Tell a Fairy Tale Day

Posted on February 26, 2025 by arwenbicknell

My favorite request of people is for them to tell me a story. It can be an anecdote, it can be a recounting of their favorite meal. But I do like when people tell me made-up stories.

We are not devout, and do not attend church. But for a few years there, my husband used to tell our kid a mishmash of the Easter story made cute for baby ears involving Bunny Christ and his various adventures and sacrifices.

Our kid used to make up stories of adventures that he would go on with his favorite stuffedie, a prairie dog.

At one point, to amuse the kid, I wrote a re-imagining of Snow White that involved a bunch of kids and a spaceship. I really liked that story, and I was pretty sad when no agents picked it up.  I may have to retool it now that I know more about how to cater to those audiences.

I was going to write a fairy tale for you guys, but I am too cynical. Fairy tales have magical elements and fantastical plots, but they are rooted in morals and good guys and bad guys, so anything I write cloaked as a fairy tale is bound to offend someone who disagrees with my view of “good” and “bad.” And since I’m also all over the map politically these days, I’m bound to offend people across the spectrum if I take my usual actions-have-consequences approach——although I will say this little thought exercise opened my eyes to how many fairy tales seem to reward bad behavior. Jack robs a giant. Hansel and Gretel, left unchecked, would have literally eaten the witch out of house and home. Looking back on it I am kind of surprised that one of Cinderella’s stepsisters didn’t win the prince by chopping off a part of their foot. (I’ve always thought I should update that story and make Cinderella hit up her fairy godmother for a small-business grant instead of some glass shoes so she can open a laundromat or a Merry Maids—but not today. Again, cynical.)

So instead, I’ll talk about a fairy tale that has always confused me no end: The Twelve Dancing Princesses. (If you don’t know it, you can read it here: https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/175/grimms-fairy-tales/3061/the-twelve-dancing-princesses/)

What on earth is going on in this story?

1: The king decrees that if you try to solve the mystery of where these gals and succeed, you’ll be king next. But if you fail, you get your head chopped off. WTF kind of trade-off is that? It sounds like the king doesn’t really want to know the answer.

2: Apparently a bunch of dudes went for it. I get that being king is a good gig, but after the first guy died, surely there would have been a bit of a lull in people taking that on?

3: I actually love that the character who is the key to the story and has the “well, duh, idiots, here’s how you do it,” info is just some random old lady in the woods. It’s always the invisible old women who know what’s up, amirite?

4: The princesses know that the guys who fail are killed, and they think it’s … hilarious? That’s messed up, you guys. I mean, yes, I know I just said above that actions have consequences, and these guys know the stakes going in, but you don’t have to be a bitch about it.

5: The youngest princess gets blown off when her Spidey sense tingles and she hears weird noises. So… maybe this is a proto-horror movie, more than a fairy tale?

6: Where in the name of Hades is this amazing castle and dance party? Who are these princes who live underground?

7: I can see why the soldier would go around whacking branches off trees made of precious metals and diamond, but what’s the significance of the golden cup on the last night? Like a diamond tree branch isn’t more startling and adequate proof?

8: When the soldier spills everything to the king, the reaction is underwhelming. Again, the guy was chopping off heads for failed attempts. But when he finally does get an answer, he’s practically comatose. “Hey, kids, is this true?” And when the princesses are all “yeah,” he’s not mad, he doesn’t punish them or ask to see this weirdo place or meet these 12 guys they’ve been hanging out with or anything. It’s just, “Huh. OK, then. Who ya gonna marry, Soldier sir?”

9: The story tells us the soldier chooses the eldest daughter because he’s old himself, which—OK, nice of him to try to be age appropriate. (Although we aren’t given an age gap, so this still might be kind of ick. How old is old for a soldier?) But … what kind of marriage is that going to be? This princess doesn’t get to marry the guy she’s been dancing the nights away with for however long; her dad makes her pair off with the dude who blew the whistle on all her fun. Guy better sleep with one eye open.

10: It irritates me no end that when the soldier becomes king in the end, there’s no mention as to whether he gives credit where it’s due or what happens to the crone from Item 3 who made it all happen. I like to think he set her up in style as a thank you, but I sincerely hope there’s some version where she she puts a hex on him if he doesn’t.

BONUS: And on the topic of loose ends—what happened to all the guys underground? Did the 11 other princesses keep up their nightly partying with them? Or did they all schlep off to some other underground kingdom? SO MANY QUESTIONS.

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Pistol Patent Day

Posted on February 25, 2025 by arwenbicknell

It probably isn’t politically correct, but Pistol Patent Day honors when Samuel Colt received his patent for the first revolver.

So let’s talk about Sam. Like a lot of inventors, he tried a lot of things before he succeeded.

He was born in 1814 and was part of a pretty large family with its share of sad stories—his mom died when he was 6, all three of his sisters died, and one brother committed suicide shortly before he was to be executed for killing someone. He had two other two brothers: a lawyer and a textile merchant.

When Colt was 11, he worked for a farmer who had a copy of an encyclopedia that included articles about scientists and inventors—and about gunpowder. Needless to say, the stories stuck with him. It sounds like Colt became a bit of a firebug and amused himself with galvanic cells and setting off fireworks; he got himself kicked out of boarding school after starting a fire. Colt’s dad must have thought a career on the water would be advisable; he sent the kid off to apprentice on trade ships. While at sea and inspired by sea rigging, Colt got his idea for the revolver, which would allow repeated firing without reloading. When Colt came home in 1832, his dad financed production of a pistol and a rifle using this innovation. The pistol exploded; the rifle did OK. Dad was done with subsidizing his kid at that point, so Colt had to find other means of income and found it by hawking nitrous oxide as a “medicine man” in what sounds like a bit of a snake oil scheme, although I guess maybe he really believed in the drug’s restorative powers. This experience taught him a lot about sales—the obvious tenet that customers don’t want a textbook, they want a pulp novel.

But Colt’s first love remained guns and inventing, so when he has some cash, he went back to his gun studies and hired gunsmiths to work on his design. He was also pals with the superintendent of the U.S. Patent Office, who told him to get foreign patents first since a US patent would mean Colt couldn’t file for one in the UK. Colt spent 1835-1836 running around securing patents for his revolver, and then he went into production. Colt was an early proponent of assembly lines and interchangeable parts. In 1837, he was out of money again (making a lot of revolvers but not selling many), so he went back on the sales circuit but with little effect. He wanted to get a military contract (even in those days, it was big business), but he didn’t succeed. When he did sell some to Florida soldiers, the men were so intrigued by its weird design that they took a lot of the guns apart and broke them.

So Colt turned his attention elsewhere, selling underwater electrical detonators and waterproof cable he had invented. Working with Samuel B. Morse, his cable was used for underwater telegraph lines. (My husband writes about this brilliantly in America 1844: Religious Fervor, Westward Expansion, and the Presidential Election That Transformed a Nation. Tell me if you want a copy; I can hook you up!)

Things started to pay off for Colt in 1847, when he got a contract to provide 1,000 revolvers to the Texas Rangers. And the rest, as they say, is history.  Colt’s firearms were used in the Mexican-American War, they were integral to the westward expansion. He sold guns to both the North and South in the runup to the Civil War. When he died in 1862, Colt was worth about $485 million in today’s US dollars. Almost 150 years later, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

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Twin Peaks Day

Posted on February 24, 2025 by arwenbicknell

This is a particularly poignant commemoration this year, since we lost David Lynch last month. I think my kid is still mourning a bit.

Twin Peaks Day is celebrated today because  it is the day when FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper first shows up on the scene and basically kicks off the show.

Apparently there is still a celebration every year in Snoqualmie and North Bend, where the show was filmed. It’s like a TwinCon, with panels and screenings and so on. (It was held over the weekend this year, but I didn’t see any news stories about the turnout.

I don’t have any personal behind-the-scenes ties to the show, but I absolutely loved it when it first aired. I was working at a campus coffeehouse called Café Vieni Vieni (which we all called Café Come Come if we were feeling clean-minded and altering the spelling if we were not), and my friend Chad recommended it after the first episode (which I missed, and had to wait several months to see). He and I talked a lot anyway, but the show gave us even more to discuss as we dished up cookies and dumped dead coffee grounds. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed harder on the job than I did that semester. Chad, who hailed from the Northwest, told me hilarious things about Washington, and how some things in the show veered closer to Actual Reality than Surreality. He also explained a lot of the more esoteric aspects of the Lynch universe that I was only dimly aware of.

My roommate, a rich bitch from La Jolla, also fell in love with the show and bought up all the related things she could find—the soundtrack, Laura Palmer’s diary, clothing; I’m pretty sure she even got herself a stuffed owl. My dad would postpone his weekly phone call from Florida (long-distance was expensive back then!) until after the show had aired so we could discuss it. My BFF from high school, who had stayed in Florida, would watch it with him and my mom every week. She and I both benefited from my dad explaining the back story of all the actors in the show—I had never seen West Side Story and had no idea that Benjamin Horne and Dr. Jacoby had beef. (It was even longer before I found out that Ben’s brother was the bottle-clanker in The Warriors, which I guess my dad never saw.)

This was also a show you almost had to love to keep watching. I could be wrong about this, but it felt like ABC really made you work for it by switching the air times; it didn’t air at the same time every week for what felt like a huge chunk of its short run. When the second season ended with two episodes in summer (after being on hiatus since spring), it was almost a relief despite the infuriating cliffhanger.

I was excited to hear a movie was coming out. I was disappointed when I learned it was a prequel and not a vehicle to tie up loose ends. (I still went to see it and enjoyed it.)

Life went on, and after Netflix was invented, I went through a spell in the late 2000s of binging old shows that I remembered as being good. Early Dr. Who. Buffy. X Files. Twin Peaks. Quantum Leap. I watched these on my own, for the most part. The hubs didn’t care, and my kid bored easily. The only one of those shows to get my kid’s attention was the last one, which is a different blog post.

When the third season came out, I just sort of assumed that it wouldn’t answer any questions. Plus, we didn’t have Showtime, so I blew it off. But a few years later, stuck at home during “the pando” as my kid calls it, we watched the whole shebang again, from Pilot to end of Season 3. My husband found it “extremely weird and mildly entertaining,” but my kid—who by now was a big Lynch fan—was entranced. He even decided doughnuts were worth eating, which was maddeningly late in life and would have made road trips a lot easier if he’d been indoctrinated earlier. But I suspect, given the advantages he had of a movie-intensive upbringing, he had a greater appreciation of the whole experience as a first run than I’d had.

It’s sort of funny to me that a TV show had such a sustained influence on my life. I really didn’t watch much TV until my late 20s—for a long time we didn’t have a TV, then I had to fight with my parents for screen time, then I worked nights. But some things definitely stuck, and I’m glad Twin Peaks was one of them.

(And for the record, I checked, and the Hooters-like breast-aurant chain named Twin Peaks has nothing to do with the show. So don’t add that to your list of Lynch-related must-sees.)

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Dog Biscuit Day

Posted on February 23, 2025 by arwenbicknell

My dog is underprivileged.  As a diabetic, she now only gets very specific treats in very specific amounts. Before her affliction, however, her currency was teeny, thumbnail size MilkBones, and her most favorite word in the world was “biscuit.” We talked about making some for dinner the other night and even though it has been a couple years since she has had one, her ears still perked right up at the word.

But my favorite story about this delicacy could be titled, “Dog Bones: Not Just for Dogs!”

When my mom was in college, she was friends with a math genius who worked off some of his tuition as a teaching assistant. Like all teachers everywhere, he had to deal with kids who flunked tests and then came in seeking clemency. These office hour visits were fairly predictable. Some kids asked for retakes, some kids asked for explanations, but some asked for a straight-up break. This guy was not dumb, he administered the tests and knew who had really tried as opposed to who had shown up hung over and simply whiffed. For the latter visitors, he kept a box of dog biscuits in his desk. When the kid would start talking about how it wasn’t fair and so on and so forth, my mom’s friend would pull out the box, shake it a little, make sure to pull out one of the especially ugly green biscuits, and start chomping away.  “Sorry,” he’d tell the kid. “I missed breakfast. Want one? No? Do go on with what you’re saying.”  My mom said she was hanging out with him for one such visit and accepted a biscuit.  “Dry, but not awful,” she told me. “Just boring. Kinda like cardboard.”

This anecdote stood me in good stead when I was in school and rode the late bus home with a pervy little jerk who spent equal time criticizing my clothes and trying to rip them off me. After two days of dealing with that garbage, I came prepared. I pulled a baggie of my own dog’s treats out of my book bag and went to town. Dude never bothered me again. And when he told other kids that I ate dog biscuits, the reaction showed me who my friends were—I avoided the “ew, she’s so gross” crowd and ran with the folks who came up to me laughing and asked, “you did that? Classic!’

Granted, I’m not sure how well that works in the adult world, but I can attest to the fact that people are less inclined to mess with you if you act a little nuts. And Pup-peroni is cheaper than pepper spray….

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Tongue Twister Day

Posted on February 22, 2025 by arwenbicknell

My favorite tongue twister is the entire Dr. Seuss book Fox in Socks. Three generations in my family have held races for who could read it the fastest with the fewest errors. I think my dad still holds the record.

I swear I have a memory of some standup comedian—Steve Martin? Chevy Chase? That era—messing up a line, turning his head and going “toy boat, toy boat, toy boat,” to recover. I remember it because I could never do it myself. But a search of the interwebz gave me nothing, which might indicate I made the whole thing up.

The hubs says his favorite is reminiscent of Florida: She sells seashells by the seashore.

My mom used to sing to me about Sarah, Sarah, sitting in the shoeshine shop, all day long she shines and sits…

When I was in junior high, a drama teacher made us memorize the entire “to sit in solemn silence” thing as a vocal warmup. 

What’s your favorite?

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Sticky Bun Day

Posted on February 21, 2025 by arwenbicknell

I have been in love with all manner of buns since I was about 6 and read about Paddington Bear getting into an awful mess with cream buns. As an American child, reading that book was eye-opening because the language was So Veddy British and it was the first time I realized that writing had a “voice.”

So I asked my mom what cream buns were, and she didn’t know. In those pre-internet days (when my dad was a library director), I went downtown and asked the children’s librarian, and we looked it up. It basically sounded like a cream puff but made with cinnamon roll dough. Somewhere in that research rabbit hole I also discovered that what my mother called “cinnamon rolls” were actually “sticky buns”—essentially, cinnamon rolls with a brown sugar caramel-ish glaze rather than a white icing.

This means sticky buns are associated in my mind with three great things: libraries, my mom, and pretty much every Christmas morning until I met my husband, when white cake and strawberries took over as the holiday breakfast.

In honor of that, here’s my family’s recipe for (not) cinnamon rolls:

For the dough:
¾ cup milk
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup butter
1 package yeast
1/4 cup warm water 105F – 115F
4 cups all-purpose flour

Also needed:
1 bag brown sugar
2 sticks butter (approx.)
Ground cinnamon

  • In a small saucepan, stir milk, sugar, and butter together. Heat over low heat just until butter melts and sugar dissolves. Cool to about 100-105 F.
  • While cooling, combine warm water and yeast to activate in a separate cup.
  • When tepid, combine all wet ingredients in the bowl of a stand mixer.
  •  Add 2 cups flour and salt to wet ingredients. Using a dough hook, mix on low speed for about 1 minute.
  • With the mixer still going, add remaining flour, 1/2 cup at a time. Mix until dough starts to clean the sides of the bowl.
  • Knead on low speed for about 2 more minutes, or until dough is smooth and elastic but slightly sticky to the touch.
  • Place dough in a greased bowl, turning it to grease the top. Cover the dough with a clean, dry dish towel.
  • Let it rise in a warm place, free from draft, for about 10 minutes.

While the dough is rising, prepare 2 pie pans and one 9×13 cake pan (glass is best, but you can use metal ones you don’t want to keep nice) as follows:  Dump 1/2″ layer of brown sugar in the bottom of each pan, sprinkle liberally with cinnamon, and daub small chips of butter on to brown sugar about 1/8″ apart. (You will use a lot of sugar and butter here.)

After letting dough rise once, roll flat, smear with more butter, coat with brown sugar 1/4’’ thick, and sprinkle liberally with cinnamon. Roll the dough up jelly-roll style, and cut into 1″ slices. Put slices into pans on top of sugar/butter/cinnamon. Let rise 1 hour. Bake 30 minutes at 350.

As soon as you take them out of the oven, flip the pans onto large platters or cookie sheets and use a rubber scraper to get as much glaze out of the pan and on to the rolls as possible. Let cool, and eat.

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Clean Out Your Bookcase Day

Posted on February 20, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Our house has a lot of bookcases—20, I think— that are used for books. We have another eight holding other stuff, such as tchotchkes and DVDs.

The hubs has a horror of getting rid of books. The hubs and I share a (bad?) habit of buying more despite not having read everything we already own.

As you might guess, “clean out” around here really just means “dust.” It doesn’t mean weed or replace or anything like that. I have, occasionally, found a duplicate copy of something that we’ve hauled off to the used book store, but those have been rare occurrences.

Lately, though, the lack of shelf space—or, more accurately, space to add more shelves—has been bothering me. As I have finished reading things, I have been making a conscious decision whether to put it back on the shelf or drop it in a “Do something else” bin. Nonfiction mostly goes on the shelf. Fiction goes in the bin.

The problem is that I’m not sure what to do with this bin. My local library is small and I know all too well that anything not checked out in two years goes away to a larger library in a larger town up the road—and for all I know, those guys just pulp the stuff. The twice-annual book sake gets rid of some stuff, but a lot more comes in for the sale than goes out.

So here’s another giveaway.  Leave a comment and I’ll send you a gently used book of my choice! Then the shelf-cleaning will be your (non)problem!

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Prevent Plagiarism Day

Posted on February 19, 2025 by arwenbicknell

“If it’s on the internet, I can just use it without saying where I got it, right?”

This is one of the banes of my professional existence. Someone else wrote those words, took that photo, drew that picture. Why on earth do you think it’s OK to present it as yours?

On my better days, I assume people are stupid and just don’t know any better. On my more cynical days, I assume they took Tom Lehrer’s (public domain) lryics to heart:

I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky
In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics
Plagiarize
Plagiarize
Let no one else’s work evade your eyes
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes
So don’t shade your eyes
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize
Only be sure always to call it please “Research”

This is one area where I am a red-blooded ‘Murican. I am a big proponent of ownership. I made it, I own it, I should be able to do what I want with it. (Unless it’s my kid. His entire life, I have had no idea what to do with him half the time.) If I sew a tapestry, it’s mine to sell or keep or destroy or reproduce as I see fit. And if I post a photo of it on the internet, that photo is also mine unless I forfeit rights to it. How hard is this?

Obviously, legal limits should apply, and living things are harder to parse. People own dogs, but that “whatever I want to do with it” part has limits; I’m not going to defend someone’s right to leave a critter in a concrete kennel with no water til it dies.

Ownership is also at the root of many thought exercises I indulge in (and get nowhere) regarding AI. If you slap a CGI Carrie Fisher in a new movie, is it identity theft? If you plug in all Shakespeare’s sonnets and ask ChatGPT for an ode to Cheez-Its, is the result an original creation or is it intellectual appropriation? And is the owner of the ode the person who asked for it to be written or the machine that wrote it?

But in short, y’all, come on. Give credit where it’s due.

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Pluto Day

Posted on February 18, 2025 by arwenbicknell

On this day in 1930, Clyde Tombaugh found Pluto, with no idea that someday a bunch of wags on social media would say they were old enough to remember when it was a planet.

It’s now a dwarf planet, and I don’t think anyone living there cares what we call it, so I’m not sure the furor that kicked up at the time was all that warranted. In fact, the only thing that bothered me much was that kids from then on would learn about their Very Educated Mothers dishing up Nachos instead of Nine Pizzas. It’s just not as funny!

My husband had a great idea for a novel in which the angry Pluto-backing rabble took hostages at the National Science Foundation to get it changed back. I suppose some might find that idea too close to an actual possibility these days, but it was pretty funny at the time and I wish he had written it. I don’t remember what his title was, but I do know that he had plans for the media to disparage the Karens of the movement as Plutocrats, which cracked me up.

One day on Pluto is about a week in Earth time. I don’t remember why I know this, but I do know I think about it occasionally and wonder if I’d get more or less done with a schedule like that. I have a friend who lived in Alaska; I should ask how the longer/shorter days affected her. 

I don’t know much else about it, honestly. I think Bjork wrote a song called Pluto, but I don’t recall it saying much. I imagine there are kids’ books about life on Pluto, but I never read them.  Someone go find me a nice documentary!

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Presidents Day

Posted on February 17, 2025 by arwenbicknell

I have never met a president. The only person in my family ever to have done so, as far as I know, was my great-grandfather, who shook Teddy Roosevelt’s hand one time.

I have read a lot about presidents—not as much as my husband, but I know some stuff. If I were a better person, I would have used Presidents Day over the years to Brush Up My Fillmore, but I am who I am, so that didn’t happen.

Instead, I had a lot of great days off because of presidents. When I was in grade school, we got days off for Washington AND Lincon, which was pretty awesome in the most hideous and my least favorite month of February when walking to school was especially cold and wet and gross. Nothing ever really happened on those days off, it just meant I got a day to stay home and read all morning, even though the price was always a long afternoon of manual labor for my tireless mother.

Then we moved to Florida and I got a bit more independence. When my friends and I gained mobility, Presidents Day meant an afternoon at the movie theater stuffing our faces with all the junk we could afford.

When my kid was in school, Presidents Day usually meant I was off with him or dragging him into the office with me. We had some more great days in those years—usually trips to DC to visit our friends in the various Smithsonians—dinosaurs, the Hope Diamond, and the Saturn V exhibit. I think maybe 2 of those 3 things are still on display.

And now? Now, it means virtually nothing since it is not a paid holiday for me (or a lot of other people, which could be a symptom or a lagging indicator of our nation’s lack of regard for itself). Plus, I almost always have Mondays off anyway on my part-time schedule, so I don’t remember it’s happening until I go to the post office or some other government entity. Of course, even when I remember, I don’t do much to actually honor the day. (Does anyone? I don’t do much on most federal holidays, honestly. I don’t go to cemeteries on Memorial Day; I don’t celebrate unions on Labor Day—though I do give props to Peter McGuire, the guy who chose the day because it was midway between July Fourth and Thanksgiving. That is some good thinking right there.) Anyway, no, I don’t honor presidents, either. It’s too cold to golf like Eisenhower or garden like Jefferson, I am not into boxing like Teddy Roosevelt, and cockfighting like Jackson is right out. The hubs would be up for honoring Nixon by bowling, but I suck at that and have no desire to improve. The path of least resistance is probably to hop in our lovely heated pool and honor FDR by swimming. So I guess that’s where you’ll find me tonight.

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