Poems

Orange Marmalade Monkey Poem

102 Comments

Trivia: When you Google “Orange Marmalade Monkey Poem”, Trail Baboon is the #1 site that comes up.

Number one. Who knew?

I discovered this quite by accident, and am delighted to know that we are first in the world in a competition we didn’t enter, and in a category that I never would have expected to win.

All credit goes to Clyde, who wrote a hilarious bit of verse about orange marmalade getting the upper hand and hitting his computer keyboard last Fall. The monkey part? That must be Google’s doing, factoring in Baboons and Blevins.

I take this as evidence that Clyde is the reigning poet laureate of orange marmalade, and no one has ever brought a monkey anywhere near the stuff. In rhyme, anyway. Until now.

This ought to be sticky enough to cement our #1 status.

A funny little monkey
For his breakfast in the glade
Topped a toasted piece of raisin bread
With orange marmalade.

A travel weary zookeeper
Whose flight had been delayed
Was surprised to see a monkey
Making breakfast in the shade.

“Toast is not a food for monkeys,”
said the keeper. “I’m afraid
that a monkey can get sickened
overeating marmalade.”

So he put the primate in a box
And shipped him, postage paid,
To a zoo where he’d be properly
And frequently displayed.

But the monkey became ill
In all the cages where he stayed.
And though they gave him monkey medicine
He got no marmalade.

He ate nothing then, for weeks.
With matted hair and muzzle grayed
Children gathered at his window
Just to watch the monkey fade.

Then one day a little girl with whom
The monkey had once played
Accidentally dropped her raisin toast
With orange marmalade

When the monkey took a tangy bite
a turnabout was made
and he hopped and ran and pranced around
his hospital stockade.

Now the monkey’s an attraction
Past his cage, there’s a parade
He makes raisin toast for all his guests
With Orange Marmalade

What phrase, as a Google search, would (should!) rank you #1?

102 thoughts on “Orange Marmalade Monkey Poem”

  1. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    I cannot imagine I will Google as #1 with any phrase. When I Google my name, “Jacqueline Stratton” there is a woman in Baltimore, Maryland who pops up.

    And that is just fine with me. I’ll bet she even has a Facebook page. I seem to be allergic to Facebook.

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  2. Unlike Jacque I do come up when Googled. Not surprising to regulars on the trail the entries tend to be short, righteous , and full of word play. The first entry is a PowerPoint I put together for a presentation. It’s called “You’ve Come a Long Way Babies.” I think I’d rather be ranked with that one than with one of the next comments which includes the line, “Conservatives shouldn’t get their undies in a bundle.” Although on reflection I could go with either!

    Hey baboons, do something presidential with your marmalade today!

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  3. To my astonishment, when I Google my name, I come up Number One with my Gather profile. Gather is an internet friends’ group created by someone affiliated with MPR, as I recall. It encouraged members to contribute writings. I haven’t contributed in years and I don’t even know if the group carries on.

    As a book author, I’m all over the internet. Googling the name of my books will take you to my name, especially “Modern Pheasant Hunting” (my most recently published book and NOT one I’m overly proud of!).

    Clyde’s poem is wonderful. I will, in maybe a year or two, be reading it to my grandson.

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  4. I was confused for a bit there, so let me make this clear: I did not write the above poem. Dale did, of course, course,

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    2. Although I do sometimes have a few minutes to kill with aimless web searches, I did NOT casually Google “Orange Marmalade Monkey Poem” just to see what might happen. And if I had written an Orange Marmalade Monkey Poem and subsequently discovered that my own blog was already the world’s foremost OMMP location, that would be an unlikely alignment indeed.
      No, the truth is, WordPress regularly reports what Google searches happen to lead readers to Trail Baboon, and OMMP appeared there one day. Today, “oddogg” brought someone our way.

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  6. This is delightful piece of online engine gobbldegook.
    if you Google Clyde Birkholz, your get stuff about the job from which I refired (not a typo or spelling error this time). But this is the listing for the seventh hit:
    Clyde Birkholz – Principal of Rounders – Mankato, MN 56001
    We had a business listed as an educational business, which other listing services by the action of their engines turned into a school. Our landlord booted us out and started at that address a restaurant called Rounders. So now an online engine has made me the Principal of Rounders.
    Top That One!

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    3. Online review of Rounders from Yelp: “Mushroom swiss was great. Fries were a little underseasoned, but that’s not a big deal.”
      Not a big deal? I’ll bet it’s a big deal to The Principal!

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  7. Wow, I just googled my full name and the 4th listing is a posting I made to Trail Baboon is listed. Boy talk about full circle being completed. Congrats Dale!

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  8. while on the trail we tend sail
    through topics far and wide
    of bubbbys fate and things we hate
    the trail bloggers words they do glide

    but us number one? heck were just fun
    while welcoming bog of the day
    the day it will start with a thought or brain fart
    then go merrily along its way

    we discuss the moon and then we will tune
    to you tubes for clips that support
    then embed the scene on our computer screen
    that confirms the discussions report

    past blog discussions of spys some were russian
    have been highlighted spots on our trail
    the brain it begins and we all weave within
    the seed planted daily by dale

    many posts timely some are also rhymely
    we have fun yes we do
    discussing the stuff easy or tough
    that our brains like to work daily through

    google search number one is certainly fun
    the trail is the best i’ll bet
    in kindhearted words about sunrise and birds
    andfuture topics undiscovered yet

    we are indeed first for my daily thirst
    of tweaking my brain with a smile
    to begin every day the baboon blog way
    it’s a habit i’ll keep for a while

    so thanks to clydes post of marmalade toast
    to get us discussing today
    the way we’re the best far ahead of the rest
    while doing it the babooon way

    dale has done it and we’ve overrun it
    the trail it has flourished right here
    thanks to all the baboons we miss jim ed and the tunes
    but we’re in the right place that is clear.

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      1. The pale mother over the stove,
        To plan a meal, thoughtfully strove.
        Rejecting ideas both left and to right,
        She thought very hard far into the night.
        A lightbulb went on to warm her pale face
        While searching the Baboon recipe place.
        She did find a Non-Amish curry,
        To solve her sad wan mom-ish worry.

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    4. Since the planet is full of people who enjoy it, and most of it is non-Amish, this makes you queen of all the world’s curry.
      Congrats, Linda!

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  10. When I google my name I get professional listings of my name as a psychologist with pleas for people to rate me. i am too nervous to see if anyone has.

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  11. There’s more “Ben” or “Benjamin”s than I expected… I show up further down the line; mostly theater stuff, eventually some township stuff…

    Nothing very fun on loose or free ranging morals or morels. Some serious reading there.

    I’m off to a class to renew my ‘Private Pesticide Applicators’ license.

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  12. It used to be (when Anna Nicole Smith was around) that I always had to put my name in quotes when I googled myself to weed out the, um, adult material involving Miss Smith. Now it appears there are enough Anna Bliss’ in the online world I don’t need to do that…I guess that’s okay. I am mostly not in the top because several of these other Annas are younger and do more on Twitter, in online publications (there is one Anna who is in design or architecture who publishes a lot) – I’m probably in the “10 Anna Bliss’ who use LinkedIn,” which is the top hit, though maybe not since I use my full name there. I do, however, show up in the top images if you google me in quotes, so there’s that. My full name gets you my LinkedIn profile right at the top (yay!), and a bit down the fact that I “liked” one of my favorite neighborhood restaurants on Facebook, but then it quickly falls into genealogy sites as there is some other Anna-Maria from the 18th century who seems to be the ancestress to many (but not me). If you put in “Anna Trail Baboon” I get mixed up some with Beth-Ann (good company there), but a few of my posts…and, interestingly, my chocolate chip cookie recipe on Kitchen Congress.

    What should I rank for? Gosh – I don’t know. Clearly I don’t rank well for goofiness (or for my theater work, which is mostly pre-internet). And not for making forts with Daughter in the living room (she and I slept in one of our creations last night – I may regret that later, my hip sure does). If this were my fantasy world, I’d be a top-ranked children’s book author (I just finished reading a book about E.B. White – he’s one of my writing heroes), but I’d have to write a book and have it published first…

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      1. That’s the one I just finished – I really liked it. It was heartening to know that it took so long for him to write Charlotte’s Web – it seems like most authors who write a book about how they write give you the impression that if you just sit down every day and write you’ll have a completed work in short order. It was reassuring that someone who wrote with such clarity and seeming ease took a long time to find just the right way to tell a story.

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      2. Agreed. What I thought was fascinating was how much research he put into what kind of spider Charlotte was and how she would do this or that; I’m sure most of us reading it wouldn’t have known the difference if he had completely made it up. Gives the book a higher sense of integrity!

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  13. Morning all… I’m not so sure that the poem came before the google search. So I’m back to the question of why Dale googled Orange Maramlade Monkey Poem.

    My google search turns up that I am the only one of my kind in the US. Sadly, my Facebook entry comes up first – sad since I only look at Facebook every month or so! And I come up in way too may of those business/networking sites, none of which I have actually signed up for. I’m happy that a link with my coats’ project makes it onto the first page at least. If I have to be known as something, that will do.

    Of course, if I type in “verily sherrilee” I get trail after trail after trail….. I like that! It would be nice to come up in a search for glitter, dogs and the smell of garlic, but not sure how to put that together.

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    1. Yes, now I think I reversed the order. Dale, write a poem about that.
      Speaking of poems, just to prove it happens anywhere. Go to Almanac and tell me that the word “Windows” in the third line is not a typo.

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  14. coming out of lurkitude to say how talented our poets are – thanks Dale, Clyde, tim, always amaze me – and sometimes this brilliance encourages me to lurk rather than say anything.
    but i will say, if i google “MeadowWild Farm Alpine Goats” we get 9 of the first 10 hits. has that helped me pre-sell any goats this season? no. 🙂
    about five weeks til the kids start hitting the ground (this is what we goat folks say – of course, i don’t let them really HIT the ground too hard) busy getting ready for being really, really busy then.
    think i will prune a cherry and apple tree for Presidents’ Day (not chop down) and feed the prunings to the goats.

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    1. Hope we are still out of lurkitude when the little kids come; I always look forward to the stories around that, Barb.

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    3. for a preview of what we hope will be happening five times from late March to mid-April (without quite so much noise and chaos, but with the healthy, happy outcomes!)
      hoping to embed….. fingers crossed

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  15. Confessions: I have been a lurker for a long time. However, I tend to lurk after the fact – late afternoon or evening – and I have mostly not been tempted to post because I know nobody would read it. This question was really interesting, though. I searched and searched and had to get pretty specific to find something where I came up first: “GSL Knowledge Bowl”. I don’t know if I really come up first, but my 2007 team does and I am quoted several times in the first article.
    While I wish I wrote poetry, I don’t. I just love the ones some of you write. In the main part of my day, I teach earth science to eighth graders and coach an academic competitive activity called Knowledge Bowl. My favorite part of Knowledge Bowl is that students and I get to talk and answer questions about an extremely wide range of academic and semi-academic subjects, and that we get off-topic often. Most of you would enjoy the range of topics, too.

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    3. I love it when people de-lulrk! You’ll fit right in, Vicky – off-topic is what we do best, as you probably know.

      Is Knowledge Bowl and after school or during school activity?

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      2. Whether Knowledge Bowl is during or after school depends on where you live. It’s not a Minnesota State High School League activity and the structure partly depends on which one of the service coop regions you live in. Our region mostly competes on Saturday; at least one region competes mostly on Monday evenings; some other regions compete mostly during the school day. Even practice times vary. We practice after school. Other schools practice in the morning or over lunch – it partly depends on whether the students are also in sports, speech, or other competitive activities. We practice almost two hours after school three or four days a week. (Not as much as some sports, but getting close.)

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    5. Welcome! My oldest son and now my 17-yr old are both in Knowledge Bowl at Big Lake HS. They both enjoy it tremendously. Good for you!

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      1. That’s great! My daughters were both in it. In our region, most meets are on Saturdays, so it was good that I got to see my own children while I spent so much time on buses with other people’s children. And now, sometimes, they volunteer with us and spend quality bus time with their mom.

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    6. Hi Vicky in Silver Lake! Welcome!

      There’s a Silver Lake in Rochester. There’s a Silver Lake Township over by Fairmont… I don’t know where the town of Silver Lake is. But I can Google it!

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      1. There are a lot of Silver Lakes in Minnesota. There is also Silver Lake Road somewhere in the northern metro. My Silver Lake is west of Minneapolis on highway 7, almost to Hutchinson. We farm about two miles north of town.

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      2. I looked it up; my sister and brother-in-law lived in New Germany for a few years so I was sort of in the neighborhood.
        Silver Creek runs through part of our farm.
        May I ask what kind of farming you do? I used to milk cows, now I just run the land and amuse myself with chickens and ducks. And dogs.

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      3. My husband is really the farmer – we raise organic beef, asparagus, some other fruits and vegetable and use draft horses. We used to have pick-your-own strawberries (for about twenty years) but stopped almost ten years ago. I am mostly the bookkeeper (and the teacher),

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    7. im thinking the baboons could put together a team we got lotssa nollege. have your teams be here at 6am for some nollege testing against the likes of jacque, beth ann, pj, renee, clyde, jim, anna, barbara, barb, edith, linda, sherrelee, steve, lisa, ben, krista, steven, joanne, crystal bay and dale . we’d kick your butts, bring those little twerps on.

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  16. I just get my White Pages info, but as I keep clicking for more info, it’s alarming how much detail you can get without paying anything! Full address and phone, age, maiden name… Yikes.

    And then of course Barbara in Robbinsdale brings up a smattering of links to here, but I can’t imagine how it chooses those particular ones.

    I’ll have to think a while to actually answer Dale’s question…

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  17. If I search for Firstname Lastname, I get a lot of people who aren’t’ moi including an actress listed at a website that tracks actors and actresses whose characters have died in movies.

    Under “images”, I get a lot of women with long blonde hair (as I had in my youth) but, farther down, also babies in diapers and hamburgers (?) Using Firstname Middlename Lastname, I come to a Public Information site where I show up as having lived in Salt Lake City (not) and linked to my sons, two wasbands and one wasbrotherinlaw. Weird.

    Using my ofttimes nickname, there were only 3 entries, two for the times it appeared on the Trail and one where I responded to a minister’s blog, The blogster complained that GK’s frequent jokes about Unitarians had gone beyond the pale with a nasty article about some of our changes to Christmas carols.

    Love marmelade and really appreciate Dale’s and Clyde’s contribution to the marmalade literature and Tim’s poemizing on today’s topic.

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  18. I think any Baboon who has a recipe in the Kitchen Congress need only type into the Google the name of their dish, and voila! they’re magically transported to #1 in the search results. I tried it with my eggplant curry, and Steve’s tomato soup, and it worked in both cases.

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  20. I’m somewhat mortified to discover that my name instantly brings up “The Dancing Grandma”, complete with my irreverent, funky web site showing an embedded 4-minute national talk show appearance on the subject of older women dating younger men. I rarely post on this site as a friend set it up years ago, insisting that this might result in an avocation for me. I say “mortified” because, being incredibly low-tech, it never occurred to me that this would immediately precede my professional web site link! God only knows how many potential clients I’ve lost who’ve googled me and happened upon a view of the “other side” of my life?

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  21. I have always been unwilling to do a search with key terms for the educational materials that I wrote. What I learned was what I expected: that people have stolen my work all over the place and claimed it as their own work. Some are selling it. But since I no longer have any connection to my work financial or otherwise, I find it does not bother me.

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  22. A line from Top Gear, the real one, English one: “That’s like lifting up the Queen’s skirt and finding she wears a thong.”

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  24. Dale, you’re a genius! You’ve got us googling ourselves!

    Is there a way to edit what Google comes up with? The first thing that comes up for me is quite old – a link to something about the first version of our band. I’d rather not have that be the first thing that comes up about me. If you continue looking down the list you find my almost completely neglected LinkedIn membership. Rock Bend shows up a little farther down.

    I’m happy with being known as a folksinger but I’m one in millions of folksingers. I wish I had a non-Amish Curry to brag about!

    I did find out that, like VS, I’m one of a kind in the White Pages.

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  25. might be time to put together a post on your jalapeno oatmeal recipe krista. you could be the folksinging spicy oatmeal queen. with a marmalade tierra

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  26. How about PlainJane’s whole grain plantain champagne

    tim’s teabag tabouli

    Anna’s banana nirvana

    Sherrilee’s seashore sushi (say that one three times real fast)

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