On a happier note, here's something I've been wondering.
Background: (It seems whenever I'm wondering about something there's always a lengthy background.) I've been watching cartoons lately while erging. I'm not at my best or brightest at 5AM, or whiler erging in general; the combination of the two prohibits functioning brain cells. I was watching the news, but you can't watch morning news for more than about twenty minutes without seeing far too many stories repeated. It turns out that from 5 to 6 AM, I can watch Disney Playhouse and see The New Adventures of Madeleine and Pooh's Playhouse. Oddly, the latter, which has stuffed animals supposedly inside a book in a sort of fuzzy Claymation, is followed by an animated version of Pooh. And the characters are recognizable in both but different in each: the animated version is more faithful to the original books. Owl is more pompous and Rabbit more irascible, for example.
At any rate, in Pooh's Playhouse yesterday, Piglet had a dream in which he encountered heffalumps. They were cute: shaped like small colorful elephants, with spots that changed color and noses shaped more like a seahorse's than an elephants trunk. Their language consisted entirely of the doo-wop sections from old songs. Through the use of pantomime and the help of a small, shy, nonscary heffalump, Piglet eventually figured out that "Boom shaka laka laka" menat "My feet are cold" and he solved the problem by knitting socks for all the heffalumps. Several sets of four socks, in almost no time - he must be an incredibly speedy knitter. His knitting hobby has been mentioned in other episodes, as well.
My question, for any parental types or anyone else who has reread Milne lately, is did Piglet knit in the original stories, or is that a Disney invention?
Posted by dichroic at July 7, 2005 04:55 PMI read the stories over and over as a kid. I do not remember Piglet ever knitting. What I do remember is something like this: "The more it goes, tiddly pom, the more it goes, tiddly pom, the more it goes, tiddly pom, on snowing/And nobody knows, tiddly pom, how cold my toes, tiddly pom, how cold my toes, tiddly pom, are growing." No one ever offered to knit socks!
Posted by: l-empress at July 8, 2005 08:10 AMI don't remember any knitting either, though you've made me intrigued and am going to hunt my books out again tonight!
Posted by: ruthie at July 8, 2005 03:36 PMI read all of the Pooh stories within the last year... I don't remember any knitting, but perhaps it just slipped by?
Posted by: Melissa at July 12, 2005 03:49 PM