Pooh

and we got the pooh bedding, classic pooh of course because we’re That Sort Of Snob, or at least i am, because i actually grew up with the original pooh stories by a.a. milne, long before the whole pooh estate got bought out by disney and turned into a franchise and some mindless executive drone came along and said “you know what we really need here? clothes. it’s just completely unbelieveable that all these make-believe animals are frolicking around in a forest with no visible means of economic support, talking and carrying on and writing bad poetry and generally displaying signs of higher-order intelligence, but none of them are wearing any clothes.” and then a bunch of people like me complained, although not me personally, and then disney did a new-coke-classic-coke thing and came out with classic pooh, although these days most of the classic pooh you see in stores isn’t really classic pooh, it’s just in the style of classic pooh, since there really weren’t that many illustrations that e.h. shepherd did in the original pooh, and disney needs more designs than that. but people sigh, and wink, and nudge, and buy them anyway, and put them in cribs so their babies can grow up surrounded by fake recreations of the characters they grew up with. no doubt there’s a power law at work here. “oh bother,” said pooh, as he looked down at the millions of unloved characters on the long tail of the power law. “oh help and bother.”

I’ll take my pre-disney Pooh book with me to the office tomorrow so I can make some scans of the original E.H. Shepard illustration.