For those who’ve never seen an action film starring Bruce Willis in an ever-yellowing vest, this is a famous poem used in the film “Die Hard with a Vengeance”.
"As I was going to St. Ives I met a man with seven wives.
The seven wives had seven sacks.
The seven sacks had seven cats.
The seven cats had seven kits.
Kits, cats, sacks and wives, how many going to St. Ives ??"
The answer is of course, ONE, as the bloke with all the wives was NOT going TO St. Ives, but actually coming FROM it. But let's examine this poem in detail.
First of all, we have a man with seven wives. Little bit dodgy, but for all we know he could be a Mormon, so let's not pass judgment on him on that front, shall we ??
Next line; the seven wives had seven sacks. This doesn't mean that there was one sack each, oh no. This means each wife is carrying seven of these sacks. No mention of these wives being hot air balloons, so they can't be ballast. So the question remains: why is each wife carrying seven sacks ?? If it's for the purpose of carrying stuff, why not just have one big sack, or maybe a horse and cart running behind them ?? It's asking a bit much to ask each one of your concubines to drag along seven great big stonking brown hessian bags.
Moving on, the poem examines the contents of these sacks. The answer: cats.
Each of these sacks is carrying seven cats. Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't PETA and the RSPCA trying to put a stop to this sort of thing ?? Cats are social creatures up to a point, but the point does not extend to being tied up in pitch darkness with six of their fellows. These will not happy cats be. And unhappy cats tend to transmute very rapidly into violent cats. So it’s safe to say that each one of these sacks is probably wriggling like a python that’s been infected with an especially bad case of mad cow’s disease.
Let's do some math here whilst we're at it, seven cats x seven sacks: so therefore each wife owns 49 cats !! With seven wives, this brings the total of cats to 343 unhappy felines, a force to be reckoned with probably worse than a Dalek with a headache.
But no !!
These sacks are not full yet !! It's bad enough that seven cats are being forced to coexist in a rather small bag, they had to bring the family too !! Each cat is nursing a litter of seven kittens, so as well as the adult cats each sack contains forty-nine little ones, all of whom are probably learning to fight very quickly. So we now know something else ... every single one of the 343 adult cats are females who have recently given birth.
Ah, I think a picture is forming. Obviously this chap owns a cat farm, and was taking his female cats to another cat farm in St. Ives, or in this case, a cat stud farm. But this doesn't explain the sacks. Nor why each cat had exactly the same number of kittens. The suspension of disbelief of this poem is being stretched so hard that the underpant elastic's showing.
Some more maths - we have forty-nine kittens and seven adult cats. If we count a kitten as half an adult cat, each sack now contains THIRTY-ONE AND A HALF cats. This is one sack, remember, and each wife has seven of these. So now each wife is staggering under the weight of a whopping 220.5 cats !! If we say each cat weighs about four kilograms, which would make them rather scrawny, that makes 882kg being carried by one wife !!
That's nearly a whole metric tonne !! And add insult to injury this Mormon cat-farming bloke isn't carrying a damn thing !! And what’s more, this brings the total amount of cats in his party to a rather mind-blowing 2041 !!! So we now have the sorry state of affairs of over two thousand rabid moggies screeching, mewing, scratching, biting and struggling all over each other, not to mention shredding vast quantities of kitten lumps everywhere and sending clumped, matted hairballs flying all over the show !!
I think I can understand why the narrator of this tale felt moved to write a poem. It should have gone like this …
The seven wives were groaning under the weight of seven sacks each.
The forty-nine sacks were making rather distressing screeching noises, what with there being seven cats within each of them, engaged in several dozen fights to the death.
Then this Mormon cat farmer took me aside and said: 'Look, do you think you could take some of these cats off my hands ?? They're driving me up the wall'.
Whereupon I kicked him in the knackers, set his own wives on him, released all the (remaining living) cats and threw the sacks into the river because I don't appreciate this sort of thing complicating my holidays.
Then I went down the beach, put my I-Pod on and listened to “What’s The Story [Morning Glory] all day long."
And BTW, the original "Die Hard" is still the best Christmas film ever.