“Good afternoon. I came to ask about that book I dropped off. The one with the curse on it? Or that’s what I thought.”
“Yes, sir. I was able to work out Abigail Bergoo’s handwriting. And it IS a curse.”
“Is it just another one of those curses on people who borrow the book and don’t return it? If that’s what’s causing the noises in my house….”
“Are those still going on, sir, even though I was taking care of the book?”
“Yes. I assume that since I still own it, and the old woman was considered a witch, I may have to return it to wherever her papers or other books might be. I know there are a couple of her things in Salem, and there’s a house in Portland that….”
“I wouldn’t recommend that, sir.”
“No?”
“It is a curse, but not a curse on anyone who fails to bring her book back. That sort of ‘book curse’, as it is known, goes back as far as recorded history. Examples exist from Ancient Babylon and Ancient Israel, as well as medieval libraries and those of the great book collectors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. You’ve seen the sort of thing: ‘Return this book; my world is whole. But keep it and you’ll lose your soul.’”
“Yes, I looked that up. Then is it anything I can fix? Is it….”
“You have an exceedingly rare book here, sir. It is one of the few remaining copies of this seventeenth century text…and now I know why.”
“So what did Abigail write?”
“She calls forth a malediction on any who borrow this book and do not heed its warning.”
“Yes, that was the only part I was sure about.”
“She calls on demons to block the bowels and burn the groins….”
“That was harder to read, but I got most of that. But the noises….”
“Of anyone who dares return this book to her.”
“What?”
“She goes on, and I quote, ‘This thrice-blighted book is the most infernal waste of life’s precious minutes ever set to paper. It is offal, the ill-chosen words of a mind too feeble to create even engaging waste. May the forces of evil visit an eternal stench on your nostrils if you force this book upon me again. My eyes are dimmed by the very existence of the first sentence.’”
“I’ve read books like that. Is that all there is to it?”
“She becomes a little more explicit with what she wants to happen, partly to the author, but mainly on those who refuse to steal the book. I’ve printed out a full transcription.”
“But that doesn’t solve the problem. Why do I have something banging around my bookshelves and moving things on my desk?”
“I can only offer up a theory. Among the collectors whose bookplates or signatures we find in the book is one of a certain Gunther, who had the income to collect historical oddities. A typical businessman of the late nineteenth century, there is no mystery at all about his death, as he died in his library with a decanter of whiskey on the table and the remains of four cigars in his ashtray.”
“So it wasn’t Abigail’s curse. Just the curse of living large.”
“One obituary notes that he was a bookman to the end, as he was drafting an order for two hundred bookplates with a text beginning ‘My malediction on he who…’”
“You think that’s this curse? Abigail’s curse?”
“His heirs probably assumed it was one of the usual book curses, but Gunther was known for his sense of humor. Abigail’s curse could have been his final project, and he MAY be regretting that he never got to use that bookplate.”
“So maybe if I print a little box of bookplates with her curse on it, that’ll put him to rest?”
“It’s worth a try. And possibly lucrative, as there are plenty of people who’d buy them. I have a few books I’d paste one in.”
“I’ll give that a try, then.”
“I’ve wrapped the book securely, sir. And here is the translation of Abigail’s curse.”
“Thanks. And your bill? Great. Now…you know, I have never been so tempted to read a book with a curse on it.”
“Well, there’ll be no danger to YOU whether you do or not…except for the waste of your time.”
Drewvia stopped and licked her lips. Then she whispered, “Here, kitty, kitty.”
The tiger now stopped and licked its own lips. “Good kitty,” said Drewvia, a little more loudly. “Come on. Don’t be scared. I won’t hurt you.”
The tiger frowned. “Dear little kitty,” said the princess. “I like kitties. I won’t hurt you.”
She walked right up to the tiger and started to stroke its whiskers, where were as soft and pettable as steel spikes. “You want me to walk with you, so nobody hurts you?” she asked. “Okay. Come on.”
The tiger shook its head, but turned and walked with her through the woods.
They strolled through the night-shaded forest until they met a second tiger, so big that the first tiger could have stood on its back, at least until the second tiger got hungry.
“Ooooh, another kitty!” squealed the princess. “Is this your friend? Here, kitty, kitty! Such a pretty kitty! Oh, you’re so cute and teeny I could just hug you to smithereens!”
The second tiger scowled at the first tiger. “How come you didn’t eat this person, so I wouldn’t have to listen to it?”
“Don’t you remember?” growled the first tiger. “Crazy people disagree with me. Last time I ate a crazy person I got hiccups.”
“Oh, same with me!” exclaimed the second tiger. “I hiccuped so hard I thought my tripes would fall off!”
“And a tiger without stripes is just an orange pussycat,” said the first tiger.
“Can you walk with me too?”Drewvia inquired. “Oh, goody. Kittens so teeny shouldn’t be out alone at night anyway.”
The two tigers escorted her through the woods, each staying as far from her as possible. Drewvia continued to tell them how cute and fuzzy and, especially, how little they were.
Just as the faintest light of morning was showing, they stepped out at the far end of the forest. Here stood a tiger with teeth that dripped red. It was so big that both the other tigers could have stood on its back, and it could have eaten them whole without even being hungry.
Drewvia shuddered. “Oh, how sweet!” she cried.
“Not hungry?” the third tiger asked the others. “Or are you saving her for brunch?”
“No, no,” said the second tiger. “Hiccups, you see.”
“Oh!” The tiger looked Drewvia over with eyes that seemed to bite down.
“You,” she told him, holding back screams, “”Are the sweetest, dearest little kitty of them all! I wish I had brought a rocking chair along so I could take you in my lap right now!”
“Are you sure this is a crazy person, and not just a silly one?” the third tiger asked them. “I haven’t had a silly person with whipped cream and a cherry in simply ages.”
“We could ask the boss,” suggested the first tiger, as the princess came up and ruffled the fur under the third tiger’s chin.
“He might eat her himself,” said the second tiger. “And when he gets hiccups he can be really mean.”
“We could ask him after he finishes breakfast,” the first tiger replied. “He might not be so hungry.”
The third tiger checked out the sunrise. “Say, it is almost breakfast time, isn’t it?” he said, stepping back from Drewvia, who was standing on tiptoe to pat his nose. “Maybe if we take this person to him, he’ll give us some of his breakfast.”
So the four of them strolled down the hill, Drewvia skipping a bit and singing a little song. They did not have to go far before she saw the brightly colored roofs of a small village. Beyond that rose a tall, square building which Drewvia assumed would be the giant’s castle. As they got closer, though, she spied a tall, pointed castle beyond this. She had paid no attention to it at first because she had assumed it was a mountain.
“Is, er, the giant as cute and little as you are?” she asked the tigers.
The tigers just grumbled “Hiccups” and marched on.
Drewvia looked down into the village. The sun was only just barely over the horizon, but people were hurrying to and fro. Running along shiny white streets among green lawns were villagers in bright clothes. Many of them were skipping on the way, carrying shiny tin noisemakers and chains of buttercups. One small boy stopped skipping and sat down. His mother shook her pompons at him, so he got up and skipped some more.
As they drew nearer, Drewvia could hear the people singing a cheerful little song which seemed to consist primarily of the words “Lily-lily lime lime. Lily-lily lime lime.”
This did not suit Drewvia’s idea of what a village right next to a giant’s castle would be like. “Hmmmm.” She paused to consider the flags and streamers hung on one cottage. “Maybe he’s not such a bad giant after all.”
A man in a brilliant top hat, its sequins glinting in the light of the rising sun, turned to stare at her. “You aren’t singing!” He turned to a woman wearing a dress made of painted ping pong balls. “Why isn’t she singing? Is she from your neighborhood?”
“Crazy person,” growled the first tiger. “Get out of the way.”
The singing people made a wide path for the tigers to walk through. Drewvia turned to the man in the top hat and said, “I’m from out of town. I don’t know about your ways. Do you get to pet the kitties if you sing?”
“Out of town!” The man jumped so far back his hat nearly fell off.
“Out of town?” repeated the woman in the ping pong ball dress. “Why would anybody lucky enough to live somewhere else come here?”
“Well, it looks like a very nice place,” said the princess, waving a hand at a bunch of brightly colored ballons which floated next to a chimney with a smiling face painted on it.
“Well, of course!” said a woman in a fuzzy bunny suit. “The….” She glanced at the tigers, who licked their lips. “We have orders to look nice,” she went on, her voice quitter. “He says he hates unhappy food.”
“Food!”
“Oh yes,” said the man with the hat. “This morning eight of us will be chosen to be baked into pizza for his breakfast. He says nothing is worse than ugly, unhappy pizza.”
“Pizza,” purred the third tiger, licking its lips again.
“We’ll get some crusts,” said the second tiger, looking over the princess, though she felt she looked nothing like a crust.
“We wish we could dress in rags and be grumpy,” sighed the woman in the bunny suit.
“But if we don’t do exactly as he says, why, he’ll come down and kick our whole village to pieces more quickly than a cat could kiss an egg. Or something.” The woman in the ping pong ball dress pointed to a wagon Drewvia had seen before, only now it was filled with coal, and pulled by a dozen straining horses.
“The ovens heating right now,” she said. She forgot to smile for a moment, but when the tigers growled, she grinned. “We don’t have any idea how he can afford to buy so muc fuel. But somebody keeps sending him loads of gold.”
“I heard it come from a country where all the people eat people,” said a little girl wearing dozens of silver rings. “And they’re buying recipes from the giant.”
Smoke rose from the big square building at the end of the village. Drewvia thought she could feel the heat. “Is that his oven?”
“Yes,” said the man, “And we’d better all get in line to see who gets to be in the pizza.” He laughed in a merry way as the first tiger moved a little closer to him. “I know I’m going to be chosen. What can you expect when your name is Paul Pepperoni?”
The princess looked from the oven to the castle. “The giant makes you act happy before he cooks you?”
“Why, we have to set off fireworks when he has dessert!” laughed a man dressed all in feathers.
“And you would rather not be eaten?”
Everyone stared at her. “Crazy person,” said the first tiger.
Drewvia marched up to the oven and told the man at the front door, “Don’t cook the pizza just yet, please. I’m going to the castle to talk to the giant.”
The man looked from the tigers to Drewvia. “Well, that’s good of you, Miss,” he told her. “But I don’t believe you’d fill him up enough to make up for a whole pizza.”
Drewvia raised ger chin. “I am a princess and I do not desire that he should breakfast on me.” With that she started up toward the castle, the tigers stalking along behind her.
The people stared as she proceeded up the wide road. “Do you think she’s from the land where they have all the gold?” whispered a lady dressed like a sunflower. “Is she going to eat up the giant?”
“I know,” said the man with the tall hat. “She’s from the land where he gets the coal. He’s late with his payments, and she’s going to take his tigers and oven as payment.”
They watched the princess go right up to the castle door, and go inside with the tigers at her heels. “No,” said the woman with the ping pong balls, “She’s crazy, the way the tigers said.”
“The only way to find out,” said the man with the hat, “Is go and see.” The people of the village moved up the road, slowly, ready to turn and run back to get into the pizza if the giant came out looking angry.
Drewvia, meanwhile, was standing just inside the front door of the giant’s castle, looking down the hallway at the giant, who was at the other end. She stroked the first tiger some more, trying to feel good about how well her plan had worked this far.
Drewvia had known all along that this was going to be a big giant, because giants were supposed to be big. That was what they did for a living. And she had heard all her life that this particular giant was eight times as big as a tree.
What no one had ever told her was how big a tree.
The giant could probably have set his chin on the sill of her bedroom window, and she lived in one of the tallest towers. He was like a thundercloud on legs, with a curly black beard down to his waist and curly black hair down to his shoulders. Somewhere in the midst of this hair she could see mean little black eyes glittering. She very nearly turned around and ran. But there were tigers.
For his part, the giant was also a little bit surprised, though he showed no signs of running. That was why he didn’t snatch the princess up and gulp her down then and there. “Snatch and eat” was his general rule about unexpected visitors. But she surprised him. She didn’t seem at all frightened, and his tigers were keeping away from her. Sometimes these humans could be dangerous even when they didn’t look it. The giant had once had trouble with a knight, and had a scar on his little finger to show for it.
So he decided to act friendly now, and roar later. This always looked better than roaring first and then trying to act friendly when the visitor turned out to be dangerous.
“Well, well, well, welcome!” he boomed, his friendly bellow nearly knocking over Drewvia and the tigers as well. “Who is this who comes strolling not the home and castle of Abfrain the Admirable?”
“Crazy person, boss,” said the third tiger.
“Ah,” said the giant. “Hiccups, eh?”
“Not at all,” said Drewvia, trying to talk loudly enough to be heard but look dignified at the same time. “I am a princess.”
“Princesses,” aid the second tiger. “Crazy people. Same thing, really.”
“Princesses don’t gibe hiccups,” said the giant. “Is this just a social call, or did you come on business? Or maybe you came for breakfast. I’d gladly invite you to my table.”
The tigers snickered. “I am Princess Drewvia of Costren,” she said. “You have not visited us since I was very small, and I wished to see if you were as big a giant as everyone says.”
“Ho ho!” The giant leaned down to get a better look at her. “Isn’t it nice that the last thing you’ll ever see is something this grand! Am I so big then?”
“Well,” Drewvia replied, trying not to look at his teeth when he smiled, “Not really, no. Why, you’re not even as big as I am.”
The giant scowled, curly black eyebrows bumping into each other above his nose. “You’re down there so far that maybe I don’t hear you so well. Say that again?”
Drewvia wrinkled her nose. “You’re not so very much of a giant You’re not even as big as I am!”
The giant stood up straight again. “That’s what I thought you said. So I don’t need to have my ears dewaxed after all. I wonder if I couldn’t eat a crazy person just once.”
“Last time,” the first tiger said, “You hiccupped all the oranges off the trees to the south.”
“What’s the matter?” Drewvia demanded.
The giant laughed. “Princess, you are the most amusing breakfast I’ve seen since the Wicked Witch of the Midwest rolled pumpkins into my mouth!”
Drewvia sniffed. “Laughing proves nothing. Let’s ask the people in the village to judge the matter. Whoever impresses them more must be bigger.”
“Very well, let’s make a game of it.” The giant bowed to the princess. “What are the stakes? What shall we win?”
The princess set a finger in the center of her chin. “Oh, what could I use? Let’s not make it your castle: there isn’t room for it at home. Let’s say I’ll win your dirty old coal wagon.”
“Ha!” thought the giant. “She wants to keep me from collecting her father’s gold, eh? But if worse came to worst, I can buy a new wagon, and a bigger one, too.”
Out loud, he said, “Good enough. And if I win, I shall take something just as worthless. Your head, perhaps.”
Drewvia nodded agreement. “Fair enough. Now let us see what the people from the village have to say.”
“I’ll start first, shall I? Your legs are so much longer than mine I’ll need a head start.” The giant laughed again, and the tigers laughed with him.
The sound made Drewvia quiver, but she said, “Do so. I have to use my magic first.”
The tigers stopped laughing So did the giant. “What’s this? You said nothing about magic!”
“Neither did you,” Drewvia told him. “So there’s no rule against it. I shall use this magic potion to make myself twice as big. You may, of course, use your magic too, of course.” She curtsied to him. She had forgotten to ask George if the giant had any magic of his own. It was too late to do anything about that ow.
“Twice as big?” said Abfrain the Admirable.
“Yes,” she said, taking the bottle from her pocket. “But if you think that will frighten you, you may have a drink as well.” She held the bottle out to him.
“No, thank you,” said the giant. “I don’t feel like magic today. Ho ho.” A princess would make a much better breakfast at twice her size, which would make her almost as big as his butter knife. “Use your big, big magic.”
Drewvia had hoped the giant would grab the bottle, drink it, and explode. But, she supposed, that would have been too easy. She shrugged, and sprinkled the potion all over herself.
Her skin felt as if ants danced on it. Her clothes stretched and swelled as she did. The castle’s front hall didn’t seem quite so long, and the tigers were a little smaller as well. Only the giant was still towering above her.
“Well, sausage, that makes you look much more appetizing,” he said.
“Can we have a drumstick?” asked the third tiger.
Drewvia said nothing at all, but turned to walk to the castle door. “I’ll be with you in a moment,” the giant called. “I like to have a glass of orange juice with my breakfast.”
Ignoring him, she stepped out through the door. She looked down at the villagers, who looked up at her.
“Is that the princess?”
“But she’s huge!”
“Habe you ever seen such a big princess?”
The giant stepped out through the door, holding a tall glass of orange juice. He took a deep drink before turning his eyes toward the villagers.
“She must be a Grade A princess!”
“Can a princess be king-sized?”
“I hope she’s not mad at us for calling her crazy!”
The giant cleared his throat. No one looked at him. They had seen the giant thousands of times, but they had seen the princess only once before, when she was half this tall.
“She is really huge!”
“I hope she’s had breakfast!”
“Don’t tell me we’ll have to feed two creatures that size!”
“What’s going on here?” roared the giant, his voice blowing numerous hats to the ground.
Drewvia turned her face up to smile at him. “It certainly sounds as if I’m the one who impresses them!”
The giant stared at her. Then he threw his head back and released a booming laugh that shook pennants and banners way down in the village. “Ah, what a fine joke, coming from a breakfast!” He leaned down at her. “And what will you do, oh big, big princess, if I bite off your head all the same?”
“Well, it’s the only head I have. Still, this is your castle and you make the rules.” Drewvia shook a finger at him. “But first, at least admit that I won the contest.”
“I bow to your neat trick.” The giant laughed again. “Very well, if it will make you happy, you won and I lost.”
This did make Drewvia happy. She spun three times and shouted “Scooper Drooper!” Then she added. “You’re a…a little bitty puppy!”
The glass of orange juice dropped with a crash. The villagers stared as the massive giant shrank into a little ball of black curly fur and splashed around in the orange pond.
“We’ll get breakfast, anyhow,” said the first tiger, stepping toward the puddle.
“Will one puppy be enough for all of us?” asked the third tiger.
The puppy certainly thought so. Snarling “This is all YOUR fault!” he leapt from the orange juice and plunged straight at the tigers. The tigers had never seen a dog like this before and, remembering how tough their boss had been, turned tail and ran. The dog ran after them, trailing orange juice all the way.
“Look at the fierce dog!” cried the villagers. “He’s an orange juice hound! He’s a puddle puppy!”
And so Abfrain the Admirable, quite against his will, became the very first puddle dog, or poodle as we call them today.
Drewvia stayed in the village for breakfast. Everyone ate smaller pizzas without any people cooked into them. The princess had time to finish an extra large with double cheese before the potion wore off and she shrank back to her original size. Then she strolled home through a forest that had no more tigers in it.
People were, of course, throwing coins at her sister when she got home. She put her hands to her mouth and shouted, “You don’t have to do that any more! The giant’s gone!”
People close enough to hear her cheered. “What did she say?” demanded Princess Tinabula, leaning forward. “What about the giant?”
But by now so many people were cheering that Tinabula couldn’t hear a thing. She tried to stand up on the silver chair to find out what was going on, but she was wearing her glass slippers, and her foot slipped.
“Is she all right?” demanded Drewvia, running up to the money pit.
“She’s spoiled the game that’s all,” said a bearded man, as Tinabula sat up. “Look at all the coins touching her dress! We can’t ALL marry her!”
“That doesn’t count!” Tinabula shouted.
But the king said it DID count. “Our rules were that anyone whose coin touches the princess’s dress gets to marry her (or nominate someone from their family to do so). They say nothing about where she must be during the game when the coin touches her.”
The ling was correct, and so was the man with the beard. Tinabula couldn’t marry every single person whose coin she’d landed on, and once the coin had been thrown, there was no telling whose coin was whose in any case. So when the grand banquet was held to celebrate the passing of Abfrain the Admirable, everyone who had thrown a coin that day was given a little card to fill in. These cards were tossed in a barrel. Tinabula, the king decreed. Should marry the person whose name was on the first card drawn from the barrel.
“And Princess Drewvua,” he went on, “Because she defeated the giant all by herself, shall have the honor of drawing the card.”
Everyone within sixteen miles of the castles was at the banquet, and each of them danced and ate and had a loud good time. But all stood silent when trumpets sounded and Drewvia stepped up to the barrel. Pulling back one sleeve, she plunged a hand deep into the heap of cards, greatly disappointing those who had tried to make sure their cards would be on top. She brought up a single card, read it, and then passed it to her sister, to read aloud.
“Latari of Golgo!” Princess Tinabula called.
Latari was a muscular young bagpipe player with red hair. Flushed with excitement, he pushed through the crowd to step up and hold Princess Tinabula’s hand. Drewvia slipped the card from her sister’s other hand, and tossed it in the fire before anyone else could see it.
“Now that the giant is gone,” the king announced, “There is no need for a princess to sit on the shimmering bridge. We can fill in the pit….”
The crowd groaned. “Oh no!” shouted a man who had had a great deal of wine. “What about the game!”
“We want our game!” called a woman in the crowd. “Hooray for the princess and down with the giant, but let us keep playing every day!”
“You could still have a game,” Latari murmured to his future father-in-law. “That way there’d still be money to build libraries and bridges.”
“But not with a princess as a prize,” said Drewvia, quickly. “You’ll run out of princesses. Why not put a big bag of money up there instead?”
The new game of throwing money at money was introduced to celebrate the big wedding, and was named after the groom. So everyone had a share in the happy ending: Tinabula because she was the star of a grand ceremony, Drewvia because she would not have to be anyone’s first prize, and the people of Costren because they could play their splendid Latari.
“Aren’t you that bloke who was JUST complaining about people telling you every single year that the original jack-o-lantern was a hollowed-out turnip?” Yes, curried candy corn, but I have to see those videos. I don’t have to read my own blog.
MY Halloween refrain, while repetitive, at least adds a little variety by way of illustrations. See, every year about tis time I complain about how hard it is to present a Halloween blog because I have almost no actual Halloween postcards for sale. The one at the top of this column, though nightmarish, is for an artistic experience held in July of 2010, while the one next, thugh spooky, strikes me as cheating, since it is one of those museum postcards showing a 19th century painting (which is, I am told, a spooky comedy, since, if you look closely enough, you will see two nonchalant cats who are the source of the scary sounds the family is investigating by dead of night.)
This is more the sort of thing I need but, again, it is a modern card and also, since it involves a camping trip, unlikely to be set in October, at least in MY part of the world.
Genuine vintage Halloween postcards are so popular and so hard to get that you just won’t find them in my inventory. What I’m looking for, and don’t have, is postcards at least half a century old which deal, with, say, bloodsucking monsters who prey on humans by night.
Or cryptids who haunt our imagination.
But since I have to rely on what I have in stock, I am helpless when it comes to shwing pictures of massive menacing giants bearing down on their victims.
Devouring them with not a scruple. Or even an onion ring.
I search in vain for at least one solidly spooky mad doctor.
About the only thing my inventory is good on—and though appropriate for Halloween, it is hardly specific to that holiday—is the threat of violent death.
Postcards were having their way with all manner of mayhem long before the Three Stooges made their careers with it. But though the Stooges did a number of excellent spooky films, this vibe just isn’t specific enough.
I mean, I could do a whole blog of postcards involving the threat of violent death, but no matter how I spoke of them, you’d detect a humorous axe scent. (Yeah, some of my jokes are scary, but that brings the problem full circle.)
And eventually, I have to come back to the postcards I use over and over because they are genuinely creepy. (The smile does it for me, even after I have realized that’s a flower petal and not a knife he’s brandishing.)
Maybe I should expand beyond the postcards in inventory and try some of the books and magazines instead. (And even THIS is cheating. This illustrates an article on the history of fur trappers in the wilderness who took cats with them. Not spooky at all, since…. Reader? Faithful reader? Hey, over here! I should have warned you not to look into those eyes.)
Once again, dear reader, your faithful bloggist has come through. Prompted by the seventh online expert in one week to tell me that the original jack-o-lantern was carved from a turnip (something they told us every year in grade school, thank you all) I looked up one or two questions no one was telling me about. These are of no use to you at all, but the Interwebs would not loom so large in our lives without that sort of information.
Whilst eating popcorn, a major part of my healthy diet, I wondered if people still refer to the unpopped kernels as ‘old maids”. The quick answer is that yes, they do, in spite of warnings I found online for people learning English as a second language that this phrase is considered offensive in some places.
The phrase derives, of course, from ‘old maid’ as a term for a spinster or unmarried woman, which became current somewhere during or before the fifteenth century. HOWEVER, in spite of those not very fine old jokes inevitably made about the kernel being unpopped, the older phrase is only the first step. There is another old maid which needs to come first.
In the 1830s, the world was taken by storm with a new game by Eliza Leslie. It was played with a regular deck of cards and, if girls were playing, was called Old Maid, but Old Bachelor if it was played by boys. The game had its day and was starting to fade when in 1883, a publisher brought out a version with a special deck of cards with funny characters on them. This game was called Merry Matches, but was so similar that it took on the name(s) Eliza Leslie gave it.
Around the same time, those unpopped popcorn kernels got their nickname. My own guess is that this came about because people ate popcorn and played games on family evenings. Historic slang dictionaries indicate that in some places, the unpopped popcorn was called Old Bachelors, which I think shows the line of descent from the original Old Maid (who was not expecting….. let’s move on.)
I also wondered whether anybody still makes jokes about needing their “beauty sleep”, and when we started using THAT phrase. I had to fight past all the Beauty Sleep and Beauty Rest mattresses, but it turns out the phrase is even older than the old maids.
It starts appearing in the 1810s and 1820s and even in those days was used primarily as a light-hearted joke. This was an era when parties often started around midnight and ran for several hours, and a nap was often resorted to around 7 P.M. (Only a few people–influencer…well, writers—took it seriously declaring, that sleep before midnight was better for you than sleep after midnight.)
And then I worried about this postcard, and that spelling. It is entirely legit.
A Scottish term, Colsie, first recorded in the seventeenth century, meant much the same thing. It went on to be spelled Cozy, Cosy, Cosey, Cozie, or anything else within reason. In the 1850s, some ingenious soul made a verb of it, and to “cose” meant to make oneself comfortable, alone or as one of a couple. A generation after THAT, people turned it into a noun, as a knitted cover to keep something warm—a tea cozy or, less often, an egg cozy.
Where would the Interwebs be within controversy, though. Online, where an expert is defined as “anybody with a blog”, there is argument over whether ‘cozy’ led to the word ‘cushy”, meaning something simple and no problem that the person at the next cubicle got as their assignment. One or two experts claim they are closely related, if not actually mother and daughter.
MOST dictionaries, however, claim they’re barely acquainted, saying that ‘cushy’ was originally a military term employed by the British Army in India, where the Hindi word ‘khush’, which also gives us “cushion”, was used to mean either an easy job or an easy-going person. (Or simply a weakling, depending, apparently, on the tone of voice of the speaker.
So you are now in possession of a load of data at LEAST as important to your daily life as that business about turnips (and, by the way, nobody to this day has answered the question that fretted me as a child: were they really big turnips or really small candles?)
The land of Costren was a pretty nice place to live, except for the giant. There’s always something.
The giant, a hungry, hairy figure of a man eight times as tall as a tree, used to come around to Costren for his lunch every day, with the result that a family or two would never be seen again. The king pf Costren, whose castle was just over a hill and around a corner from the castle of he giant, begged him to take gold instead of people. With gold, he explained, the giant could buy food somewhere, or order in. The giant agreed to this. Once a week, he would send a great iron coal wagon pulled by three tigers over to the king’s castle. The king would fill this with gold and send it back whence it had come.
The people of Costren were happy about this for a while. But providing that wagonload of gold for the giant every week was emptying out the king’s treasury. There was no money left to build bridges or fix roads. So he had to raise taxes.
And so the people began to grumble. “More taxes. More taxes. He must be eating all our money.”
“I wouldn’t mind if all the money was going to the giant. But with everything this country needs, what must he do but build a big shiny bridge over a hole in the ground he dug himself!”
This was absolutely true. The king had ordered his men to dig a huge pit, with a tunnel leading to his castle from the bottom. And he had ordered his engineers to build him a high, shimmering crystal bridge. A staircase ran along the curve of this bridge to a shimmering silver chair at the highest point.
When this was all finished, he called a meeting of the people of Costren. Hundreds gathered to look at the bridge, which had guards standing at each end to make sure no one tried to walk on it.
“What do you suppose this is all about?” they asked each other. “He’d better have a good excuse for building this big shiny thing!”
At length, trumpets sounding, the gates of the castle opened. The king strode out and up to the bridge, holding the hand of his daughter, Princes Tinabula. He stopped at the base of the bridge, but the princess marched up the stairs. When she reached the silver chair, she curtsied to the crowd, gathered her skirts, and sat down.
Everyone applauded. No one had a notion what was going on, but it was all very pretty.
“Now that I have your attention,” called the king. “I would like to make a proclamation.”
People stopped applauding. Proclamations almost always had something to do with taxes, usually that there would be more of them, and everyone would have to work harder to turn this kingdom around, and this proclamation really didn’t count against last week’s proclamation that there would be no new taxes.
“There will be no new taxes,” the king proclaimed.
The people applauded just a little, polite but not convinced.
“Instead,” the king went on, “We are going to have a game, open to anybody who wishes to play. Every day, provided it doesn’t snow or rain, my daughter, the Princess Tinabula, will sit in this silver chair for four hours. Anyone who wishes to do so may step into the booth right there.”
He swung his scepter to point out a little wooden booth at one side of the pit. “Each player will throw a coin of his or her choice to the Princess Tinabula. Anyone whose coin touches her chair or her shoes will win seven silver coins.”
A few people applauded. The rest were digging pennies out of their pockets.
“But anyone whose coin touches the princess’s dress will marry her.”
The crowd dropped into complete silence, staring at the smiling princess, who waved at them. “Or, if the winner is already married or someone who does not wish to marry a princess,” the king went on, “Someone in the winner’s family will instead marry the princess, move into the palace, and become a prince.”
Nobody applauded. Everyone was running at the booth, holding coins in the air. The idea of being a prince, or at least having a prince in the family, sounded excellent.
Twenty-three fights about who was first in line had to be sorted out by the castle guards. Thirteen people fainted and fifty started to cry thinking they wouldn’t get a turn. But the line was finally organized, and people stepped up into the booth, where they found throwing their coins a little more difficult than it had looked from outside the booth. The sun glinted off the shining crystal bridge right into their eyes, and the booth wasn’t QUITE big enough to allow for a full wind-up. Nonetheless, everybody wanted to try, those who failed to hit any target cheerfully running to the back of the line and pulling out another coin.
Princess Tinabula stayed in tat silver chair until the sun went down, and people couldn’t see to throw anymore. The people of Costren went home to find more coins (except for the one or two who had actually managed to hit the chair, who made immediate plans to return the next day for seven more turns with their winnings.) And the king’s men came down through the tunnel from the castle to shovel the coins thrown that first day into wheelbarrows. The coins went straight up into the treasury.
The same thing happened the next day and the day after that, and day after day. The guards never took up fewer than six wheelbarrows full of coins for the treasury.
So the king was happy, because his nearly goldless treasury was on the way to being refilled. Princess Tinabula was happy to be of help through little more than smiling and waving. The people of Costren were happy, since there would be, after all, no new taxes, and they had a game to play which might win them a little silver and perhaps a princess of their very own. No one knew whether the giant was happy, but at least he wasn’t coming around and eating people.
One person in Costren was not happy. This was Princess Tinabula’s little sister, the Princess Drewvia.
“Don’t you get tired sitting up there all day?” she asked Princess Tinabula.
Tinabula shook her hair back. “Don’t be silly. I have a parasol to keep the sun off my face, and trousers so no one can peek up under my dress. As long as I have a book to read and a box of chocolates and cold lemonade to drink with them, it doesn’t matter where I sit.”
“But you’ll have to marry just anybody,” Princess Drewvia told her.
“Not just anybody,” said Princess Tinabula, glancing in one of the mirrors she always kept handy. “Only a young man with good, strong arms could manage to reach me with a coin way up there. Why, sometimes I have to stick out a foot just so somebody can win a little money.”
“But….”
Tinabula looked up from the mirror. “Drewvia, I just do not see what your problem is. Unless you’re jealous.”
Jealousy was not Drewvia’s problem. Her problem was that she had brains. And these brains told her that one day somebody with a good, strong arm (or hidden slingshot) was going to toss a coin hard enough to land it right in Tinabula’s lap. The princess would then be married, but the treasury would still need money. Someone else would have to sit in that chair and be the next grand prize. Of course, the obvious person to take over the job was the next princess, which was Drewvia.
And Drewvia didn’t want to marry just anybody from the crowd. She had already decided she was going to marry Geirge, the apprentice to the royal wizard. The only reason George and Drewvia weren’t married now was that it would have been severely improper for a princess to be married before her older sister. (That and the fact that Drewvia hadn’t told George yet that he was going to marry her.)
The next morning, while Tinabula was sitting in the silver chair, sliding her shoes toward the crowd and then jerking them back before a coin could hit them, Drewvia went off to the tallest tower in the caste. She found George stirring a big smelly kettle of the wizard’s latest experiment.
“I just don’t know what to do,” Drewvia told him. “One of these days, they’re going to hit her. And because we have to pay for roads and libraries AND a giant, I’ll have to sit there next.”
“We don’t know what to do either,” George told her. “Some of that money, you know, goes to pay for magic books. The wizard reads them, over and over, looking for ways to be rid of a giant. But to get him into our power, he has to say we’ve defeated him. And how can we defeat him if the only way to defeat him is to defeat him?”
“That has its drawbacks,” said the princess, wandering over to the cupboard where the wizard kept his completed potions. She opened the door, said hello to the grumpy pixy who guarded the potions, and studied the boxes and jars. “Isn’t there anything else we could do? Could the wizard turn you into a giant for just long enough to wrestle him?”
George made a face. “He thought of that. If you KNEW some of the brews I had to drink while he was trying that! I’d rather eat Swiss chard on a bed of squid with liver and bleu cheese dressing. He did find a recipe for a elixir which will make things twice as big. But that’s all, and it isn’t enough.”
“Twice as big?” said Drewva. “Why not just drink more of it?”
“You don’t drink it,” said George. “If you do, you explode. You just sprinkle it on. And it won’t make anything more than double in size. Here, hand me that white bottle on the second shelf.”
Drewvia found the bottle and passed it over, managing to touch his hand as she did so. He didn’t appear to notice, and looked around the room as he pulled the cork from the bottle.
“Ah!” He stooped down and scooped up a mouse that was slipping behind a box of crystal balls. He splashed the captive animal with the potion and let it drop before it knew what was happening.
“Oh!” Drewvia jumped back.
“Some princess!” George snorted. “Afraid of a mouse?”
“I’m not! It’s just the biggest mouse I ever saw and….” She pointed at the door. “It’s getting away! Shouldn’t you do something?”
The mouse was gone. “It doesn’t last long,” George explained. “Anyway, the cat’s big enough to deal with him.”
“Of course,” said Drewvia. “The cat’s big enough. But that was the biggest mouse I’ve ever seen.”
George corked the bottle, set it back into the cupboard, and went back to the cauldron. “If I let this new potion burn, the wizard will turn me into a mouse, and a little one at that. Je tells me half the mice in this castle were once salesmen who woke him from his naps.”
Drewvia considered the door the mouse had temporarily escaped through. Then she asked, “George, if the giant did say you defeated him, would he disappear right away?”
“No,” he told her, “It would just put him into our power. Then, according to the books, mind you, whoever defeated him has to say ‘scooper drooper’ three times and then tell him he’s a mouse, or a fly, or something. And he’ll turn into that forever…or until some other wizard with another spell comes by.”
“Ah,” said Drewvia. And then she started talking about what was in the cauldron, which turned out to be a new kind of paint remover and nothing at all to do with the giant.
Eventually, she went down to her own room, and opened her wardrobe to pick out her best walking shoes and some warm clothes for hiking. That night, somewhat after midnight, she put these on and crept up to the wizard’s workroom.
“What do you want?” asked the pixy guarding the cupboard when she opened the door.
“That bottle.” Drewvia pointed at the one with the double size potion in it.
“Did the wizard say you could take it?” the pixy demanded.
“Not exactly,” said the princess.
“Okay. Take it and go away. I need my beauty sleep.”
Drewvia picked up the bottle. “You aren’t going to make any noise or tell the wizard or anything?”
“My job is to watch his potions. I’m watching them. Now go away, will you?”
“But you’re supposed to be guarding this cupboard.” Drewvia tucked the bottle into her purse.
The pixy opened one eye. “Are you stealing the cupboard?”
“No.”
The eye closed again. “So be a good little princess and go away now, won’t you?”
Drewvia shrugged and sneaked back downstairs. She slipped out through the castle gate and started the long walk to the giant’s castle. The moon was bright enough to show her where she was going, but she was still worried. A place that had a giant living there, she reasoned, likely had other things wrong with it.
Of course, she was right. As she moved through the forest at the top of the hill, something moved toward her. Drewvia was on the alert, and saw it almost as soon as it saw her. But this did not do her much good. The tiger was so big that a horse could have stood upon its back, at least until the tiger got hungry. Pulling a coal wagon filled with gold once a week no doubt gave it a mighty
“I am impressed, Dr. Van Helsing. You are the last person I would have expected to decorate his house so thoroughly for Halloween trick-or-treaters.”
“At this time of year, the curtain between worlds is at its thinnest. If I can lure the demonic monsters here, I can avoid having them attack innocent partygoers.”
“So this is all bait?”
“Indeed. You may not know it, but all the candy corn available this time of year is actually for people who wish to subdue evil walking scarecrows.”
“I see.”
“Every villain has a confectionary weakness. Evil sentient computers can be appeased with Smarties, while nightmare clowns subside in gratitude for Chuckles or Snickers.”
“I suppose you have Swedish Fish in case the Creature from the Black Lagoon comes by.”
“Not at all. For him I have a Raisin Net. The stray, small spirits of mischief abroad this night will be held back by these Pixy Stix, and I regularly see one wailing ghost who is still looking for Mr. Goodbar. These Starburst will control any alien invaders.”
“And you’ve piled up Mary Janes for the stalking cannibalistic slashers.”
“No: Junior Mince. I have provided for any eventuality, with these emergency candies in case someone I had not anticipated appears. Here’s Bazooka gum, and, at a pinch, Lifesavers.”
“And do you have anything for any actual children who come to the door?”
I sometimes come to you, my army of readers, when I am confused by a postcard. This is done on the theory that everyone across the Interwebs has information, or at least an opinion. When some point in a joke or a picture has me puzzled, I bring my troubles to you, and not once has this resulted in an answer. But it fills up a column.
This time, however, I have run across a postcard company which seems to be confusing me on purpose. The cards and I are at least a half century apart in age, so I don’t say they were thinking of me personally. But they did produce a series of postcards featuring women who are busy with their own occupations, like the one shown here in her urban sanctuary, who are going about their business without any care about what the audience thinks they’re up to.
There is no hint visible to my eyes of who printed these where or when, aside from a conviction from the ladies’ outfits that we are hovering somewhere around 1909. The backsides of these cards are plain, even boring, but consistent, showing they WERE produced by one company which thought there might be a market for “WHAT are they up to?” cards.
The ladies are seldom timid about whatever it is they’re doing. They are confident, self-sufficient, and generally enjoying themselves. The captions seldom do anything to clear up the mystery.
Maybe that was the point. Maybe the whole thing was an exercise in letting the viewer generate a story based on what the card showed. If you look closely enough here, for example, you will find that what is in that barrow is another woman, apparently unconscious. Is this just a good friend, helping a fellow traveler home from the bar, or is that mounted policeman ignoring Jill the Ripper taking home the latest trophy? Up to us, In guess.
Unless there’s some clue that is lost to me along generational lines. Would a viewer in 1909 understand why this woman fainted at this Edwardian Starbucks? Is there a hint to the source of the drama passing in the excitement?
Which of this foursome is “back again”? And why…. Somebody must know.
In this case, at least, there’s a hint here in how the women are dressed. The woman on the right is clearly an adult, but adult women did not wear short skirts unless…. Is she the voice of spring? A fairy godmother?
How did these ladies get up on the telephone pole? How are they going to get down? Who’s below? Men? Is that why we’re being a little cautious about how our dresses are arranged?
Men turn up only now and then in this series. The ladies don’t exhibit any major contempt or apathy for men. These are just, by and large, adventures without the trousered gender.
Where men do appear, things get no clearer. I get the general gist here, but what is that between their teeth? And how is that a kiss? In fact, how is it germ-proof? Am I totally clueless or just temporarily confused?
Is there an answer? Or are we just meant to be puzzled, as there is no definitive answer to this question, either.
Okay, I take it back about that last question. This card does answer it. But it does nothing for MY dilemma. If you know, send me a message. You don’t even need to use a postcard.
There didn’t seem to be any walls or floor here: only darkness. King Basso didn’t like to think what might be hiding in the dark, so he walked close behind the princesses, who were shimmering just a little, just enough to be seen.
“Of course,” he said to himself, “If I can’t see the monsters, they can’t see me, either. Perhaps I should just take off this helmet and go bravely, like a King. I slew a dragon; I don’t have to slink around as if I was scared. I am a very brave man.”
He reached to pull his sword out of the sheath, and tripped on the hem of his robe. “Too brave to concern myself with what a lot of cowardly monsters creeping around in the dark think of me. I’m brave enough to stay invisible, and let them think what they want.”
The sword just would not come out of the sheath at all. King Basso swallowed hard. “Of course, I rode my horse to go fight the dragon. Maybe I’d feel better if I went back and got my horse.”
But now he saw a little light shining ahead, coming out of what seemed to be doorway. A tiny man stepped out as the princesses approached. He had no hair, and wore nothing but a tiny pair of pink breeks.
“They’re coming!” he shouted, and skiddled back through the door.
The five princes walked through the door. King Basso followed right behind them. Surely there was no need to fear such a tiny man.
The giant was a complete surprise to him. She was twice as tall as King Basso, with long red hair and a red beard that went right to the ground. A big cauldron full of some steaming potion stood next to her. Each princess stepped up to this cauldron in turn, and the giant splashed a ladleful of potion over each princess’s head. After the splash, each princess’s beard and mustache grew and spread. Even Princess Darling, who had a hood on her nightgown, turned hairy as the potion went right through the thin cloth.
Meanwhile, the tiny man was jumping around the cauldron, looking at the princesses and then at the door. He didn’t seem to find what he wanted.
Finally, he said, “I don’t see a prince with them tonight, Wife.”
The giant woman scratched her forehead with the spoon. “Is it Sunday, then?”
“I thought this was Monday,” the little man said. “But it could be Sunday, to be sure. Perhaps I lost track, Wife. Never mind. We don’t need another cheese board anyhow. How I wish you could turn those princes into something useful!”
Looking beyond the mismatched pair, King Basso saw that what he had thought was the wall of the room was a large stack of cheap cheese trays. “Well now,” said the giant. “I have to start with something useful if I’m to make something useful out of it. Never mind. Next time we get invited to a party we ca give them away as Christmas presents.”
The little man jumped back. “Wife, we haven’t been invited to a HCristmas party in two hundred and twenty-two years!”
She snorted. “We will be, once we’re king and queen.”
“Hush up out there!” someone shouted. “We’re playin’ cards!”
“Yeah! And if yer gonna talk about cheese, bring us some! We’re hungry!”
The little man jumped over next to the giant, and jerked a thumb at the cheese trays. “I wish we hadn’t traded our daughters for those princesses when they were born,” he whispered. “I don’t know if I’m as much of a genius as it seemed at the time.”
“It can’t be much longer now,” the giant whispered, glancing at the cheese trays. “Surely a prince strong enough to break our spells will show up soon, and take them all back where they belong. They’ll make everyone out there as miserable as they make us, and spend so much of the old king’s money that his government will collapse. Then we can take over.”
The princesses with their long beards had turned to walk back through the door. King Basso stood where he was, watching them. Could it be true that his real daughters had been stolen away after birth, and replaced with the children of the hairy giant and her little husband? Je didn’t follow the princesses as they left, instead following the little man, who was skittering around the stack of cheese trays.
Five golden-haired women sat around a little card table. Their tresses were tangled, their faces were dirty, and their greasy robes hung open. Each had a glass of something green to drink, and each was smoking a long black cigarette.
“This is warm!” said one, throwing all the juice in her glass over the little man. “Get me a cold one!”
The others also tossed their beverages at him. “Yeah!” said the one with a big brown smudge on her forehead. “How come you never has any ice cubes in this dump?” She dropped her glass on the floor. When the little man bent to pick it up, she kicked him. This made her laugh so hard she never noticed one of her sisters was stealing cards from her hand.
King Basso backed away from the card table, wishing these women didn’t look quite so much like him, or, worse, Queen Azalea. What a good thing HIS daughters didn’t act like…. Whose daughters?
He was so sick at heart that he didn’t pay attention to where he was walking. When he bumped into the stack of cheese trays, one fell off.
“Ha!” said the little man. “I thought it was Monday! Wife, it’s another one of those princes with a helmet of invisibility!”
The king ran around the stack of trays, but the giant was waiting for him. “Got you!” she cried, as he thudded against one big arm. “You might as well give up!”
King Basso agreed. He reached up and took off his helmet.
“Goodness gracious!” The little man stepped over and picked up the fallen cheese tray. “Are you a prince?”
“Oh, no,” said King Basso, and this was true, of course. He went on, “The King never sends a prince down on Sundays.” This was true, too, although it was, of course, really Monday.
“What shall we do with him then, Wife?” asked the little man.
The giant shook the king. “Is your name Jack? Boys named Jack can be terrible nuisances even when they aren’t princes.”
“N-no, Ma’am,” said the King, as well as he could while being shaken. “M-m-my n-name is not-not Jack.”
“Well, Not Not Jack,” she said, shaking him some more, “What are you doing around here?”
“J-j-just looking around, Ma’am,” said the King.
She gave him another good shake. “Well, shall I make you into stew, or throw you to those five yonder?”
“Just keep quiet!” screamed a voice from the other side of the cheese tray wall. Another voice burped, and then all of the voices brayed with laughter.
“Wait, Wife,” whispered the little man. “We should let him go. See how old he is? Obviously, this is that quaint old codger who tells the good prince how to come down and break all the spells. If we tell him the secret and let him go, some Prince Jack or another will come down, rescue those girls, and allow OUR daughters to come back down here. Until we win, of course, and live in the castle.”
“I think you have the right of it, Husband.” The giant set King Basso down. “You may go, little old codger.”
King Basso was not so little, not so old, and didn’t even know how to codge. But he decided not to complain. The giant’s little husband shook a finger at him. “But don’t you dare tell any prince how you got down here. And you’d better not tell him that a silver hammer would break our cauldron of beauty potion here or that sticking us with silver pins will force us to tell a terrible secret we’ve kept since the princesses were born.” He winked at the king.
“I won’t tell,” said King Basso.
“I bet,” said the giant. With that, she picked him up and threw him at the door. King Basso sailed through the darkness until he landed with a plop in the big armchair in the princesses’ bedroom. He sat there through the rest of the night without once going to sleep.
As the sun came up, he heard a voice cry, “I have a beard again!”
“Oh no!” came another voice. “Then where’s Daddy?”
The curtains were pushed back on the beds, and five women pushed up their shaggy eyebrows so they could look at the leather armchair.
“Daddy!” Screaming, they ran across the room to throw their arms around him. “You’re still here! Are you okay? What happened? What did you see?”
Queen Azalea came into the room just at that moment. She, too, seemed glad to see that the King had not disappeared, but frowned.
“If you haven’t disappeared and you’re all right,” she said, “Why do our daughters still have all their hair? Did you fall asleep and miss the whole thing?”
When the queen said “our daughters”, the king frowned too. He stood up, burdened still by hugs. “Is breakfast ready?”
“But what did you see?” his daughters demanded. “What happened? Did you fix everything?”
The king reached out as if to take Princess Dainty’s hand, but then he didn’t. “Not yet,” he said. “I’ll fix everything tonight.”
“You know how?” the queen demanded.
“Yes,” said the king. “Tell the Royal Chamberlain I need a silver hammer, about fourteen silver pins or nails, and five bananas. We shan’t be needing any princes. Now let’s all have breakfast.”
All day long, everyone in the palace wondered what the king meant to do. Naturally, the queen and the princesses wondered loudest, asking a lot of questions. But he wouldn’t tell them, not even when it was bedtime.
“Oh please,” said Princess Delicate, “Can’t you give us a hint?”
“He saw fourteen hair fairies, I bet,” said Princess Demure. “And he’s going to nail their wings to the ceiling so they can’t bother us.”
“Then what are the bananas for?” said Princess Dainty.
“Huh!” said the king. “I suppose you never got hungry and wanted a snack during the night.”
“Oh, Daddy!” said Princess Dainty, and threw her pillow at him.
At last the princesses climbed into their beds and pulled the curtains around them. King Basso sat up in the leather armchair with all the things he had requested. He calmly peeled and ate all the bananas, to the surprise of the princesses, who kept peeking out to see what he was doing.
The big bedroom grew dark and silent. King Basso, who hadn’t had much sleep during the day, was wondering whether he had time for a quick nap when he heard the jingling sound again. He grabbed up his silver hammer and all the nails.
Thump! Princess Delightful, walking in her sleep, had stepped on a banana peel the king had thrown on the floor. There were four more thumps as four more princesses rose from their beds and then sat down hard. This did not wake them up, but it did slow them down. They tried to rise, but slid again and again on the banana peels slipping out from their sisters’ feet. Not one of them could reach the magic door that was slowly opening.
King Basso leapt from the armchair and, tripping no more than once, threw himself against the door to shut it. Then he took his silver hammer and began to nail the door shut. He had just pounded in the fourth silver nail when he felt someone pounding back from the other side.
“He’s using silver nails, Husband!” he heard the giant shout. “I can’t make it open!”
“You’ll never open it again,” growled King Basso, proceeding with his carpentry. He did feel just a little sorry for all the princes, who would have to be cheese trays forever now, but he couldn’t have the coming back out to tell just everyone about the giant’s children.
“Maybe in a hundred years or so a lad named Jack will go down and free them,” he said to himself. “There are too many princes anyhow. I’d never get any pie.”
The magic door, shut for good, was never seen again. King Basso never did explain what he’d done, but everyone could tell he’d done something. The princesses still had great quantities of red hair, but without the magic potion being splashed on them, it grew no faster than normal hair. Princess Delicate and Princess Delightful always shaved off their beards and mustaches, but Princess Darling braided hers. Princess Dainty sported a sweet little mustache, while Princess Demure kept just her sideburns. Society women went out and bought false beards and mustaches so they could look as lovely as the princesses. No one ever guessed the true reason the princesses grew so much hair.
The princesses won the volleyball tournament again that year. At the big victory feast, King Basso ate nine pieces of sweet potato pie, and led the crowd in three cheers for each princess.
“Their hair doesn’t matter so much, I suppose, now that the curse or whatever it was is broken,” said Queen Azalea. “Everybody in the country seems to love them.”
“Of course,” said King Basso, helping himself to another piece of pie. “MY daughters have been very well brought up.”
“Great Leapin’ Honk! Where in the name of all that’s pretty did YOU come from?”
“You rubbed the lamp, Master.”
“Teach me to dust in here; I’ll never do THAT again. You’re some manner of genie, are you?”
“Sealed into the lamp by Solomon himself a thousand and a thousand years beyond that, I am….”
“That’ll do, thanks. And you’ve got wishes for me, I reckon?”
“Indeed, Master. Three wishes have I for you, in gratitude for freeing me from my ancient prison. Subject to certain rules and conditions.”
“There’s always fine print. So no wishing for more wishes, and like that, hey?”
“I CAN grant you more wishes, Master. But you can ask for only one extra wish per wish, so you gain nothing by THAT. In addition, I cannot grant any wish which is basically impossible. I cannot bring you the moon and hang it above your dining room table.”
“Gee whiskers and wildcats, how will I go on without that?”
“I cannot kill more than a hundred people per wish for you, Master, nor politicians in excess of three at a wish. I cannot do more than double your life expectancy, whatever that may be. I cannot promise you happiness ever after, or the eternal fidelity of some young maiden or….”
“Say, while you’re working your way through the warning labels, can I wish myself a test drive?”
“If you mean to make a wish now, Master, that is certainly allowed. Provided it is something I can….”
“I wish you’d get back in the dadburn lamp and stay there.”
“But Master, I….”
“Thank’ee. As if my life wasn’t complicated enough already.”
Not so long ago in this space, we considered the jokes swapped between residents of the rural parts of the world and those who lived in the city. This town vs. country debate is ancient and widespread, and COULD be considered part of the basic human belief that the people who live the way I live are the best and the rest are wrong, dirty, and evil. But a kinder, gentler notion sees it as simple part of the “fish out of water” comic tradition.
Another facet of this, often seen on bygone postcards, is the comedy of the newbie. These gags make fun at someone who is new to the job or situation, and sometimes even too young to quite understand what’s going on. Some of the same basic situations apply to both types of humor, of course/
But this is broader than just the town mouse not understanding the country mouse and vice versa. The reader gets the same sense of superiority as in the town/country jokes, seeing where the novice is going wrong. The laugh is mixed with a little sympathy, though. because we’ve all had to start somewhere and had the more experienced workers sending us for that left-handed monkey wrench or bottle of toenail polish.
It can, um, apply to something as simple as suiting up for work. (This joke is repeated on scads of postcards. And some of us can feel superior twice, as occasionally it is obvious the artist doesn’t know what chaps look like, unlike this chap, who gets it right.)
World War II saw dozens of gags which depended on the thousands of recruits who showed up to serve in the war effort without knowing a whole lot about how this military service worked. (To some degree, these descend from bestseller ‘Dere Mable’, a World War I classic, which had ancestors during the Civil War and continued through No Time for Sergeants, Gomer Pyle USMC, Private Benjamin, and so forth.)
It’s a perennial source of humor in societies where it is admitted that even soldiers can make mistakes.
The Baby Boom, which coexisted with World War II, drew on another ancient comic trope: the man who is new to what were considered female domestic chores.
Children, both before and after that particular boom, were another rich source of “I’m new around here” humor. They had an obvious excuse for their lack of experience and knowledge about the adult world and its chores. This kept no one from laughing about it.
Back in the adult world, even one’s experiences outside work were grist for the mill. Leisure time activities often took people into new places and new situations where they could not conceal their newbieness.
The world may forgive you for not being from around here, but forgiveness never includes not laughing at you for making a misstep in a new place.
As we have seen hereintofore in this blog, the mistakes of novices are sometimes attributed to being the wrong sex for the specific activity (as in the sailor seen above trying to change a diaper.) Is it that this fishing partner is female, or just because she’s new to this fishing business that she has made a rookie mistake?
Because, and you will find this in literature as well as on postcards, our sympathy for both sides of the question can lead us to cheer for the rookie who surprises everyone by winning the game, breaking the sales record, or, like the boy from the country who marked the side of the boat in the old folktale, having a few tricks up one sleeve.
Blogsy Babbles 