eNursery Rhymes: 01/29/09

I can remember when the .com ending for URLs was created and opened up the internet to commercial sites. The internet, though not exactly new technology was new technology to the average person. In college we had access to the sort of connections we now have in our homes, work, hotels and coffee houses. Around the same time, the poems ineNursery Rhymes were first written.

The first computer I had and truly enjoyed using was a Mac Classic. It had a whopping 40 megabyte hard drive. I thought I would never have enough files to fill up that hard drive. The machines back then were clunky and somewhat mystifying.

Then by 1997 when I was trying my had at freelancing I can remember poems like the ones in eNursery Rhymes making the way into my email in box or showing up on the usenet groups I frequented.

The nursery rhymes in this book (and the accompanying illustrations of "Mother Mouse") are dated. They are products of the 1990s. They are a quaint look at the early days of a technology I think many of us now take for granted. Without any new poems involving cell phones, PDAs, L33T speak, blogs, twitter or similar, the poems are stale.

Sometimes in the book the "new" poem will be put side by side with the source poem. The versions picked for many of these source poems are very different form the ones I learned. The poems for the most part are pretty obvious to anyone who is familiar with nursery rhymes. Some are barely changed save for a technical buzz world.

Near the end of the book there's a glossary that would have been useful in the 1990s and might be useful in the future if technical terms fall completely out of use. Right now, though, the glossary is just another sign of how out of date the poetry is.

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