There is a whole new generation that has grown up to whom I can say this - I havent mentioned it for years
I have a found proverb
It was on a sign for many years by Platform 9 of Victoria Stn in London
MANY TRAINS DIVIDE ON ROUTE
L
----- Original Message -----
From: Mark Weiss
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2005 9:22 PM
Subject: a snap, maybe, with intro
Alison, it's really your call whether this qualifies as a snap.
For a number of years I wanted to write a fortune cookie poem. At one point
I had a party for which I had fortune cookies made, stuffed with recycled
lines from poems, except for one, the only fortune I ever managed to write.
It went:
If you have broken this cookie with your fingers
don't lick them.
What can I say? As a USian paranoia is always easy to summon up.
Then I thought it might be fun to write a proverb. Nothing happened for 20
years, until a friend quoted a comment by an Iditarod driver. The story
went something like this:
When asked what motivated the dogs, the driver responded: "The lead dog has
a great view. Harder to understand what motivates the others--for them the
view's always the same.
This got me thinking about the psychology of dogs, and I came up with:
ESKIMO PROVERB
The lead dog has the tastiest asshole.
or, in the Queen's English,
The lead dog has the tastiest arsehole.
This quickly morphed into :
The top dog has the tastiest asshole (arsehole).
I tried it out. It seems to me to be enormously useful. If Bush
unaccountably gets away with something, "Like they say, 'the top dog has
the tastiest asshole'"
If a poet whose work seems to me shallow wins a big prize, "The top dog..."
If Microsoft markets a beta model as a consumer product, "The top dog..."
You get my drift.
So now I've written a proverb, and I don't have to think about it anymore.
I hope everyone who reads this will use it in conversation, to speed the
day when it's quoted back to me by a stranger.
Solomon Weiss
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