dual personalities

Tag: A.A. Milne

January 18, 2024

Tra-la-la, tra-la-la

by chuckofish

While we are in a celebratory mood, let us toast today’s birthday boys: A.A. Milne (1882), Oliver Hardy (1892), Cary Grant (1904), Danny Kaye (1911), and Kevin Costner (1955). Cupcakes all around!

I would like to watch The Fighting Kentuckian (1949) starring John Wayne and Oliver Hardy. It is an excellent movie!

We’ll see if that can be arranged.

We were remiss in not mentioning the passing of actor David Soul a few weeks ago. We loved him as the middle Bolt brother in Here Come the Brides and as Hutch in Starsky and Hutch back in the day.

I lost track of him after that but I did always think he was my husband’s doppleganger. Well, sort of.

Interestingly, his father was a Lutheran minister and a senior representative for Lutheran World Relief during the reconstruction of Germany after World War II .

I would like to indulge in some Starsky and Hutch binging, but it is not available as far as I can see.

So, as we experience a brief thaw before the arctic air returns, I am content to putter around at home, reading my Pilgrim’s Progress assignment, straightening up the house and driving cardboard boxes to the recycling center. I feel like my father “going to the post office” in order to get out of the house. While I’m at it, I suppose I should stock up on bread, milk and pretzel bites.

This seems right to me, because it is not crazy to think that demonic forces prowl about in [AI] technology. There may well be a way “for the technology to move forward in a manner aligned with the City of God, but thus far Big Tech (collectively) seems quite content to operate from a position of self-interest and self-gain, values prized by both the City of Man and the cosmic powers of darkness.”

On that note, it’s time to relax and read some A.A. Milne:

Tra-la-la, tra-la-la,
Tra-la-la, tra-la-la,
Rum-tum-tiddle-um-tum.
Tiddle-iddle, tiddle-iddle,
Tiddle-iddle, tiddle-iddle,
Rum-tum-tum-tiddle-um.

He had made up a little hum that very morning, as he was doing his Stoutness Exercises in front of the glass: Tra-la-la, tra-la-la, as he stretched up as high as he could go, and then Tra-la-la, tra-la–oh, help!–la, as he tried to reach his toes. After breakfast he had said it over and over to himself until he had learnt it off by heart, and now he was humming it right through, properly.

Have a good day! Watch a good movie starring one of the birthday celebrants, read some Winnie the Pooh, make some cupcakes, and find some excuse to get out of the house. Go with God.

3 Comments
January 23, 2023

“I gave you a book, you didn’t read it”*

by chuckofish

Well, I have hardly left the house all week and I am not complaining. Baby Ida is doing well, and how could she not with such a good big sister? I am not sure how much actual “help” I have been besides being another pair of hands to hold the baby and another lap for Katie to sit in, but we have managed quite well.

While here, I have been reacquainting myself with A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh and am newly impressed. “For I am a bear of very little brain, and long words bother me.” But for a bear with very little brain, he has quite a varied and amusing inner monologue.

“Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn’t.”

Anyway, the stories are a pleasure to read, to yourself or out loud to a two-year-old.

I also love stories like this. It is what being an American is all about.

And, oh Dolly, you released a good new song on your 77th birthday last week! The apocalypse is coming…

And speaking of the apocalypse, Anne is on fire here. Yeehaw.

“How on earth can you say that the Bible is “central to our understanding,” though that is a tepid, if not actually fatuous, way of putting it, and then announce that there are many different possible conclusions for what it says about gender, relationships, and marriage?”

(The links in the first paragraph are also excellent.)

Have a good Monday. Read some A.A. Milne. Listen to some Dolly. Hold a baby. Ask yourself:

Do two walk together,
    unless they have agreed to meet?
Does a lion roar in the forest,
    when he has no prey?
Does a young lion cry out from his den,
    if he has taken nothing?
Does a bird fall in a snare on the earth,
    when there is no trap for it?
Does a snare spring up from the ground,
    when it has taken nothing?
Is a trumpet blown in a city,
    and the people are not afraid?
Does disaster come to a city,
    unless the Lord has done it?

–Amos 3:3-8

*Dolly Parton

5 Comments
June 1, 2017

Time flies

by chuckofish

Can you believe it is JUNE already?!

84c313707dfe30dbb2f831512252ea07.jpg

Daffodils Contre Jour, Bruce Yardley (b. 1962)

She wore her yellow sun-bonnet,
She wore her greenest gown;
She turned to the south wind
And curtsied up and down.
She turned to the sunlight
And shook her yellow head,
And whispered to her neighbor:
“Winter is dead.”

–A.A. Milne

3 Comments
October 14, 2014

“When you see someone putting on his Big Boots, you can be pretty sure that an Adventure is going to happen.”

by chuckofish

Mottisfont - Winnie the Pooh, -® The E.H.Shepard Trust reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group

On this day in 1926 Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne was published in England.

As I have mentioned before, our pater was a big fan of Winnie-the-Pooh, and, therefore, so were we. No one read A.A. Milne’s stories and poems better than our father. This ability was one of his most endearing qualities.

So in honor of old A.A. Milne, maybe we should put on our Big Boots and have an adventure! But first we need some of these I guess.

Side note: It has been raining cats and dogs here for days on end. Big Boots have been on my mind.

3 Comments
April 4, 2012

Be that as it may

by chuckofish

Today we take note of the birthday of our pater familias, who would be 90 today.

Wind on the Hill
by A.A. Milne

No one can tell me,
Nobody knows,
Where the wind comes from,
Where the wind goes.

It’s flying from somewhere
As fast as it can,
I couldn’t keep up with it,
Not if I ran.

But if I stopped holding
The string of my kite,
It would blow with the wind
For a day and a night.

And then when I found it,
Wherever it blew,
I should know that the wind
Had been going there too.

So then I could tell them
Where the wind goes…
But where the wind comes from
Nobody knows.

8 Comments