Last night one of the parents at the ball game was taking children aside to administer a survey about where different foods come from -- she works with a museum and they're planning a display about food and nutrition. Charlie couldn't remember where cheese came from. Initially he said it came from "cheese particles", but that was just a joke. Then he admitted he couldn't remember, but thought it might have something to do with milk. Another question asked which the hardest one was and Charlie said that he thought cheese was the hardest one. After recording his response, the woman agreed that cheese was hard and said that several children had thought that cheese came from mice. This morning, when Charlie was recounting this to me as a piece of absurdity, I pointed out that cheese *could* come from mice -- you'd just need a lot of mice (and little teeny hands for milking them -- did you ever read that book? I think I can still remember the whole rhyme:
Oh, we got a new computer but it's quite a disappointment cause it always gives the same insane advice Oh, you need little teeny eyes for reading little teeny print like you need little teeny hands for milking mice. So we got an expert genius and he rewrote all the programs but now we always get results that look like these Oh, you need little teeny eyes for reading little teeny print like you need little teeny license plates for bees
I first read it in a Larry Niven book, but I was prompted to do a search for it and found the complete version here:
http://www.well.com/user/bubbles/LilTEyes.txt