They say you learn something new every day, if you work at it. I think I've stumbled upon my factoid for today. One of my favorite authors, Florence King, came out of retirement in 2006, bless her heart, and resumed writing a column for the National Review. I don't subscribe to that magazine – it's far too far to the right for me – but they do have an online presence, and through that (well, through a “free news” site) I can keep up with her most recent articles. Miss King (not “Ms.”, mind you!) seems to enjoy bashing Hillary Clinton quite a bit.
Anyway, in one of them, she happened to mention that most of Emily Dickinson's poems could be sung to the tune of the old ditty “The Yellow Rose of Texas”. Well! I couldn't quite believe that, so off I went to Google to find some of Miss Dickinson's poems online.
I found some, and damn me if you couldn't sing every one of 'em. And singing them to that tune turned Miss Dickinson's rather droll little verses into bouncy little ditties. Fun, even. Try it: “There is no Frigate like a Book/To take us Lands away/Nor any Coursers like a Page/of prancing Poetry --.”
Now, some of you might've known this already, but to me it's the biggest news since I found out you can sing “Amazing Grace”, “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”, “The House of the Rising Sun”, and the words of the Gilligan's Island theme song to each other's tunes. I believe I've mentioned before that it takes very little to amuse me.