"never saw a purple cow..."

Purple Cow Mascot

Why?

Williams College

(Borrowed from Williams College Sports Information)

My favorite short children's poem back when I was a lad of merely 6 years was Frank Gelett Burgess's Purple Cow:

Purple Cow

I never saw a Purple Cow;
I never hope to See One;
But I can Tell you, Anyhow,
I'd rather See than Be One!

I liked this because when my fellow first-grader Tonya Bassham recited it as we were waiting for our schoolbus, my older brother, Pat, retorted, "I wouldn't -- I'd rather be a purple cow!" Tonya and her cousin Gayla Coleman, another first-grader, both became irate at Pat's insistence that he'd rather be a purple cow. I found that so funny .... at the time, but I've since repented for laughing at them, especially since they've both gone on to become far more successful in life than I. She who laughs last laughs best...

Incidentally, like Mearns, Burgess lived a good, long ... but more eventful life (1866-1951). According to Wikipedia, around 1894, he lost his teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley "because of unmentionable alterations of statues ... of Henry Cogswell, a famous Bay Area dentist who had donated several statues of himself to the city of San Francisco, California." It appears that one of the more mentionable thing that Burgess did was to topple several of these three-dimensional expressions of Cogswell's haughtiness, which seems fitting to me, for as the good book says:

Pride goeth before destruction,
and an haughty spirit before a fall
(Proverbs 16:18, King James Bible)

Burgess sounds like NoZe Brother material to me...