Henry's Songbook

        Kiss a pig, hug a swine
        Some of them are good friends of mine
        There's nothing I like better than a porker
        More fun than a dog and smarter than a horse
        Though you might find them a little coarse
        But really they're not as rude as those New Yorkers

I was driving down the road just the other day
Met a pickup truck coming the other way
There was a bump in the road and a pig fell out
The farmer didn't stop
He hadn't noticed anything
I pulled over and I caught that pig
And I put him in my car
Then I saw the cop
The cop flashed his lights, pulled me into the side
By the time he'd finished reading me my rights
The farmer was gone
I didn't have his number or his name
I said, Officer, what am I gonna do
He said, Why don't you take that pig to the zoo
So I did. He liked it
Then we went to a Rangers game

That pig was a sight riding in my car
With a baseball cap, big cigar
Folks asked his name, he said, Oink
And they said, Howdy
Everyone knew he lived at my home
Guess that's how he came to be known
As Oink MacKintosh, ugliest man in the county
Some time back things got bad
And we lost almost everything we had
Oink lost a leg, I got some wood to make one
He was walking again inside of a month
Couldn't eat him all at once
Some things are more important in life than bacon

A few weeks back, I'm sad to say
In the middle of the night Oink limped away
He must have heard me say that awful word recession
He was my buddy, he was my friend
He was my breakfast every now and then
And he never even gave me indigestion

(as sung by Iain MacKintosh)

[1998:] I thought [New York] was cosmopolitan, brusque and rude, though it was in Chicago that I had my first lesson in the dangerous superfluities of English speech. When I bought a ticket at the subway and said thank you, thank you very much, the man behind the grille snarled at me: 'Did you say something, asshole?' (Harold Evans, Observer Review, 13 Dec)