The House on Pooh Corner

This week, in a grand break from tradition, I travelled out to the hinterlands mid-week (a 40-minute car ride each way, on a work night!) to visit some friends and their little one:


She reminds me a little bit of Winnie-the-Pooh, or maybe more of a cross between Tigger and Pooh. Then again, it could have just been the striped shirt that made me think of Tigger. Or the poster on the wall behind her, which looks a bit like a family crest, but is really a W-t-P scene.

For a friend's wedding in 2000, I was one of two people invited to choose a reading for the ceremony. At first, I struggled to find something unique (I really wanted to work in at least a stanza of Stanislaw Lem's mathematical love poem), but ultimately fell back on my old favorite Shakespearean sonnet. (This was probably a relief to the bride, who had originally given me free rein to choose something ... then got worried and had me clear it with her mom, who happily approved my choice and preserved the surprise.) I worked on the sonnet over and over, figuring out the right emphasis for every word and line to make the meaning stand out in high relief, and it really came out well. Beautiful, cerebral, and entirely apropos. But the other reader (a man) chose a reading from Winnie-the-Pooh -- and the moment I heard it, I thought Wow! It's so sweet, and right from the heart. Perfect. It never would have occurred to me in a million years.

Of course, at this point, all of the A.A. Milne characters have been commandeered by Disney, and Disney is my sworn enemy -- at least until my niece or my own hypothetical future children are of park-going age. Why the enmity? It's not just the $700 entrance fee to the theme parks, but also a litigation in which we oppose The Mouse (Disney is, in fact, known in the legal arena as "One Mean Mouse"). Not to mention Disney's role in breathing immortality into copyright law. Cf. U.S. Const. art. 1, s. 8 ("The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries...."). One of my friends has also been waging his own merry little war against The Mouse, a battle of will and psychology; I think he has won some battles and may ultimately triumph. Which will most likely benefit both parties.