Wednesday, June 27, 2018

My New Personal Best: 10 Original Limericks in Five Hours




The American Library Association is dropping Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name from a prestigious children’s literature award in order to distance the honor from what it described as culturally insensitive portrayals in her books.
NYT

A writer cannot buck the trend
Of seeing her eminence end
When gatekeepers choose
To downgrade her views
For what she so long ago penned.



The nut harvest’s early this year.
They already start to appear
In front of cafes
With their winning ways.
(I bet they don’t tip worth a sneer.)


A butcher who lived in Marseille
Claimed protestors got in his way
Whenever he carved
A roast for the starved,
And so he removed to Green Bay.



You’re free to be Muslim, my friend;
But traveling here’s at an end.
Without crucifix
We don’t care to mix
With your kind, nor even pretend.






Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Our Congress has reached a ripe age.
They’re getting too old, and not sage.
I think the time right
To tell ‘em “Goodnight!”
And make ‘em retire offstage.


In childhood I ate cottage cheese,
Though telling my mother “Oh please!”
Not artisan-made,
Twas duller than suede --
But now it’s commanding great fees . . .



If spiders can fly, I’ve no doubt
That pigs can dig caves with their snout.
That snakes use chopsticks
And chickens lay bricks
While kangaroos make sauerkraut.


I’m using a new dating app
That makes me a lovable chap.
I’m handsome and rich,
But there’s just one glitch --
The girls somehow know it’s all crap!


We live in a terrible era
When jungles become the Sahara.
If I were a tree
From the tropics I’d flee
And put down some roots in Canberra.



There’s always a headline or two
I love to sit down and review.
This one is a pip;
It sure has got zip.
(If only she’d used a corkscrew . . . )


Tuesday, June 26, 2018

A Letter from my Missionary Daughter



Hello wonderful people!!


The life of a missionary is sometimes quite unpredictable. You never know when you could be called upon to speak at church, or give a training in a missionary meeting, or be asked to help someone move out of their house, or babysit dogs, or have conversations with crazy people about vowels and consonants meaning something significant.. The list is endless, but you know, I wouldn't change a single thing! There are things we get to experience as missionaries that we really couldn't really experience anywhere else. For example: We went over to a member's house, the Wettengel family, and they have about 6 kids. The youngest two are 4 and 7, and they were kind of shy at first. But after about 10 minutes or so, they come running into the room with these latex gloves blown up and they say: 
"Look! We made you hand balloons!!" Sister Peterson and I about died laughing, they were so adorable haha. I think one of my favorite parts of being a missionary is getting to know so many people and their families and seeing how they raise their kids. It gives me a lot of ideas on things I want to do or don't want to do when raising my own family. And it gives us a never ending list of friends and family :) 
We've been trying to spend a lot of time with members this week to let them know how much we love and care for them and that we're here to help strengthen their families and their faith. We have had many opportunities for service doing moves and cleaning houses, and we've had the opportunity to make them cookies and take them to different people in the congregation. That has worked pretty well, but our goal in doing all of this is that they trust us enough to tell us about their friends or family who would be interested in learning the message that we have for people which is all about Jesus Christ! It's awkward or frightening for a lot of people to tell others what they believe to be true, which we definitely understand. It's still frightening for me sometimes to talk to complete strangers about what I believe and ask them if they'd like to learn about it and know for themselves if it's true. But it's important, and everyone deserves the chance to know for themselves. Ultimately though, love for God and for others is our motivation in sharing our beliefs. I don't think that people go out into the world looking for "religion" necessarily but what they ARE looking for is lasting peace and joy. And knowing what we do about Jesus Christ, his teachings, and his restored gospel is what will bring people that lasting peace and joy that they are looking for. But it only works if they are willing to have an open heart and mind, and honestly seek to know the truth. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink; it's a choice that everyone deserves, always. 
There's much more to tell, as always, but I'll leave it at this: God is real, He loves you and knows you; Jesus Christ is the person who knows how to help us best, but only if we let him in; miracles are happening every day, we just have to open our eyes :) Ya'll are wonderful and I love you! Have a wonderful week! And as one of my missionary friends likes to say: " Hasta La Pasta! "
Love, 
Sister Torkildson

dead among the stones



dead among the stones
the ebbing blossoms show up
white like worn-out bones 

my brown spotted stone




my brown spotted stone
belongs to nobody else
but me and the sand


Monday, June 25, 2018

I and my poetry are profiled in the New York Times today

Our Newsroom Doesn’t Have a Poet Laureate. But This Guy Is Pretty Close.

Tim Torkildson is a retired clown who got the attention of New York Times journalists when he began emailing original limericks to the newsroom several times a week.
Lela Moore
By Lela Moore
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Tim Torkildson at his home in Utah, responding to a reporter's positive critique of his 'Timericks.'CreditCourtesy of Tim Torkildson
Tim Torkildson’s limericks — he calls them “Timericks” — are a familiar sight in the email inboxes of New York Times journalists.
Several times a week, he sends them to 22 journalists, including eight at The Times.
When The Times reported in May that China’s president, Xi Jinping, stood to benefit most from a proposal to cancel sanctions between the United States and North Korea, Mr. Torkildson took to his computer to send his readers this limerick:
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A 'Timerick' inspired by a May 11 Times article, "On U.S.-North Korea Talks, China May Hold the Cards."
The poem is one of approximately 1,000 that Mr. Torkildson estimates he has written for Times reporters over the past four years.
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A 'Timerick' inspired by a June 19 Times article, "How the Koch Brothers Are Killing Public Transit Projects Around the Country."
“He is often clever and on point regarding human foibles, the press and our current national situation,” said Dennis Overbye, a science reporter at The Times who regularly receives Mr. Torkildson’s poems. Often, Mr. Overbye said, they relate to articles that he has written.
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A 'Timerick' inspired by a June 14 Times article by Dennis Overbye, "Black Hole Drags Star to Dusty Death."
Over the years, Mr. Torkildson has struck up email conversations with several of the journalists he’s written.
“Any acknowledgment from a reporter, even if it's just 'thanks,' makes me feel wonderful,” he said in a phone interview with The Times. “I feel like I've accomplished my goal in life, at least for one day.”
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At 64, Mr. Torkildson is retired from clowning and lives in Provo, Utah. “I was born different,” he said. “I truly believe I was born to make people laugh.” He was born in Minneapolis; his father was a bartender and his mother a homemaker.
“To them, the best thing in the world was to have a good steady job, even if it was boring,” Mr. Torkildson said.
During his senior year of high school, he applied to and was accepted by Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College. He said that after his mother called the Better Business Bureau to determine if the school was legitimate, she gave him her blessing.
Then Mr. Torkildson hitchhiked to Venice, Fla., in 1970 to begin what he called “boot camp for funnymen.”

He did not expect to end up with a job. “I was the worst, least funny student they’d ever seen,” he said. “I couldn’t juggle, couldn’t ride a unicycle, my makeup was horrible. I never expected that they’d hire me.”
But after an audition in front of Irvin Feld, the circus’s owner at the time, in which he accidentally sprayed Mr. Feld with caustic chemicals from a fire extinguisher, he learned that he had been hired.
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Mr. Torkildson toured with Ringling Bros. for five years, using the alias Dusty.CreditCourtesy of Ringling Bros.
In 1974, he left the circus to serve as a Mormon missionary. He worked in Thailand under the auspices of the Red Cross, performing his clown show in schools, prisons and other venues.
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Upon completing his two-year mission, he briefly performed again with Ringling Brothers.
He said he was fired in the late 1970s after an encounter with Michu Meszaros, the so-called World’s Smallest Man, who later went on to portray the title alien in the 1980s sitcom “ALF.” Mr. Meszaros died in 2016.
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Left, Tim Torkildson in costume as Dusty the Clown with Michu, the World's Smallest Man, center, in the arms of Dougie Ashton.CreditCourtesy of Ringling Bros.
One morning before Mr. Torkildson went to church, Mr. Meszaros poured beer on his Book of Mormon. Angry, Mr. Torkildson locked Mr. Meszaros in his wardrobe trunk and headed to church.
“In the circus,” he said, “there’s an unwritten rule that you never touch or abuse the little people. I’d crossed the line.” Mr. Meszaros was rescued from the trunk, “madder than a wet hen,” Mr. Torkildson said.
So Mr. Torkildson found himself back in Minneapolis, in urgent need of a new career. He took a vocational course in radio broadcasting that sowed some of the seeds for his unique brand of news poetry.
The course helped him land a job in 1981 as a radio news DJ at KGCX in Williston, N.D., where he met his former wife, Amy.
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The couple married in the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City and had eight children while Mr. Torkildson tried to adjust to the serious business of being a newscaster. “When I’d try to make my newscasts funny,” he said, “I’d get in trouble, and a couple of times I lost my job.”

For the next decade, Mr. Torkildson worked on and off as a traveling clown and ringleader, and in temp jobs. But his family began to fall apart under the stress of his work schedule. He got divorced and fell behind on his child support, and his mother died.
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A 'Timerick' inspired by a June 13 Times article, "Common Drugs May Be Contributing to Depression."
After paying off his child support debt, he moved to Provo, near several of his children, in an effort to see them more often and “see if I could mend some fences,” he said.
“I’m the perfect grandpa,” he said, referring to his clowning abilities. “It’s been slow and it hasn’t been easy, but I am making reconnections with my children.” He said that one way he connects with them is by researching his family’s genealogy through the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Mr. Torkildson began composing and emailing his limericks in 2014.
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A 'Timerick' inspired by a June 14 op-ed, "Hey Boss, You Don't Want Your Employees to Meditate."
One of his early recipients was Lizette Alvarez, a former New York Times Miami bureau chief. She shared some of his poems with her husband, Don Van Natta, Jr., the editor of The Sunday Long Read and a former Times correspondent.
“Tim was sending her limericks off Florida news stories; Lizette thought they were fun and funny and she’d share some with me,” Mr. Van Natta said in an email. “He has a particularly sharp eye for stories that skew writers and editors.”
Mr. Torkildson now serves as senior limerick editor for the online edition of The Sunday Long Read. To craft his news poetry, he reads four newspapers online daily and, depending on what stories strike his fancy, constructs a limerick or two.
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“I usually choose my stories by first going to Google news and entering keywords of current interest to me,” Mr. Torkildson said.
“I don’t have a TV, I don’t watch local news, don’t listen to radio news. My news comes from newspapers — the last best defense against tyranny and against falsehood,” he said.