Chatterbox

A Request for Reader Aid

Chatterbox feels certain that somewhere on the Web there must be a site that generates limericks from words or phrases punched in by readers. He can’t find one, though. If anyone knows of one, can you notify this column? If there isn’t one, perhaps an enterprising Slate reader will design one. Please don’t write Chatterbox to alert him to the various limerick contests, limerick anthologies, etc., on the Web, of which Chatterbox is already aware. Here, for example, is a 1995 entry in the Toast Point Brady Bunch Limerick Contest, from one Artie the Jungle Troll (it’s one of the few that can be published on a family Web site):

While pressing her bell-bottomed jeans
Marcia, she primps and she preens
And Jan, with an Uzi
And nary a “Scuse me!”
Plots Marcia’s fate … smithereens.