In December of 2006 I wrote this on Richmond Sunlight:
These are all of the bills proposed for 2008. Some of these bills will pass, becoming a part of Virginia law, but the overwhelming majority will not make it. It’s kind of like sea turtles hatchlings: out of dozens and dozens of eggs, only a few make it safely past the seagulls to the water, and of those just one is likely to grow to adulthood.
That being the world’s only known sea turtle / lawmaking analogy.
And in this week’s C-Ville Weekly, in an article about Del. Rob Bell, this passage appears:
Bell compares his bills to baby sea turtles hatching on the beach. Seagulls get some and dogs others and predators in the sea many of the rest. Only a few swim away to become laws.
This may be my only lasting contribution to the Virginia legislative process. It’ll certainly be my best.
Well done, Waldo. :) Nice article too. I got to know Bell a bit back in ’01, and it’s good to see that he’s maintained the same sort of respect he had back then.
Admit it Waldo, you lifted the analogy from Deval Patrick!
Has anyone ever tried making sausages out of sea turtles? Because if so, we could totally create a linguistic gordian’s knot of turtles::laws::sausages analogies, each tying into one another, until we finally created the most convoluted (but still, somehow, offensive) analogy ever to find voice in the English language.