My clever beloved served us a Rothbardian repast last night: Manicotti and Steak (I kid you not)!

And in anticipation of Scott Lahti’s next question, yes I did have Hunan earlier in the weekend, and yes, you could count that as Hunan Action.

(See this old post if you have no idea what I’m talking about. And if you’d care to.)

From The Adventures of Jimmy Skunk (1918) by Thornton W. Burgess:

XIII: JIMMY SKUNK EXPLAINS

You’ll find this true where’er you go
That those prepared few troubles know.

“To begin with, I am not such a very big fellow, am I?” said Jimmy.

“Ah reckons Ah knows a right smart lot of folks bigger than yo’, Brer Skunk,” replied Unc’ Billy, with a grin. You know Jimmy Skunk really is a little fellow compared with some of his neighbors.

“And I haven’t very long claws or very big teeth, have I?” continued Jimmy.

“Ah reckons mine are about as long and about as big,” returned Unc’ Billy, looking more puzzled than ever.

“But you never see anybody bothering me, do you?” went on Jimmy.

“No,” replied Unc’ Billy.

“And it’s the same way with Prickly Porky the Porcupine. You never see anybody bothering him or offering to do him any harm, do you?” persisted Jimmy.

“No,” replied Unc’ Billy once more.

“Why?” demanded Jimmy.

Unc’ Billy grinned broadly. “Ah reckons, Brer Skunk,” said he, “that there isn’t anybody wants to go fo’ to meddle with yo’ and Brer Porky. Ah reckons most folks knows what would happen if they did, and that yo’ and Brer Porky are folks it’s a sight mo’ comfortable to leave alone. Leastways, Ah does. Ah ain’t aiming fo’ trouble with either of yo’. That li’l bag of scent yo’ carry is cert’nly most powerful, Brer Skunk, and Ah isn’t hankering to brush against those little spears Brer Porky is so free with. Ah knows when Ah’s well off, and Ah reckons most folks feel the same way.”

Jimmy Skunk chuckled. “One more question, Unc’ Billy,” said he. “Did you ever know me to pick a quarrel and use that bag of scent without being attacked?”

Unc’ Billy considered for a few minutes. “Ah can’t say Ah ever did,” he replied.

“And you never knew Prickly Porky to go hunting trouble either,” declared Jimmy. “We don’t either of us go hunting trouble, and trouble never comes hunting us, and the reason is that we both are always prepared for trouble and everybody knows it. Buster Bear could squash me by just stepping on me, but he doesn’t try it. You notice he always is very polite when we meet. Prickly Porky and I are armed for defence, but we never use our weapons for offence. Nobody bothers us, and we bother nobody. That’s the beauty of being prepared.”

Unc’ Billy thought it over for a few minutes. Then he sighed and sighed again.

“Ah reckons yo’ and Brer Porky are about the luckiest people Ah knows,” said he. “Yes, Sah, Ah reckons yo’ is just that. Ah don’t fear anybody mah own size, but Ah cert’nly does have some mighty scary times when Ah meets some people Ah might mention. Ah wish Ol’ Mother Nature had done gone and given me something fo’ to make people as scary of me as they are of yo’. Ah cert’nly believes in preparedness after seein’ yo’, Brer Skunk. Ah cert’nly does just that very thing. Have yo’ found any nice fresh aiggs lately?”

I think Benjamin’s teacher misunderstood what he was saying he had drawn:

Une méduse, in French, is a many-tentacled jellyfish. But I’m quite confident that Benjamin didn’t mean une méduse but rather la Méduse — Medusa herself:

My 3yo son recently developed a love for monsters.

He was headed in the Godzilla-movie-monster and Halloween-monster direction (based on the toys he was seeing in the stores), but I succeeded in diverting him in a more ancient-world direction with DK Classics: The Odyssey and Ludmila Zeman’s Gilgamesh Trilogy.

Jury’s still out on DK’s Odyssey — which we’ve been skipping around in, rather than reading from beginning to end — but my son loves the Gilgamesh story and all its Mesopotamian monsters.

These are whitewashed and bowdlerized, but the illustrations are gorgeous and all the main characters and events of the epic are introduced. I started to read the boy Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the original Gilgamesh (which I love), but quickly realized that some of the story was way too adult for him. I was happy to find a version written for children. I think Ludmila Zeman changed more than she had to, but the result is a set of stories compelling to a 3yo boy and his father, both.

Highly recommended, but not unreservedly so.

My granddad used to read chapter books at the dinner table to his two daughters. My mother says she’d sneak into the library after dinner and read the next chapter.

When granddad brought his family over from Britain, the first things he read to them were The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

"You can’t get much more American than Dorothy Gale and Tom Sawyer," I said to my mother on the phone the other night.

"That’s why he chose those books," she replied.

L. Frank Baum’s choice of a little girl as his protagonist was influenced by Alice in Wonderland: "The secret of Alice’s success," he wrote, "lay in the fact that she was a real child, and any normal child could sympathize with her all through her adventures."

"But," writes Michael Patrick Hearn in The Annotated Wizard of Oz, "Dorothy is not an English child."

"Both are independent, brave, and practical little girls," noted novelist Alison Lurie in "The Fate of the Munchkins" (The New York Review of Books, April 18, 1974), "but Alice, as an upper-middle-class Victorian child, is far more concerned with manners and social status. She worries about the proper way to address a mouse, and is glad she doesn’t have to live in a pokey little house like Mabel. Dorothy already lives in a pokey little house. Demographers would class her among the rural poor, but she takes for granted her equality with everyone she meets."

Dorothy is American through and through. And she embodies not only America but the West as well. Baum firmly believed in "the superiority of western women in usefulness over their eastern sisters. … What a vast difference between these undesirable damsels [of the East] and our brave, helpful western girls! … Here a woman delights in being useful; a young lady’s highest ambition is to become a bread-winner. And they do." They "have more energy and vitality than those of the east, and … there is no nonsense or self pride in their constitutions and they cannot brook idleness when they see before them work to be done which is eminently fitted to their hands." Dorothy embodies this same Western determination and independence in her quest to get back to Kansas.

Benjamin asked me to read to him from my book. I told him I didn’t think he’d like it. He asked me to please try anyway.

Rage:
Sing, Goddess, Achilles’ rage,
Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks
Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls
Of heroes into Hades’ dark,
And left their bodies to rot as feasts
For dogs and birds, as Zeus’ will was done.
Begin with the clash between Agamemnon —
The Greek warlord — and godlike Achilles.

Which of the immortals set these two
At each other’s throats?
Apollo,
Zeus’ son and Leto’s, offended
By the warlord. Agamemnon had dishonored
Chryses, Apollo’s priest, so the god
Struck the Greek camp with plague,
And the soldiers were dying of it.
Chryses
Had come to the Greek beachhead camp
Hauling a fortune for his daughter’s ransom.
Displaying Apollo’s sacral ribbons
On a golden staff, he made a formal plea
To the entire Greek army, but especially
The commanders, Atreus’ two sons:

"Sons of Atreus and Greek heroes all:
May the gods on Olympus grant you plunder
Of Priam’s city and a safe return home.
But give me my daughter back and accept
This ransom out of respect for Zeus’ son,
Lord Apollo, who deals death from afar."

A murmur rippled through the ranks:
"Respect the priest and take the ransom."
But Agamemnon was not pleased
And dismissed Chryses with a rough speech:

"Don’t let me ever catch you, old man, by these ships again,
Skulking around now or sneaking back later.
The god’s staff and ribbons won’t save you next time.
The girl is mine, and she’ll be an old woman in Argos
Before I let her go, working the loom in my house
And coming to my bed, far from her homeland.
Now clear out of here before you make me angry!"

The old man was afraid and did as he was told.
He walked in silence along the whispering surf line,
And when he had gone some distance the priest
Prayed to Lord Apollo, son of silken-haired Leto:

"Hear me, Silverbow, Protector of Chryses,
Lord of Holy Cilla, Master of Tenedos,
And Sminthian God of Plague!
If ever I’ve built a temple that pleased you
Or burnt fat thighbones of bulls and goats —
Grant me this prayer:
Let the Danaans pay for my tears with your arrows!"

Benjamin: Is the old man going where he’s not supposed to?

Me: No, he’s not going near Agamemnon’s ships. He’s going away from the ships. But he’s about to do something that will get his daughter back.

Benjamin: Why the man took his daughter?

Me: Um. Well. You see, in ancient times, when grownups would fight, they would fight much worse than kids fight. And sometimes they would take people prisoner, and take them home with them as slaves — to make them work for them in their homes. Do you understand?

Benjamin: No, papa.

Me: OK, well it’s very much like in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, where the Wicked Witch of the West destroys (or seems to destroy) the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow, but takes Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion back to her castle, and makes Dorothy clean the castle kitchen for her.

Benjamin: So does the old man throw a bucket of water on him?

Me: Yes. Sort of. Only instead of water, he hits Agamemnon with plague…

Another passage from Jim Trelease’s Read-Aloud Handbook:

Before most parents realize it, a growing child is ready, in his own mind at least, to go out and challenge the world. In the last two thousand years, nothing has helped this exploratory need as much as the fairy tale.

I know what you may be thinking. “Fairy tales? Is he kidding? Why, those things are positively frightening. Children see enough violence on television — they don’t need kids pushing witches into ovens and evil spells and poisoned apples.”

Stop for a minute and remind yourself how long the fairy tale has been with us — in every nation and in every civilization. Surely there must be something significant here, an insight so important as to transcend time and mountains and cultures to arrive in the twenty-first century still intact. There are, for example, more than seven hundred different versions of Cinderella from hundreds of cultures. Nevertheless, they all tell the same story — a truly universal story. …

What distinguishes the fairy tale is that it speaks to the very heart and soul of the child. It admits to the child what so many parents and teachers spend hours trying to cover up or avoid. The fairy tale confirms what the child has been thinking all along — that it is a cold, cruel world out there and it’s waiting to eat him alive.

Now, if that were all the fairy tale said, it would have died out long ago. But it goes one step further. It addresses itself to the child’s sense of courage and adventure. The tale advises the child: Take your courage in hand and go out to meet the world head on. According to Bruno Bettelheim, the fairy tale offers this promise: If you have courage and if you persist, you can overcome any obstacle, conquer any foe.

By recognizing a child’s daily fears, appealing to his courage and confidence, and by offering hope, the fairy tale presents the child with a means by which he can understand the world and himself. And those who would deodorize the tales impose a fearsome lie upon the child. J.R.R. Tolkien cautioned, “It does not pay to leave a dragon out of your calculations if you live near him.” Judging from the daily averages, our land is filled with dragons:

[a bunch of horrifying statistics]

To send a child into that world unprepared is a crime.

Similar to the temptation to avoid fairy tales is the tendency of some adults to choose books that will keep the child forever young, books without problems, conflict, or drama. And then all too soon these same parents are asking why their children have lost interest in books. Of all the things we ask our books to be, few are as important as “believable.” Fiction, nonfiction, biographies, fantasies — the good ones work because they are believable. A world that is “forever pink,” … doesn’t work because children eventually realize its fakery.

I’ve been looking for PDF scans of old children’s picture books. I found a great collection at the Library of Congress. It’s not hard to tell why some of these fell out of circulation, like this page from Denslow’s Mother Goose:

I started this song for Benjamin when he was potty training, but I could never get the last line. His mother finally completed it for me tonight.

To the tune of “Sur le pont d’Avignon”:

Sur le pot, aux Deux Magots
On voit Sartre
On voit Sartre
Sur le pot, aux Deux Magot
On voit Sartre écrire Huis clos

(photo by Dee Johnson)

The term “rooster egg” has a new meaning for me.

Why would “rooster egg” have any meaning for me in the first place?

In my first LRC piece, I mention “Uncle Raymond [who] is a famous logician. (Also a magician, a musician, and a mathematician. I’m not making this up. His stage name was Five-Ace Monty.)”

Most of his logic puzzles are fantastic. Some of his basic, introductory puzzles aren’t his own, and these aren’t always as great.

Here’s one of them:

Question:

If a rooster lays an egg on the exact top point of a roof that slants off at 30° in one direction and 45° in the other, which side will the egg roll down?

Answer:

Roosters don’t lay eggs.

Yeah? So? I know roosters don’t normally lay eggs, but the puzzle doesn’t assert that they do. It asks a conditional question. What if a rooster laid an egg…

Obviously the whole thing annoyed me enough to stick with me three decades.

But now I have a new association with the term. My two-and-a-half-year-old son asked me if we could look for rooster eggs in the back yard.

Rooster eggs? Is this some wild-goose-chase term he learned in preschool? No, apparently it’s a small child’s misunderstanding of what he overhears and what he dimly remembers from a year ago.

“Is it Rooster yet?” he asked.

“Ah! No, my boy. You mean Easter. Easter eggs. And no, it’s not Easter quite yet.”

Postscript My wife points out that the basilisk (aka cockatrice) is born from a rooster’s egg.