This piece of nonsense was written for the Six Sentence Challenge, with the prompt word of ‘meter’, which recalcitrant Americans persist in believing is a measure of distance, proving that if you give them an inch they’ll take 1.6 kilometres.
Cassandra, the Greek patron saint of meterology, was blessed with the ability to take the measure of anything or anyone down to the last scintilla but was then cursed to never be believed, which is why she’d given up warning about perfidious politicians, bridge collapses and cryptocurrencies.
Feminists argue that it allowed her to stay a virgin all her life because she could spot a bounder and a cad a mile (or 1609.344 metres) off but she still had innocent dalliances with handsome young men, especially the local butcher, who was always glad to meat ‘er.
Thousands of poems were written for her, all in the strict meter of the time (with iambic pentameter being the most common, being Greek and all that), in vain attempts to sweep her off her feet.
She predicted that, in later times, particularly verbose individuals would be known as gasometers and, when the Victorians borrowed the name for giant gas tanks, the irony of their resemblance to politicians was not lost on the English.
And Cassandra foresaw the tyranny of parking meters, leading Bob Dylan advising ‘don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters’ and Cool Hand Luke descending to beheading parking meters and then dying through a failure to communicate, because it simply wasn’t his metier.
In Terror Australis, in which Melbourne is the third largest Greek city in the world and Adelaide is known as The Athens of the South, due to massive migration in the 50’s and 60’s, the legend of Cassandra lives on in our addiction to her invention for laying curses on the truly evil, the hexameter.
Six Crooked Highways 
Wow, Doug, you are a fount of information. I looked up Greeks in Australia and you are spot on. Mainly because they were giving free passage in the 1950,s, while us bloody English were charged £10, what gives?
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Careful, my wife’s a £10 Pom, from Liverpool. 🙂
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When no one believes a word you say, you can get away with a world of shenanigans. Hey, if you can’t meter, join ‘er…immeasurable good times!
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Thanks, Liz 🙂 I’ve written another piece where one of the phone companies tried the name ‘Cassandra’ for their voice assistant
(like Alexa) but ditched the name because they found that everyone ignored her. 🙂
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😆😆
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Nice description of Cassandra: always right but no one believed what she had to say.
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Very enjoyable Doug
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Thanks, Brian.
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Quite the brain trip and very funny.
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Why thank you, ma’am.
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Apart from my disagreement of the use Greek instead of Hellenic (not by you Doug, in general), your pen’s edge is always sharp.
Now in a world where National Geographic has a new podcast for kids called Greeking out, about Greek mythology and episode is about Akhenaten…I quit.
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Ah, the great unwashed. It’s all Greek to them. 😉
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Delightfully punny and creative, as ever, Doug.I particularly liked ‘meat’er’ and ‘metier’. And nice working in of the metre/meter question.
Need a hex for my computer. The tablet insists on making changes as I go -like Douglas, for goodness sake – I suspect you may not have been called that since you last got a row from your mother!
And insisting on meter – no, dammit, metre!
Please send relevant spell! (Groan!)
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Many thanks, Jenne, and you are spot on about the last person to use my full first name. I did once have a girlfriend who had aspirations above our mutual suburban origins who insisted on being called Jennifer and demanded that people call me Douglas. Somehow, it didn’t work out well. 😉
Presuming you’re using Word, in the top menu there should be an item called Review. Click on that and you’ll see an item called Language where you can set your preferred form of English (as if there were others worthy of the name). Sometimes mine has a hissy fit and reverts to some abomination called English (US) as its default. A sharp thwack with your mouse button should quickly set things aright, provided you turn your teapot three times beforehand and throw salt over your left shoulder while facing north.
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i dated a casssandra once…oh dear
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And did she tell you the meaning of life and did you ignore it? 😉
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Nonsense, you say? It’s very clever nonsense
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Guess so. The best kind I reckon. 🙂
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She should take to predicting the weather. We never believe the weather forecasters, either, but at least she could make a living.
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Hilarious, Mimi. Love it 🙂
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A veritable meter feast. I actually learned a thing or three!
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Thanks, Keith. That’s always a bonus. 🙂
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those darn ancient deities! talk about a nasty bunch, their antics make the social environment of Junior High School* look like the UN**
If what some say about the gods (down through the ages) being cultural projections of the zeitgeist of an era, maybe none of us should be all that surprised at how wacky the planet has gotten.
Fun Six
* an old division in the structure of education here in the US. Separate from grammar (1-6 grades) and high school (9-12 grades); hey! lets isolate children as they enter puberty, what harm can that do? lol
** as a right-minded person might hope it would function, as opposed anything foolish like… the real world
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Thanks, clark. And a cultural education, as well as a vintage rant. Bonus! 🙂
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Wonderfully inspired rubbish, Doug, loved it!
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Many thanks, ceayr. I find it’s the best kind of inspiration. 😉
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Laughed my way through this, Doug. And a hex on that hexameter! 🙂
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Glad it had the desired effect, Dora. 🙂
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