The L-Space Web: Filks

Thinking-Brain Dog


From: Mark A. Mandel
Submitted to: filks@lspace.org

to the tune of "Rolling Down to Old Maui" [aka "Falling Down on New Jersey"]

It's a damn hard row that we have to hoe
as beggars in Old Morpork
To gain our bread and a place to bed
doing never a lick of work.
But harder yet, you can safely bet,
when all is said and done,
Is the toil and pain of a substitute brain
for the beggar called Foul Ole Ron.

CHORUS (after each verse):
I'm the dog of Foul Ole Ron, my boys,
I'm the dog of Foul Ole Ron.
It's a life of pain for the Thinking-Brain
Dog of Foul Ole Ron. [1]

Now, the way he came by that awful name
is exactly as you'd suppose,
So think, if you can, of the stink of that man
in a sensitive canine nose.
And my one relief, though it brings me grief
to be so brutally frank,
Is the breeze that's blown from the cesspool known
as the festering River Ankh. [2]

Now, a bloke who's blind needn't lag behind
if his dog is a Seeing-Eye,
And the deaf don't fear if a Hearing-Ear
can warn them when danger's nigh.
But it ain't no joke that the part that's broke
in Ron's anatomy
Is the organ designed for the use of the mind
in the likes of you and me.

Ole Ron depends on his human friends
to wangle his ale and bread.
There's the one who sits and the one who spits
and the one with a duck on his head.
But the four combined haven't got the mind
to stop and get out of the way
When rampaging down the streets of the town
comes a walking half-ton of clay. [3]

I don't suppose that the old stinker knows
just how bloody much work it takes
To steer him clear of his pot of beer
when he's meaning to use the jakes. [4]
If it weren't for me he would prob'ly be
just a smear on a paving stone...
So I guess I'll stay for another day
to think for Foul Ole Ron.

[1] Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett, p. 165. (Page references are to the American paperback edition: 1996, HarperPrism.)
[2] Op. cit., p. 235.
[3] Op. cit., p. 98.
[4] "Jakes": the bog, the loo, the necessity, the euphemism, the little house out back.

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