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Posted by Ursula Schrader on February 20, 2008, 4:57 pm
> wrote:
>
>> It's one of
>> the half million little sayings my husband picked up somewhere.
>
> _The Notebooks of Lazarus Long_ includes the line "Never try to teach
> a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig." (Quoted
> from memory; it was a limited-edition book and we gave our copy away
> before learning that we couldn't buy another one.)
>
> It was probably an old saying when Woody quoted it. (*Really* old,
> since the story the quote was taken from is set thousands of years
> into the future.) Woodrow Wilson Smith, aka Lazarus Long, was a
> grumpy character who appeared in several Heinlein novels. A
> calligrapher collected a number of quotes and drew a really pretty
> book. I believe that he got the pig quote from _Time Enough for
> Love_, a collection of one good story imbedded in rather a lot of
> garbage. The famous "specialization is for insects" quote comes from
> the one good story, "The Tale of the Adopted Daughter" -- where it
> makes perfect sense. People who deride "A human being should . . ."
> as nonsense are quoting it out of context.
>
> (My spiel chuckle tried to change "Heinlein" to "Heineken". I think
> L.L. would have approved.)
>
> Joy Beeson
Hey, I found this:
http://www.angelfire.com/or/sociologyshop/lazlong.html
via Google. If it's from Heinek..., uh, I mean Heinlein, then there's
probably some copyright on it and quoting may come really expensive. You
never know... There was a case on German TV not too long ago where a
photographer had lured people into using his pics on their websites and then
sued them for copyright issues. The website's subtitle is: 'Free recipes
with pictures', which made folks think the pics were free, too. He claimed
that a thumbnail of an apple was worth about ? 3000.00.
Well, Heinlein must have been a pretty jolly guy, loads of insight into
human character, judging from the quotes on the above mentioned site.
U.
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