Friday, September 25, 2009

The Parable of the Tawny Scrawny Lion

Recently, Mrs. Φ obtained a copy of one of our childhood favorites, Tawny Scrawny Lion. Do you remember that story?

Once there was a tawny, scrawny, hungry lion who never could get enough to eat.

He chased monkeys on Monday, kangaroos on Tuesday, zebras on Wednesday, bears on Thursday, camels on Friday, and on Saturday, elephants.

And since he caught everything he ran after, that lion would have been as fat as butter. But he wasn't at all. the more he ate, the scrawnier and hungrier he grew.

The other animals didn't feel one bit safe. They stood at a distance and tried to talk things over with the tawny, scrawny lion.

It's all your fault for running away," he grumbled. "If I didn't have to run, run, run for every single bite I get, I'd be fat as butter and sleek as satin. Then I wouldn't have to eat so much, and you'd last longer!"

The animals prevail on the fat little rabbit to "talk" to the lion. So he hops right up.

"You look much too scrawny to talk things over," he said. "So how about supper at my house first?"

The lion, intending to eat the fat little rabbit and his numerous siblings, agrees, and after gathering food, they arrive that the rabbit home.

And when they saw the tawny, scrawny lion, they gave him a big bowl of hot stew. And then they hopped about so busily, that really, it would have been quite a job for that tired, hungry lion to catch even one of them! So he gobble his stew, but the rabbits filled his bowl again. When he had eaten all he could hold, they heaped his bowl with berries.

And when the berries were gone -- the tawny, scrawny lion wasn't scrawny any more! He felt so good and fat and comfortable that he couldn't even move.

. . .

"Mind if I stay a while?" he asked.

"We wouldn't even hear of your going!" said the rabbits, Then they plumped themselves down in the lion's lap and began to sing songs.

Once the other animals realized that the lion isn't hunting them anymore, they ask the fat little rabbit how he managed to subdue him.

The bat little rabbit jumped up in the air and said, "Oh, my goodness! We had such a good time with that nice, jolly lion that I guess we forgot to talk about anything at all!"

I love that story. I'm pretty sure there's a lesson in there somewhere, but I can't quite put my finger on it . . . .

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Labels: sex. Really?

On a completely unrelated note you mentioned previously that your daughter was considering whether to go to CC or not given the implications it would have for prestige college entry. Given that you indicated she was thinking in terms of eventually doing medicine, you might want to look at European Med programmes. To my knowledge all the European countries have undergraduate entry programmes, some of which have a 3+x structure, where you get a degree after 3 years and another after x years, then do your residency/internship.

Germany: Free (well maybe up to 2000 Euro per year) either 5 or 6 years
Oxford: ~30k UKpounds a year, 6 years, religion readily available
Cambridge: Much the same
University College Cork: In Ireland, 30K Euro per year, 5 years, if she did Premed CC might even let her go straight into second year though I'd bet against it.

If you considered this you t want to look up the licensure rules for foreign Docs in the USA, I believe they're hard but not Canadian levels of insanity, and it would be the degree granting school they'd be looking at not citizenship.

A. Reader

Justin said...

Dude, its so clear! Liberal brainwashing at work!

"Nothing has a true nature, just feed soup and sing songs to the lion, everyone will be happy." Pure liberal propaganda, the normalization of the substitution of wishful-thinking for reality.

It reminds me of the reason why I instinctively despise contemporary Disney tales: the complete violation of the rules of nature. Like a young lion would ever be friends with its prey animals... Hello, Simba would eat Timon & Pumba, not sing songs with them!

We live in stories about reality, not reality itself, but when our stories of reality no longer correspond to reality at all (liberalism), we are dysfunctional and headed for a fall.

trumwill said...

If my former brother-in-law is any indication, the rules for foreign docs are not loose enough to make getting a foreign degree advisable unless you can't get in to med school here. It took him several years go get into a residency program. He was able to use his foreign medical degree to carve out a career as an expert witness, but he had to bide quite a bit of time.

His degree was from Russia, so it's possible that if you have a degree from Western Europe it wouldn't be as difficult. But that's not the impression I got. They didn't imply that his degree was worthless by making him take more classes over here or anything. He was just the victim of slow bureaucracy. Phi's daughter being an American citizen (brother-out-law wasn't) could help, though BOL's legal residency here was never in question even prior to being a doc.

Burke said...

Justin: Interesting! I had never really considered that angle.

How much of what you describe is merely the necessary anthropomorphication of animals in the Disney stories? Are not the stories entertaining because of the character development? Anything along these lines will involve some make-believe about what the true nature of the animal is. They talk, after all.