![\"\"](\"https:\/\/sydneypadua.com\/2dgoggles\/comics\/porlock1.jpg\" "\\"Porlock\\"")
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/sydneypadua.com\/2dgoggles\/comics\/porlock2.jpg\" "\\"Porlock\\"")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/sydneypadua.com\/2dgoggles\/comics\/porlock3.jpg\" "\\"porlock\\"")
<\/p>\nBabbage has his Harmonic-Disruptor-Ray; but how exactly does one go about destroying poetry?<\/p>\n
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Okay, salamander-people are within the realm of possibility but this episode is merely fanciful, as Kubla Kahn’s<\/a> interrupted composition happened in 1797, over a decade before Lovelace was even born. Crazily enough though Lovelace’s husband had an estate near Porlock, which I swear I didn’t know about when I started this gag. Freaky.\u00a0 Stoned!Coleridge courtesy of Nick Harkaway,<\/a> with a good list of the Evils of Poetry and Why It Must Be Destroyed (that’s what you were going for, right?) <\/p>\n There’s a largish queue of Persons from Porlock<\/a> outside of poor Coleridge’s door. 2dgoggles: No Gag Too Old! As I haven’t the smallest compunction in resurrecting 150-year-old Babbage-vs-street-musician gags from Punch<\/a> (this one gets in street music, statistics, and difference engine… trifecta!) the lack of originality here doesn’t worry me a bit . I felt I needed a bit more practice in composing these black-and-white panels, so consider this an etude.<\/p>\n Charles Babbage was to develop a highly-targeted poetry-destroying method in what is one of his most famous quotations, in this Helpful Letter he wrote to Tennyson about his poem “The Vision of Sin” :<\/p>\n In your otherwise beautiful poem,one verse reads, “”Every minute dies a man, Every minute one is born;” <\/p>\n I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world’s population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows: <\/p>\n “Every moment dies a man, And one and a sixteenth is born.”<\/p>\n I may add that the exact figures are 1.067, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre.”<\/em><\/p>\n When I was young in Babbage studies (like, a month ago) I thought this was apocryphal, but nope, this is an actual letter. In Babbage’s defense I should say that it’s often extremely difficult to tell when he’s joking. On the other hand his actual jokes are pretty much never this funny. <\/p>\n