I imagine that the political challenges of being humorous mean he rarely gets to exercise that skill, and so he welcomes every opportunity to do so.

>
>a couple of ideas that worked for a few of my friends - He's
>deriving a fair bit of the operating principle for Mogami's new
>rig from what he knows of how Ishiyaman kōbu-kai battle
>machines work.
>

Thought so!

>
>Some talk of Atalanta and some of Artemis - This is the local
>version of the old marching song "British Grenadiers", which long-time
>NXE readers will know is a favorite of DJ Langley-Croft's, and which
>traditionally begins, "Some talk of Alexander and some of Hercules."
>The tortured pronunciation of "Artemis" to make it rhyme with the next
>line is a typically Britannian method of dealing poetically with
>loanwords from classical antiquity.
>

For what it's worth, I would have used "none of them despair" in the second verse to rhyme with "witches of the air." I think that the scansion would be a bit forced, but it's hard to make that conversion without straining something.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.