Burns Night Post #3: Who Would Rabbie Support?

We prepare to celebrate Burns Night tonight, & as always, the celebrations falls during the FA Cup Forth Round matches. Awesomely, Man U has already crashed out of the competition which leaves only Chelsea as a real challenge to Arsenal's sweet run towards the League/Cup double. Of course, Arsenal's 4-2 fight back @ mid-week against Bolton sent them to the top of the league table... granted, a Man U win this afternoon would see Manchester overtake them for a couple days. Still, it's pretty sweet to be top this late in the season.

So in honor of Burns Night & Arsenal's rise to the top, here's what may be the 1st in an new annual tradition... my Burns style poem for the weekend.
Enjoy!

"To a Goon"
Now, if wee Rabbie Burns were still agood
Do’na think that he would be a Chelsea man
For fookin’ fruit & prancin’ doon the road
Is not the way for our fair Burnsie, ken?

And whoot of auld sir Alex’ red Manure?
(He wouldna be a Yankees fan me’thinks.)
Young Rab would ratha cheer the worker, sure,
Than fancy big buck squads with big buck stinks.

Take Merseyside and shove it up yer arse!
Not since the four fair Beatles was it plain.
He’d never been nor would he be a Scouse.
He’d floosh the Reds, wi’ shite, right down the drain.

He’d scoff at Villain ‘tenders to tha crown
Blue Cit’zens, too, wee Rabbie would na take.
Nor lily-white; tha Hotspur, he’d put down.
North London’s got but one fer foock’es sake.

Perhaps the Ayr United or the Killie
Would scratch his home town need for home town sport.
Fair Rabbie was no silly billy Gillie,
He wouldna’ take no silly billy court.

Not Hearts nor Hibs nor Hoops would be his team.
And Rangers only range for gearlie boys.
Though Scotland’s squads would be for him it seems,
They play a pretty plot with ugly noise.

He’d be a true red Gooner don’t ya ken?
Up the Ars’nal; top the table strive.
A club wi’ whom th’hard workin’ lass and men
Can drink and sing and fight and be alive!

By the time we got to Bookstock we were half a hundred strong

Last night @ the EMU Student Center, the Lyceum, EMU's undergrad Lit. group, hosted a poetry & music event called Bookstock to benefit Willow Run High School in an attempt to raise money for their book budget. All in all, @ 6 bucks a head, I would guess the raised about 300 clams which could end up being a lot of used paperback books for the English classes. The evening started w/ some poetry by a former student of mine. I had him in an intro to Poetry class and now he's out in the world publishing & performing... and he was really good. In fact, all of the student poets were good. If I were to make a guess, I would say maybe 10 people read their stuff, & it was all really interesting. And none of it was pretentious or self-important like so much poetry is, or like so much of this very blog is. As far as the music is concerned, the 1st band, Nightcap, was really musically interesting. The 1st song was a cool instrumental w/ lots of looping & effects. It was sort of a Zappa meets Particle thing. The singer then cam eon stage and kind of messed w/ the situation. He has a lounge-act style that didn't really mesh w/ their weird electronic stuff. I would definitely check them out again though... and the drummer was another of my former students. The 2nd band is in between names @ the moment, but you can see on the flier that they were called Ill Conceived. This band features Jim & Joe on acoustic guitars playing Son Volt & Ryan Adams tunes. When they played @ Steve & Annette's a couple weeks ago, I accidentally dubbed them "Ill Conceived" so when a Lyceum e-mail went out last week asking for their name, I replied & it stuck long enough to get it on the flier. Of course, neither was too pleased by the moniker so as the MC introduced them he said, "This band was never known as 'Ill Conceived,' but they are now called 'Andre Peltier is a High-On.'" That's obviously a fun name for a band, & I went from being the dude who named them to being their name-sake. Joe was shocked to find out that no one else knew what "high-on" means though as we had to explain afterwards that the phrase was not only specific to SE Michigan, but also to the mid to late '80s. In which case, he really just dated himself, showing how old he is. In my defense, I am not a high-on nor have I ever been. I am an upstanding member of my community: a gentleman & a scholar. The final band, Looking for Mammoths seemed good, but the sound was really bad so it was hard to get a real feeling for how they were. It was too bad too because they were the ones working the soundboard for everyone else, then when they played they were w/o a sound person. Overall, I'm really happy these students were able to pull this off. Well done to all of them.