Of Mondegreens and Dogs Turned Reindeer

Olive, the Other Reindeer

by Vivian Walsh and J. Otto Siebold

1997

It's this time of the year when Booksale gets their Christmas-themed children's books out, having previously displayed the Halloween books as early as September. 

Normally, kids' books that have anything to do with Christmas make me cringe; especially when Santa Claus is rendered life-like, rosy cheeks, and beard, and all.  (The Coca-Cola Santa is okay though.)  As a kid I was spared from the lie about Santa, so I didn't really care about him, not that it would have mattered since our house had no chimneys anyway.  I grew up knowing Santa only from the cartoons, and that's good enough for me.

Also, I went to a Catholic grade school, which bombarded us with Bible stories, including the Jesus' birth, on a regular basis.  I knew them by heart, I think.  So all those children's books about the Nativity and the Three Wise Men and Jesus on a manger, yawn.

* * *

Then a nice non-sappy book such as Olive, the Other Reindeer comes along.  Still Christmassy in spirit, but this time the story revolves around a dog Olive.  Who mishears the lyrics of Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, and thinks the line "...All of the other reindeer..." is really "...Olive, the other reindeer..."  Which promptly sends her on a journey to the North Pole to report to Santa Claus.  Yes, it's a Christmas book about how a harmless mondegreen could put ideas to anyone's head, dogs included.

In Olive, the Other Reindeer, the story-telling is brisk, the events hilarious, and the ending is well-wrapped-up (Everyone went outside to play reindeer games).  There's even a moral or two for the reader. 

Of course, this won't be a kid's book without the pictures, and this is where J. Otto Siebold's charming PC-made illustrations come in: jelly-bean colored, glossy,  elaborate, and cartoonish, which remind me of art class when we'd cut out shapes from construction paper and paste them together, but this time it's seamless and better.  Which is like saying every page is eye-candy.  Perfect for reading to a kid.  Or a grownup.

And because Santa in Olive, the Other Reindeer, isn't too jolly-looking that I start craving for ennui, I like it.

* * *

Incidentally, there was an animated short by Matt Groening based on the book, with Drew Barreymore as Olive.

I wish Mr. Breathed would draw again.

I got my first Bloom County collection by Berke Breathed for just PhP20 back in 2008, or maybe even less than that since I recall that fly-by-night bookstore had a dart game and if you hit good you get a free book.  

Just a turn of the first few pages and I knew I was at the hands of a genius.

Fast forward to now, this month of May, three years later.  My 10-day vacation in the province of Cabiao has fortuitously rewarded me with another Bloom County collection (actually at Booksale in Cabanatuan).  No dart boards this time, not even sold for 20 Pesos, but a whopping PhP115, but heck, this thing is priceless.  

Actually, I chanced upon the Bloom County 2 years prior to that but I was in a pinch in those days and so had to heart-rendingly leave the bookstore.

from the Oregonlive.com

"...There's Bill the Cat's relentless pillorying of Garfield, and the inspiration for "Mars Needs Moms" (a tantrum by his son, Milo) and the day Breathed took a long, reflective look at the animation for "A Wish for Wings that Worked" and realized Steven Spielberg was about to produce a film with hilariously pornographic snow scenes.

And there's the letter he received from Bill Watterson -- the creator of "Calvin and Hobbes" -- in which Watterson sketched a cartoon that paid tribute to Breathed's Nancy Reagan story.

The president was speaking on the phone in the Oval Office, naked save for his pair of boots, saying, "That's quite a coincidence, Berke."


In the evening benefit at the Cartoon Art Museum, one long wall was arrayed with original "Bloom County" art that memorialized Michael Jackson, the birth of Bill the Cat and the classic response of the main characters when a woman asked them to focus, however briefly, on the one thing that provided a semblance of meaning in their utterly meaningless lives..."

I wish Mr. Breathed would draw again.

Make a Toy Out of Urban Paper

If you like tinkering with paper but don't have the patience for the rigors of origami, there's paper toys.  This book, Urban Paper by Matt Hawkins, in particular has ready-to-cut patterns (26 all in all) for amazing designer toys, and a DVD to boot.  The DVD includes both finished and blank templates, a tutorial, interviews with the toy designers, and 33 bonus templates).

(At Amazon, Urban Paper sells for just $14.  Get it here.)

* * *

Sure, paper toys have got none of origami's purist only-from-a-single-sheet-of-square-paper quality, but designing and structuring these nifty paper models can be a real challenge.  

And while some origamists are wary about publicly distributing their diagrams as if their precious models were a closely-guarded secret, paper toymakers seem bent on the opposite: disseminate everywhere is the motto.

Which is why you can easily download the patterns (think the dotted line drawings you cut out of the back of cereal and pretzel boxes) and print them on good sturdy paper.  With just a few snips of the scissors here and there, some folds where indicated, and a dollop of glue to keep the thing together, you get something crazy like this:

Whimsical, cartoonish, and unapologetically fun, these pop-art -inspired paper toys are bold lines and colors and demeanor all throughout.   

Drawn by Paul O. Zelinsky

I hear Disney's Tangled is nice.  Because I wasn't able to watch it when it hit the theaters, I will just resort to the handsomely-illustrated Rapunzel book, for which Mr. Paul O. Zelinsky won the prestigious Caldecott award in 1997.

Paul O. Zelinsky (1953 - ) is also the man behind the wondrously lyrical drawings in Carl Sandburg's More Rootabagas, another children's book (only PhP 60 at Book Sale some three years ago). 

I remember reading the book for the first time, checking out the wispy drawings now and then, and consulting the book's cover for the name of the illustrator. 

I also remember wondering how painstakingly drawn each blade of grass was and practically every other detail in the scene.  In the surreal country of More Rootabagas, Zelinsky's graceful, quirky and a little lonesome drawings find an apt home.

Here's Mr. Zelinsky eating Belgian waffles.

Metropolis and Robot City | Two 10 Pesos Robot Books

Something I picked up for 10 Pesos at Booksale: Isaac Asimov's Robot City.

I've never read a sci-fi story by Isaac Asimov before, so imagine my dismay when I found out he just lent his Robot City universe to Robert Thurston.  I misread the book's title "Intruder" as Foreword.

But Intruder is surprisingly good, philosophically tackling the curious question of "What is truly human?", but without sounding like an underpaid high school science teacher.

The robots are interesting too, reprogrammed by a Big Brother-like Watchful Eye who's now taken over Robot City.  Now the robots deviate from their usual boring routinary selves: Timestep tap dances, and Bogie, now with a penchant for slang, quotes lines from old movies left and right.

Ironically enough, the Watchful Eye suspects the real humans Ariel and Derec--prone to indecisiveness, outbursts and violence as they are--to be inferior and consequently less than human than the robot Silversides named Adam and Eve, who are suddenly now discovering they have a capacity for caring and concern after all.  All these for 10 Pesos.

Come to think of it, the only other book I've read that sort of featured a robot was The Wizard of Oz.  (In Wizard of Oz, the Tin Man wants a heart to become a human, while in Robot City, the crazed Dr. Avery wants a positronic robot brain to become a full-fledged robot.  They could just swap.)

* * *

Actually, thanks to Wired's list of sci-fi best robots (lots of robots on the list, by the way, with a blatant disregard for the Three Laws of Robotics)--if it weren't for it, I'd have forgotten about the robot in Metropolis.  Another book I bought from a friend--again, for just ten Pesos--during my high school days.  

I remember reading Metropolis with pervading admiration every single page.  It read like a parable.  The repeating verses were like a mantra, hypnotic, but also mirroring the mechanical fate of the slave workers in the dystopian city.  The book's prologue goes:

This book is not of today or of the future.
It tells of no place.
It serves no cause, party or class.
I has a moral which grows on the pillar of understanding:
"The mediator between brain and muscle must be the Heart."

Maschinenmensch

From Wired.com

Source code: Fritz Lang's 1927 silent sci-fi labor allegory Metropolis.

Execute win! The most notorious of cinema's robot pioneers.

Major malfunction: A terrorist gynoid straight outta Pygmalion, who performs riot-inciting erotic dances to destabilize the social order? Paging Dr. Freud!

* * * 

In the film version by Fritz Lang (the author's wife) , the robot's name is Maschinenmensch (German for machine human); in the book, she is called Parody or Futura, and is made to become  a doppelganger of Maria the leading lady.  This fake Maria thus proceeds to mislead the workers of the catacomb cities, revolt against the city's creater Joh Fredersen, and destroy the source of their scourge: Metropolis itself.

Metropolis the film was beautifully avant garde and amazing.  Every five seconds or so I kept wondering how the hell they made this so and so special effects back in the 1920's, which can be sort of distracting from the whole point of the film, but then with a fantastic film as Metropolis, awe is simply inevitable.

I liked the book better though.  I was so engrossed in Parody's deceit I completely forgot she was a robot.

Who Knew Pop Up Books Can Be Like This?

It's never just a pop up book, at least not to paper engineer Robert Sabuda.  

Robert Sabuda's Encyclopedia Prehistorica: Sharks

We've all seen a pop-up book before, and chances are you pull a tab and something interesting pops up.  Simple.  

In the pop up books of Robert Sabuda however (along with his colleague Matthew Reinhart), you open the page and many events happen all at once.  The page literally bursts open and becomes alive, whether it's Alice chased by a flurry of playing cards in Wonderland, or a dinosaur with dangerous mouth and claws.  (Sure, the books in Harry Potter's world are more alive, but for now, we have Robert Sabuda to wow us.)

That's to say Sabuda's target audience isn't babies and toddlers (although who's stopping them from getting awed by this lovely cacophony on paper?)  If for a toddler, your regular plain old pop up book is already eye candy, think about the neurological and aesthetic implications Sabuda's technological marvels can do to a grown up person.  All that pivots and tabs and rich colorful illustrations and the threshold of paper exceeded.  Absolute genius.

(Note: You never buy a used pop up book.  Some of the pages will refuse to, well... pop.)

Anyway, people wage war with each other, invent missiles, etc.  And then there are those who take it upon themselves to engineer a piece of paper, and everyone comes out of it a winner.