News You Can Bruise for 2005 December 16

Here's another thing that has the same ingredients as eggnog: the batter in which you dip French toast.

Sumana and I once tried this experiment, except we were seeing how many "a"s we could put in "It's a faaaaaake!" before we stopped getting Google results. I think the answer was somewhere in the 50s.

I forgot all about this book until it came up in the Gutenberg feed. The sequels are also in the foggy swamps of the public domain.

My mother read me this book, and at least one of the sequels, when I was young. Man, she must have read to me for years because we went through The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, the Narnia books, these books, and who knows what others, all presumably before I started reading at that level myself.

Anyway, it's a really fun book, though looking at it now I see a Victorian subtext of "Don't go around wishing for things to be different than they are!" Well, it's not really fair to malign the Victorians for that subtext, since it's the subtext of any wishing story, from old genie folktales to contemporary time-travel movies. The only thing I can think of that doesn't have this subtext is the wishing in Nethack.

PS: There was also a similar book, a lot more recent, also British, which had some siblings finding a pink creature that had grown in toxic waste. I mainly remember it because the book mentioned the "loo", and for a long time afterwards I thought that bathrooms in England had a strange device called a "loo" that nobody else had. Has anyone else read this book?