Balisage Bard entries
Balisage Bard was a long-running entertainment at Balisage conferences. Originally held during the lunch break at in-person meetings, Bard continued into the first few virtual meetings. As it was described in the program:
Balisage Bard gives you the opportunity to exercise your literary creativity with original poems, short stories, jokes, songs, and other masterpieces. Subject matter must be related to Balisage (markup, papers presented this or previous years, virtual conferences, and so forth). Read your effort or play it on video during the game session. Translations of works in languages other than English are not required but will be appreciated. There is a two-minute time limit per presentation.
It is the nature of such things that the content is ephemeral, but we have a few of the entries that Michael wrote or co-authored and/or are about him.
"The Great Michael Sperberg-McQueen"
written by Bethan Tovey-Walsh, presented at Balisage Bard 2017
(Click on cover image to see full manuscript)
by C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, 2018
To JSON, to make much of time
to be sung to the tune of "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face"
I've grown accustomed to the brace,
the way an object must begin.
I've grown accustomed to the fad
that mixed content is bad
My soul's been gripped
by Javascript,
it's second nature to me now
like angle brackets, only curved.
I was serenely validating data
long before we met,
JSON has no schema language
worth a damn, and yet
I've grown accustomed to the craze
for objects, and arrays --
accustomed to the brace.
by Michael Sperburg-McQueen and Bettie Mason
Sung by Bettie at Balisage 2018 (before iXML)
(To be sung to the tune of “My Favorite Things”)
XML parsers and trees made of DOM nodes,
Java interpreters
running on byte codes,
XSL templates
and Unicode strings—
These are a few
of my favorite things.
SAX event strings,
JSON objects,
—even ASCII files!
If you feed them into an XDM tree,
They’re almost like XML.
by C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, 2016
to be sung to the tune of "My Fair Lady/Wouldn't It Be Loverly?"
All I want is a table-height,
fonts and colors and border-type,
so pages come out right
oh, wouldn't it be Lumerley!
Lots of stylesheet priorities,
complicate all the properties,
its hard, oh help me please!
oh, wouldn't it be Lumerley!
Song Parody by C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
written to be sung by Debbie Lapeyre (including pronunciation hints
in the German verse because he knew how
good her German isn't)
My file it has a header.
A header hath my file.
Without the metadata,
it would not be my file.
Meine Datei hat einen header.
Daa Tie'
Ein header hath meine Datei
Ohne (oooh nuh) die Metadaten,
es wäre nicht meine Datei.
(veeeruh)
Song Parody by C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, date unknown
Summertime, and the markup is easy
Tags are balanced
and the queries just fly.
Oh our schema says
that the data are valid,
So hush, little parser, don't you cry.
by CM Sperberg-Mcqueen
Sung by Debbie Lapeyre to the tune of "I Got Rhythm"
I got markup
I got schemas
I got data
Who could ask for anything more?
I got markup
(more than syntax)
I got concepts
Who could ask for anything more?
Who could ask for anything more?
X-S-L-T, I do LIKE it
There's no C code
Hanging round my door!
Language models
tag my data.
When it's valid,
who could ask for anything more?
Cause Documents are
What I live for.
I got markup!
Who could ask for anything more?
Who could ask for anything more?
Balisage
by Michael Sperberg-McQueen, Bettie Mason, and Jim Mason
as a gift to Tommie Usdin
sung by Bettie Mason (link to recording below)
Some markup conferences offer sales talks,
Boring and useless and content-free.
Most people long for a different conference,
One where they know they would like to be.
Balisage may call you,
Any night, any day.
On your screen you’ll see the message:
“Register right away!”
Balisage will whisper
Through the nodes of the tree:
“Here am I, your special conference!
Come to me, come to me!”
Your own special tags,
Your own schema dreams
Parse into node sets
And merge in the streams!
With support for full goddags,
Where the text meets the tags:
Balisage, your special conference!
Pack your bags, pack your bags!
Balisage, Balisage, Balisage!
Four days in August,
Walking in the sunshine,
Talking about someone’s new idea.
Starting with problems,
Leaving with solutions:
Markup Technology!
Come to me, here am I, come to me!
If you come, you’ll find me
Close to old Ville-Marie.
Here am I, your special conference!
Come to me, come to me!
Balisage, Balisage, Balisage!
Link to recording
Bettie McDavid Mason, soprano, and Richard Sidey, piano:
The Pledge
by Syd Bauman, Ash Clark, Debbie Lapeyre, and CM Sperberg-McQueen
I pledge allegiance
to the tag
of the document type definition,
and to the document
which it contains,
one node set, Unicode,
well-formed, with validity and stylesheets for all.
© 2015 by the authors. Available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
4.0 International license; see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.
original
I pledge allegiance
to the Flag
of the United States of America,
and to the Republic
for which it stands,
one Nation under God,
indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.