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February 15, 2006
The Young Folks’ Guide to Beasties, By Willard Mardi (Alias Adora Svitak)
An Introduction To the Beastie
The history of beasties has long been debated over by the famous archaeologists Soront and Toraday. While Soront’s theory was that beasties were calm, innocent, and tame until proven otherwise, Toraday vehemently disagreed.
‘The nature of all beasties’ Toraday said in his lecture at Thormin Hall to quite a number of eager college students, ‘is always vicious and crafty. Wait and strike, wait and strike. This is how beasties find their food.’
However, a new paper from Soront’s private collection of beastie research, kept hidden behind a rusty toilet for over a decade, brings things to a new light.
‘This paper from Soront,’ the Licensed Beastie Philosopher of Cambridge College in England said, ‘is perhaps the key to one of the greatest questions in history – are beasties tame or wild? This paper describes one of Soront’s personal experience meeting a calm beastie named Asilefa, who welcomed him into her dwelling and gave him tea.’
However, there is living proof to defend Toraday’s view on the subject. Felisa Rogers, a direct beastie descendant of the twelve ruthless beasties who lived before the dawn of time, is a teacher at Seeds of Learning school in Redmond, Washington, USA, and often bares her teeth and sharpens her claws when a student does something wrong. Controversy, puzzlement, and simple confusion has followed ‘the deal on beasties’ since 1159, when a beastie was discovered off the coast of Africa by shipwrecked Arabians, and I do not think that we are about to break the mystery right now.
An Introduction To Beasties’ Habits and Hobbies
Beasties tend to be gentle WHEN PLEASED. [Study suggestion – use a model of a beastie to test your skills – not a real one!) Meeting humans is not exactly pleasing, but eating one can turn the wildest beastie into a gentle, humble creature.
“Once upon a time there lived a beastie named Hurra-Hurra who liked to eat little children. After eating children she would be very nice.” That is an example from the hidden afterward of Hansel and Gretel, which was excavated from Utopia Bestia Malvada, an inhabitable ‘city of the beasts’ near the Bermuda Triangle. This gives credence to Toraday’s theory that the nature of beasties was vicious and crafty. Soront’s theory is still approved by those who feel safer thinking of beasties as the make-believe antagonists of nursery stories, but Toraday’s descendants and disciples are scattered about the world. Fights often broke out between the two beastiology enemies, one of the most famous being the Thomas vs. Samuel duel in 1789.
We shall now do a bit more of talking about the ‘habits and hobbies’ of beasties. The habits of beasties include:
• Washing after dinner, not before. This seems to be because beasties tend to get more blood on their paws/claws/monster hands after devouring the unlucky victim.
• Circling trees before scraping. Scraping trees is another habit because it tends to give the eucalyptus traymin, or energy vitamin, to the beastie after eating.
• Pulling up any violets, roses, hyacinths, tulips, etc, before creating a new lair. This is probably because weeds are the preferred “decoration plant” for beastie homes.
Hobbies of beasties are much harder to discover; the only way to study hobbies of beasties in the early 1800s was to get in close-range with one, and of course that meant there was a danger of the beastie eating you. However, when Don Juan Ramon Coré de Calla, a rich hacienda owner in Mexico, invented the Beastie Binoculars Model 1000, using up the rest of his slowly draining inheritance, the following beastie hobbies and games were revealed:
• Fishing with one right hand paw and one left leg paw.
• Leaving food from the day’s hunt by the river where other beasties raced to steal it. If another beastie stole your food, that was too bad. If you managed to successfully guard your food, the beasties who had dared try to steal your food were forced to give their hunting day food to that beastie.
• Knitting with shark fins and twigs, which, if actually finished, will create a huge robe of twigs, covering most of the face (except for the ears, eyes, nose, and mouth) and all the rest of the body. Wearing this robe is a sign that you are hard-working, or a “peasant beastie”, so most do not deign to finish their knitting.
• Reading Beastie Runes, which are a mix of Viking runes, Chinese characters, and Egyptian Hieroglyphics. The only people who are allowed to read Beastie Runes are those who have passed a special Beastie tribe test.
Many people have disagreed with this treatise, but all our information has been proved, disproved, proved again and searched thoroughly. Guaranteed.
This is another post that I am “co-blogging”, this time with a very special guest, the eight year old Adora Svitak. The stories above are the first of a series about the Beasties (Not to be confused with these Beasties), which is a subject that occupies Adora’s mind a lot nowadays. Together with her first book "flying fingers", published last year, and more than 360,000 words written since June, 2004, Adora’s blog contains but a few of the 300 stories and poems that she wrote. Check it out! Thank you, Adora. (Previous posts here). If other bloggers are interested to share the forum here on any other topic, please contact me for details.
Graphic above (Not a Beastie) from Andrew Bell’s Creatures in my head. Many More Unusual Literary Links Here
AFTERWORD ON BEASTIE INFORMATION AND COPYRIGHT
Any scientists, beastioligists, reference librarians, taxidermists, teachers, students, or any people who dare copy this manuscript and sell it for a profit above fifty cents will be fined double the amount of profit by the Beastie Copyright Protection Patent Office Law Firm.
February 19, 2006 update: Guardian story about Adora
February 15, 2006 in Books & Literature, Co-blogged with | Permalink
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Comments
Adora was featured on NBC nightly news, here is the link to her segment, very interesting and fun to watch.http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13230202/
Posted by: hongling at Jun 25, 2006 12:09:24 PM