Life Imitates Ogden Nash
Or perhaps that should be, “Life Irritates Ogden Nash.”
The poet Ogden Nash once wrote:
I never saw a purple cow
I hope I never see one,
But I can tell you this right now:
I’d rather see than be one.
And on another occasion:
I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree
Indeed, unless the billboards fall
I’ll never see a tree at all.
Well, now in real life, they are painting cows — at least one is painted purple — to use them as billboards!
Of course, this reminds me of the old joke about the engineer, the physicist, and the mathematician who were riding on a train through an area where none of them had ever been before. They were looking out the window, and saw a purple cow. The engineer exclaimed, “Wow, this place is really strange! They even have purple cows here.”
To which the physicist responded, “We don’t know the whole place is strange yet. All we know is that there’s one farm here with one purple cow.”
Whereupon the mathematician chimed in, “Actually, we don’t even know that. All we know is that there is one cow here with one purple side.”