Wonderful. Either sci fi or politics. Or a nasty toast at a wedding.
Mark
At 04:48 PM 4/13/2005, you wrote:
>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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