Hacker News Reader

I know a variant of this about a Romanian but the important thing is the reflexive: "One ball got lost and one got broken" or as a word for word translation: "One ball lost itself, the other one broke itself"

So the end was probably supposed to be "I'm sorry I can't show you anything because one ball broke in no time, and later another one simply disappeared."

Ezra Pound supposedly told Ford Madox Ford that he, Ford, could be placed naked in an empty room and within half an hour reduced it to complete disorder.

Given the wide circulation of quips of this form, there may be some ur-form millenia old.

[edit: corrected "of this source" to "of this form"]

In Poland it's Polish, not Russian ;)