Easy Mo Bee

Pliny the Elder saw me reading Aesop's Fables. These tales are meant to be heard, not read out of a book, said he. They are oral tales. That is all very well, said I, but I have borrowed this book from the library.

Perhaps you could google up a site where someone speaks the stories, he suggested helpfully.

So I found a site and listened to several of the fables read by a child who did not read very well. Not all the fables could be listened to. I decided to give up on the child and read Jupiter and the Bee.

It was exactly the same story as the one in my library book. The Bee brings Jupiter some honey. Jupiter is pleased and offers a reward. The Bee asks for a sting to kill men who want to steal its honey. Jupiter is angry, and grants the sting, with the proviso that if the Bee uses the sting it will die. A good story. I suppose the moral is: Always ask for nice things.

But the moral of my story is yet to come. You can double click on any word in the fable you are reading and you will get an instant link to a site called ANSWER, which will tell you the meaning of the word. You can double click on Jupiter for instance, and learn that he is a God. I clicked on Bee. Imagine my surprise when I learned that Bee was a famous New York rapper, whose full name was Easy Mo Bee. I passed this on to Pliny who shook his head in disbelief.

The moral of this story is : The path to enlightenment is littered with red herrings.