
Poet Brendan Behan began his career as a housepainter. While in Paris, he was asked to paint a sign on the window of a café to attract English-speaking tourists. He painted:
Come in, you Anglo-Saxon swine
And drink of my Algerian wine.
‘Twill turn your eyeballs black and blue
And damn well good enough for you.
“At least I got paid for it,” he said later. “But I ran out of the place before the patron could get my handiwork translated.”
(From his wife Beatrice’s My Life With Brendan, 1973.)