what we can see. Instead they claim that the galaxies form a structure that isn't smooth at all: some parts of it have lots of matter, others don't, but the matter always falls into the same patterns, in large and small versions, at whatever scale you look. In other words, the universe is fractal.

It is a controversial view, and one that sparked an intense debate over a decade ago. Since then, astronomers have surveyed ever-greater numbers of galaxies, taking larger and larger samples of the universe. Now the biggest galaxy survey ever and a brand new map of the universe's dark matter are adding fuel to the fire. At stake is far more than the way galaxies cluster. A fractal universe could undermine cosmology's most basic assumptions. "All of the observations we make depend to a greater or lesser extent on the idea that the universe is homogeneous," says David Hogg of New York University, who leads a team of physicists that disputes Pietronero's view.

This idea that matter is spread more or less evenly throughout the universe is embodied in Einstein's cosmological principle. Einstein formulated it after publishing his general theory of relativity, which describes how the distribution of mass bends space-time and creates gravity. It allows cosmologists to use the equations of general relativity to describe the geometry of the whole universe. As a result it has led to a picture of a universe expanding uniformly from the big bang and in which cosmological measurements have defined meanings.


Fractals allow Pietronero to paint a very different sort of picture - one in which the irregular distribution of matter that we see around us never evens out into a smooth structure, but repeats itself at ever grander scales. Fractals are familiar enough: we see them in the branching of trees, the curves of coastlines, lungs, turbulence and clouds.

No matter what scale you look at them, fractal patterns look the same. Think of broccoli: a tiny branch looks much the same as the whole vegetable. Zoom in or zoom out, the structure looks the same - exquisitely detailed, never smooth. Fractals can be beautiful to look at, but when it comes to galaxies it may be a subversive kind of beauty.

Certainly the universe does not look smooth. Some regions contain clusters of matter; others are virtually empty. Hundreds of billions of stars group together to form galaxies, and galaxies congregate in clusters. Clusters assemble into colossal structures called superclusters that can stretch out for 100 million light years and look uncannily like fractal patterns.

Even superclusters string together in long filaments and sheets that stretch like ghostly cobwebs across an otherwise empty sky. The Sloan Great Wall, for example, which was discovered in 2003, spans more than a billion light years. These filaments and sheets seem to encircle huge voids of empty space. The voids range from 100 to 400 million light years in diameter, making the whole assemblage appear as an immense, glowing lattice punctuated by wells of darkness.


No one disputes that the universe is far from smooth on relatively small scales - by which cosmologists mean thousands of light years. But Hogg's team is convinced that if you zoom further out, smoothness reigns.

"When you're looking at the size scales of galaxies, groups of galaxies, clusters, superclusters and filaments, it looks like a fractal," says Hogg (pictured right). "But once you get larger than all of that, then it starts to look homogeneous." What has convinced him is his team's analysis of the latest data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the largest 3D map of the galactic universe so far. His team insists that the map is proof of smoothness. The fractal camp, however, are sceptical. In fact, they say the Sloan observations confirm what they've been claiming all along.

It might appear to be deadlock, but at least with the Sloan survey the two sides can agree what they're disagreeing about. For years Pietronero and his team argued that the statistical methods mainstream cosmologists were using to establish homogeneity were flawed because they start off by assuming that matter is evenly spread. The team was mostly ignored until 2004, when Hogg and astrophysicist Daniel Eisenstein of the University of Arizona in Tucson spent a summer in Paris with Pietronero's colleagues, cosmologists Francesco Sylos Labini of the Enrico Fermi Centre and the Institute for Complex Systems, Rome, and Michael Joyce of the Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris.

"We argued every day about fractals," Hogg says. "Those battles raged over lunch and coffee and finally convinced us by the end of our visit that we should be doing the analysis as they say." When they returned to the US, Hogg and Eisenstein applied the fractal team's methods to a sample of 55,000 luminous red galaxies mapped by Sloan. They found that the galaxies do form a fractal pattern, but as they looked at bigger and bigger scales, the pattern appeared to disintegrate and smooth out at just over 200 million light years - a scale far larger than most cosmologists had expected.


But Pietronero and Sylos Labini are not convinced. Instead, they believe that if astronomers could continue to zoom out and look at even larger scales, they would find more clustering. They suspect that the apparent smoothness at 200 million light years is not real, but rather an illusion created by statistical effects due to the limited range of the Sloan survey. Hogg's team, though, insist that their evidence of homogeneity is statistically significant. "I think the result really is secure," says Hogg. "I would stake my scientific reputation on that."


Even if the result is real, mainstream cosmologists still have a huge problem on their hands. The fact that the fractal patterning extends to far bigger scales than anyone had expected means that there must be far bigger structures than anyone expected - structures that are even bigger than superclusters. The fractal team argues that the standard model cannot explain the existence of these galactic giants. "If you look at the galaxy data, you can see enormous objects hundreds of millions of light years across, stuff that's really huge," says Pietronero. "This is a huge problem. You're going to have to change the story very radically."

The usual story runs something like this. In the tiny fluctuations of the nascent universe, matter began to collect in denser regions, setting off a chain reaction of gravitational collapse that has given us the large-scale structure we see today. Gravity has worked from the bottom up, building galaxies first, then collecting galaxies into clusters, then clusters into superclusters and so forth. But while the matter has been clumping together, the universe has been expanding, and thus a battle has ensued: gravity versus expansion.


According to Pietronero, there simply hasn't been enough time since the universe came into being 14 billion years ago for gravity to sculpt structures larger than about 30 million light years across: expansion would have prevented anything larger from forming. "The existence of structures much larger than this implies a crisis of the present view of structure formation," he says. This present view is the "cold dark matter model", in which the glowing masses of stars and galaxies are only the tip of the cosmic iceberg. Luminous matter makes up roughly 15 per cent of all the matter in the universe - the other 85 per cent is mysterious dark matter.

Hogg's team says that the new observations do not undermine the standard view as Pietronero claims. Instead, they maintain that the cold dark matter model explains the Sloan data quite accurately. For that to be true, however, Hogg's team have to put a number called a bias parameter into their equations. It reflects the difference between the distribution of matter in computer simulations of the cold dark matter model and the observed distribution of luminous matter.


Collisions between particles of ordinary matter help it clump together, but dark matter is thought not to behave in the same way. That suggests it could be spread out in space more evenly than ordinary matter, so cosmologists assume that the distribution of the matter we can see - galaxies, say - is not a true reflection of the distribution of all the matter that is out there. They believe the structure of the universe is really much "smoother" than it appears to be, because dark matter dominates. In the case of the Sloan survey, the bias is 2: the visible galaxies are clumped twice as densely as the predicted total distribution of matter in the universe.


Sylos Labini, however, sees the bias as a fudge that allows cosmologists to discount the observed clustering of galaxies and to assume that the gigantic clusters of superclusters are only half the problem they appear to be. "The bias is a way to hide the size of structures behind some ad hoc parameter," he says. Mainstream cosmologists, however, feel the bias is justified, assuming that galaxies cluster in regions of space that are replete with excess dark matter. According to the standard model, dark matter is everywhere, but galaxies only shine in the rare regions where dark matter is densest. Dark matter also lingers in the voids where no light shines but here it is thinly spread out. In other words, while the luminous galaxies look very clustered, the underlying blanket of dark matter is far smoother, supporting the claim of homogeneity.

"If the cold dark matter model is correct, then there should be dark matter in the voids," Hogg says. The million-dollar question is: what is the real distribution of dark matter? Is dark matter smooth or fractal? Is it clustered like the galaxies, or does it spread out, unseen, into the great voids? If the voids are full of dark matter, then the apparent fractal distribution of luminous matter becomes rather insignificant. But if the voids are truly empty, the fractal claim requires a closer look.

Astronomers are now providing our first glimpse into the voids and our first look at the pattern of invisible matter. Richard Massey of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and others in the Cosmic Evolution Survey project have just created the first 3D map of dark matter in the universe (New Scientist, 13 January, p 5). They were able to find the dark matter by observing its gravitational effect on any light streaming past it. Combining data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Subaru telescope in Hawaii and the Very Large Telescope in Chile, they mapped the distribution of dark matter at scales ranging from 23 million to 200 million light years across.


Massey's team found that the dark matter distribution is nearly identical to the luminous matter distribution. "The first thing that strikes me is the voids," Massey says. "Vast expanses of space are completely empty. The dark matter makes up a criss-crossing network of strings and sheets around these voids. And all the luminous matter lies within the densest regions of dark matter." Although this distribution of dark matter seems to favour the idea that the universe is fractal, Hogg isn't convinced. "It is interesting," he says, "but measurements of dark matter are much less precise than measurements of galaxy distributions."


"The result is very new," Massey agrees. "It demonstrates a very exciting new way of looking directly at dark matter and will be vital in future work, but hasn't yet been subject to all the analysis that has been applied to galaxy surveys." When asked if the dark matter exhibits an explicitly fractal structure, Massey replies, "We don't know yet."

"The universe is not a fractal," Hogg insists, "and if it were a fractal it would create many more problems that we currently have." A universe patterned by fractals would throw all of cosmology out the window. Einstein's cosmic equations would be tossed first, with the big bang and the expansion of the universe following closely behind. Hogg's team feel that until there's a theory to explain why the galaxy clustering is fractal, there's no point in taking it seriously.


"My view is that there's no reason to even contemplate a fractal structure for the universe until there is a physical fractal model," says Hogg. "Until there's an inhomogeneous fractal model to test, it's like tilting at windmills."

Pietronero is equally insistent. "This is fact," he says. "It's not a theory." He says he is interested only in what he sees in the data and argues that the galaxies are fractal regardless of whether someone can explain why. As it turns out, there is one model that may be able to explain a fractal universe. The work of a little-known French astrophysicist named Laurent Nottale, the theory is called "scale relativity" (see "Fractured space-time" below).

According to Nottale, the distribution of matter in the universe is fractal because space-time itself is fractal. It is a theory on the fringe, but if the universe does turn out to be fractal, more people might sit up and take notice. A resolution to the fractal debate will only come with more data. Sloan is currently charting more galaxies and will release a new map in the middle of 2008. According to Sylos Labini, this will cover over 650 million light years and should tell us if the apparent transition to homogeneity extends beyond 200 million light years. For now, the pattern of the world, imprinted at the origin of the universe, remains a secret glimpsed only in the knowing shimmer of the stars.

FRACTURED SPACE-TIME

French astrophysicist Laurent Nottale has developed a theory that takes fractals to a whole new level. A researcher at the Meudon Observatory in Paris, Nottale set out to extend Einstein's principle of relativity - in which the laws of physics remain the same regardless of the motion of an observer - to a theory in which the laws of physics would remain the same regardless of the scale at which the universe is being observed. He found that the underlying space-time of such a theory would have to be fractal.

In Nottale's theory, called scale relativity, the underlying fractality of space-time is most noticeable in the quantum world. Quantum behaviour, he claims, can be understood geometrically - particles move along fractal trajectories. On large scales, his model could explain a fractal pattern of the galaxies. The most profound question in physics today is how to unify the really small with the really big - and when it comes to matters of scale, fractals may turn out to be a key ingredient.

Amanda Gefter
© New Scientist
09 March 2007

[First posted 1 October 2007, reposted 17 November 2013 & 21 September 2016]