Once upon a time there was a little goat whose name was William Grosvenor Bennington Carey McAllister Avery Goat. But that was kind of a cumbersome name for a goat, so, as you probably guessed already, everyone just called him Willie. And Willie Goat liked to eat, as goats usually do. They’re famous for it. If you’ve ever known a goat, you know they like to eat. Of course, other animals like to eat, too. I knew a raccoon that could eat fettucine Alfredo like you wouldn’t believe. My Aunt Wilma used to eat fettucine Alfredo, too, but she had to have it with Tabasco sauce. If it didn’t have Tabasco sauce on it, she threw it out the window. And that was how the raccoon got it. My Aunt Wilma was odd that way. She used to give everybody a bottle of Tabasco sauce for Christmas. I still have all those bottles, because I hate Tabasco sauce. But Aunt Wilma didn’t eat nearly as much as Willie Goat did. He would eat anything. He would eat hay and bushes and tin cans and croissants and piles and piles of Swiss cheese. He liked the holes especially. So one day he had just finished eating a Studebaker Commander when his neighbor Pepito the Alpaca came up and said, “I’ll bet you half a dollar you can’t eat what I’ve got in my hand.” Pepito had hands. I guess he was kind of a strange alpaca. But anyway, Willie Goat said, “There’s nothing I can’t eat. You’re on. Show me what’s in your hand.” And Pepito opened up his hand, and there was nothing in it. “Ha ha!” said Pepito. “You can’t eat nothing! It’s a philosophical whatchamacallit!” But Willie said, “Sure I can. For the next five minutes, I won’t eat anything at all, and that’s eating nothing.” “No it’s not,” said Pepito. “Yes it is,” said Willie. And they argued and argued, and eventually it went all the way to the Supreme Court, which refused a writ of certiorari, so they never did come to a conclusion, and the last I heard they were still arguing about it. This teaches us not to eat Studebakers, because they make us cranky and argumentative. So that’s the story of Willie Goat, and I hope we all learned our lesson from it. Next week I’ll tell you the story of the cute little salamander who learned that some of the medieval legends about salamanders weren’t true at all. Till then this is your old friend Mrs. Cheswick saying, Don’t eat Studebakers. I got a state grant for this channel, so I have to teach you something useful.
