Uncle John's the Enchanted Toilet Bathroom Reader for Kids Only!
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The Book of Merlyn by T.H. White
The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White
Half Magic by Edward Eager
Merlin Trilogy by Mary Stewart
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain
ROTTEN ROBIN AND HIS SCARY WRENS
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An Uncle John’s Totally Twisted Tale
ROTTEN ROBIN AND HIS BAND of Scary Wrens lived in Scarewood Forest. They spent their days robbing the hooded crows, who taxed their patience, and giving to the whippoorwills, who threw the best parties.
One day, a scarlet tanager came to the forest. As he began to build himself a nest, he spotted a strand of pearls on the ground. “Jackpot!” said the scarlet bird. Flapping his black wings with all his might, he started lifting the strand up to his nest.
Rotten Robin spotted the small bird struggling with his treasure. “Wrens!” he said. “Those pearls would look better on Marian than on Mr. Scarlet.”
The Scary Wrens took off. They flew to the stranger’s nest and surrounded him in a tight circle. “Hey, Scarlet,” said one of the wrens while slowly clicking the brass knuckles on his wing tips. “Robin wants doze pearls for his mate, Marian.”
The scarlet tanager was annoyed. He didn’t have size on his side, but he did have stubbornness and years of training in beak-kwon-do. “I think not,” he said. “This bauble is mine. I found it fair and square.”
“Sure,” said another wren. “And we’re about to take it—fair and square.”
“Over my dead body,” said the scarlet tanager.
The third wren chirped out a laugh. “If you say so,” he said. Then he lunged at the tanager with his beak.
The scarlet bird did a front snap kick and sent the third wren flying. As the first wren lunged toward him, the tanager ducked to the side and swept his wing under the first wren’s legs. The wren toppled off the branch and fell to the ground. Then the scarlet tanager did a somersault in the air, kicked out his legs, and sent the last two wrens flying.
Rotten Robin watched the fight from a higher branch. When the final wren fell, he flew down to face the scarlet tanager.
“Great!” said the tanager. “Another thief.”
“You have some skill, Mr. Scarlet,” said Robin. “You defeated my Scary Wrens without ruffling your feathers.”
“Will,” said the scarlet bird. “My name is Will.”
Robin held out a wing. “I am Robin, leader of the Scary Wrens. How do you feel about hooded crows?”
“Ugh!” Will shook his neck feathers. “I left the Green Wood to get away from them.”
“With a bird like you in our band, we’ll soon rid Scarewood Forest of them,” said Robin. “What say you?”
“And the pearls?” asked Will.
“You’ll have to give a few to the whippoorwills,” said Robin, “if you want to get into their parties. And, believe me, you want to. That’s where I met my mate, Marian. She is the hottest robin in the forest.”
And that’s how Will, the scarlet tanager, joined Rotten Robin’s band. Which caused a new problem—what to call the band. They couldn’t be the Scary Wrens with a tanager in the mix, now could they?
THE END
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ROBIN HOOD: THE MAN, THE TIGHTS
What’s worse? Making a living as a robber? Or wearing tights in a forest?
•The Robin Hood legend may have been based on real-life British outlaws with equally fun names: Fulk fitz Warin, Herewerd the Wake, and Eustace the Monk.
•Some stories say that Robin Hood was named for the clothes he wore—a red cloak with a hood—which made him look a bit like a robin redbreast.
•Those green tights? Robin’s legend has been around since at least the 1200s. Men did wear wool hosiery with their tunics then, but they weren’t stretchy like the ones made today. In fact, they tended to sag.
•When actor Russell Crowe starred in Robin Hood (2010) he didn’t wear tights. He wore leather pants. Why? “If you are going to be climbing trees, living in a forest, tramping through gorse bushes and brambles, how clever is it to wear a pair of tights?” Crowe said.
AND THE MAGIC NUMBER IS...
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Fantasy series are a dime a dozen, but the numbers connected to these books are mind-boggling!
οYou’d have to be the worst kind of Muggle not to know about J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. But you might not realize that Rowling is the first author ever to become a billionaire by writing books. How rich is she? If Rowling were to spend $10,000 every day, it would take her more than 273 years to run out of money.
οThink your teacher is long-winded? English professor J.R.R. Tolkien took 17 years to write his famous The Lord of the Rings series. When the book was finished, it was more than 1,200 pages long, and it weighed as much as a 10-pound dumbbell. Tolkien’s publisher panicked—no one would buy a book that big! So the epic story was split into three parts and sold as a trilogy. The series has sold more than 150 million books, and the number grows every year.
οTolkien was good friends with another fantasy author, C.S. Lewis, who wrote The Chronicles of Narnia series. Although there are seven books in the series, all of them added together equal a measly 500 pages (less than half the number in Tolkien’s masterwork). Still, the Narnia books have collectively sold close to 120 million copies. That means every single child in the U.S. owns an average of 2 Narnia books.
οMadeleine L’Engle published more than 60 books in her lifetime, and 4 of those make up the Time series. But 26 publishers turned down the first book in the series, A Wrinkle in Time, before the 27th publisher accepted it. Why would so many editors dislike her book? Maybe because they’re adults. “When I have something to say that I think will be too difficult for adults, I write it in a book for children,” L’Engle said.
οPhilip Pullman’s most famous series is a trilogy called His Dark Materials. The series includes The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. Pullman’s numbers: He’s written 30 books that have been translated into more than 40 languages. And he’s won a half-dozen major awards and prizes. Why was Pullman drawn to writing fantasy? “I’m very lazy,” he says. “If I need something, I just make it up.”
οGarth Nix (author of the Seventh Tower and Keys to the Kingdom series) gets from 20 to 80 letters and e-mails every week. Does he answer them? “If I could answer each one in 5 minutes, to answer 80 e-mails would take me 400 minutes, more than 6 hours, which is basically a whole working day. That time would not be spent on writing, and I figure that the great majority of my readers would rather I worked on new books and stories rather than answering mail.”
IN A TRANCE
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What do you get when you cross a wizard, a doctor, a guidance counselor, and a priest? A shaman!
TRIBAL WIZARDRY
Shamans have been around since the Stone Age, about 30,000 years ago. People were using stone tools then, but they hadn’t invented gardening. When they got hungry, they hunted animals or gathered food such as nuts and berries and rutabagas. But when food was scarce, tribal shamans called on “spirit animals” to help make sure a hunt was successful.
Shamans also helped out when tribe members got sick. What could they do thousands of years before modern medicine? They called on “plant spirits.”
Shamans may sound like ancient history, but they’re not. Even now, in the age of grocery stores and doctors’ offices, shamans are still on call all over the world.
OUT OF THIS WORLD
To find the knowledge needed to heal the sick or the wisdom to help people solve problems, shamans go into trances. A trance is an altered state of mind (sort of like being hypnotized, but without the watch).
While in a trance, the shaman goes on a “journey” to meet spirit guides. Those spirits are believed to have wisdom and knowledge that can aid people here in the ordinary world. How do shamans reach a trance sta
te? There are a number of ways, but they’re not for the untrained—so don’t even think about trying them at home.
SHAKE, RATTLE, AND WOBBLE
In Siberia, shamans drum themselves into trances. They bang—for a very long time—on reindeer-skin drums. In India, shamans chant and rhythmically tap a stick on a buffalo’s horn. (Horns still attached to live buffalo are not used, for obvious reasons.)
Other shamans shake rattles, lead group dances, or sway along to drumbeats while wearing animal costumes. After enough drumming, tapping, dancing, or swaying, the shaman enters an altered state of mind. (Imagine turning around and around until you fall down, but without the falling part.)
MAKE MINE WITH MUSHROOMS
Some shamans eat themselves into trances. When they need to heal someone or talk to dead ancestors, they gobble down special mushrooms that cause hallucinations, sweating, and twitching.
The mushrooms they use can be very expensive. Shamans who can’t afford to buy them sometimes have to settle for “secondhand” mushrooms. What’s a secondhand mushroom? First someone eats a “magic” mushroom. Next that person pees. Then the shaman drinks the urine—it still contains enough “magic” to induce a trance.
SMOKE SIGNALS
When shamans of the Upper Amazon River area want to journey to the other world, they either eat tobacco leaves or smoke them. Imagine smoking five or six three-foot-long cigars in one sitting. That’s what shamans do. They believe that while humans hunger for food, spirits crave tobbaco. So they use tobacco to lead them to the spirits. Be warned! Smoking can bring shamans to the door of death. There, they believe, they can meet with the spirits who will teach them.
WHAT’S GOING ON?
Experts say that “contacting spirits” doesn’t fully describe what shamans do. So what are they up to? The Maori people of New Zealand call on the sacred spirit mana. The North America Iroquois call on the spirit oki, and the Sioux call on wakan. Many names have been used for the force a shaman encounters during a trance, but they all seem to refer to the same thing: the life force that connects all things. Could such a force exist?
In 1911, a German physicist named Max Planck discovered that there is an energetic “empty space” between atoms. This energy field is everywhere at all times. Today scientists call it the Zero Point Field. Hungarian scientist Ervin Laszlo believes the Zero Point Field carries information about everything that is or ever was or ever will be in our universe. To access that information, he claims, all you have to do is find the right frequency of energy. Shamans would probably say that is what they have been doing all along.
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THE FORCE IS WITH YOU
Want proof? These two experiments seem to show the existence of a field or force connecting all things.
•A biologist wanted to know where memories are stored in the brain. So he trained some salamanders to do specific things. Then he took out their brains, ground them up like hamburger, and put them back inside their heads. Result? The salamanders went right back to doing what they’d been taught to do. That seemed to prove one thing: memory is not stored in the brain. So where is it stored? Perhaps outside the body, in the Zero Point Field, the mana or wakan of the shaman.
•In 2003, Shireen Strooker and 600 other people stood in a field. At the edge of the field, hundreds of drawings hung from a fence. Shireen pictured what she had drawn. I am the creator of the drawing, she thought. I have to become one with the drawing, and it will pull me toward it. Then she walked across the field straight to her drawing without bumping into a single person. What’s so special about that? Shireen was blindfolded.
THE BATHROOM READERS’ TAROT
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Make your own set of fortune-telling cards, with a special twist from Uncle John!
UNDERSTANDING THE TAROT
Mystics have been using tarot cards to understand life and foretell the future for centuries. No one’s sure who made the first tarot deck. Rumor has it the tarot was created thousands of years ago by 17 magicians just after a flood wiped out all life on Earth. (Which begs the question: Why were they still alive?) But some say it might have been a French wig maker who published a book on the tarot in 1785. It’s all kind of…mystical. And so is reading the cards. The “meaning” of each card depends on what the reader thinks the meaning means. See what we mean?
WHAT YOU NEED:
οHeavy paper (card stock or poster board)
οScissors
οMarkers
οOld magazines
οGlue stick
WHAT TO DO:
1.Cut out seven 5" x 7" cards from the heavy paper.
2.Label each card with one of the names from “Uncle John’s Totally Quacked Tarot Cards” (below).
3.Illustrate each card to fit its name and meaning using markers and/or magazine cutouts.
WHAT TO DO NEXT:
1.Once you’ve finished making your cards, it’s time to read the future. First, decide what you want to ask the cards. Hold the question in your mind.
2.Shuffle the cards, and then draw three cards.
3.The cards you drew all relate to your question. The first card is about the past, the second is about the present, and the third is about the future. Like those ancient mystics did, listen to your gut as you decide how the cards answer your question.
4.Warning: If a card is upside down when you draw it, the meaning is reversed.
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UNCLE JOHN’S TOTALLY QUACKED TAROT CARDS
THE PUPPY: The Puppy is always excited and ready for whatever comes his way. But if the card is upside down? When a puppy gets too excited, accidents happen!
THE JOHN: This card stands for wisdom, and wisdom comes when you take enough time to listen to what your gut tells you. As we all know, the toilet is the number one (and number two) place for peace and quiet. So it’s the perfect image for this card. If The John is upside down, be warned—you haven’t been listening to your gut. And things are about to get nasty.
THE DUCKY: This card means you are one lucky duck. Something great is coming your way, and the “luck” will happen because of your prior actions. If The Ducky is standing on its head, you’re out of luck for now. But keep trying! If you do, your luck will return.
THE CLOWN: It’s time to do something surprising or even silly. If The Clown is upside down, watch where you step. You may end up with poo on your clown shoes.
THE PLUNGER: Nothing can resist The Plunger! This card is all about strength. If you draw this card, be strong, face your fears, and plunge away. If the plunger is upside down, remember that brute strength isn’t always enough. Be nice. It helps.
THE DRAIN: This card means change. You’re ready to move on to something different. But before you can, you may have to flush old habits down the drain. If The Drain is upside down? You’ll be stuck in the muck for a while.
MR. BUBBLE-Y: This card stands for success and happiness. After all, who could be unhappy in a tub full of bubbles? But if Mr. Bubble-y is upside down, watch out! Your bubble is about to burst.
THE HARE’S SIDE OF THE STORY
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An Uncle John’s Totally Twisted Tale
TIMMY HARE WAS LOOKING THROUGH an old box in his grandfather’s attic when he came across a newspaper clipping. “Slow and Steady Wins the Race,” said the headline. “Patient Tortoise Beats Lazy Hare!”
Like everyone else, Timmy had heard the story of the race between the tortoise and the hare. But as he scanned the article, he got a shock: The lazy hare had been his grandfather.
“Grandpa!” Timmy yelled as he pelted downstairs. “You lost that race to the tortoise? I can’t believe it!”
Grandpa folded his paws. “Never happened,” he said. “No tortoise could ever beat me.”
“But the newspaper—” Timmy began.
“Lies!” said Grandpa. “I won that race by a mile!”
“Then why—”
Grandpa frowned. “Sit down,
Sonny Jim. I’ll tell you the true story of the tortoise and the hare.”
Timmy grabbed a carrot and sat on his grandfather’s knee.
“I was the fastest hare of my day,” Grandpa said. “And that’s how I caught the eye of the cutest bunny in the forest.
“But that danged tortoise was always trying to show off. He tried to make me look bad every chance he got. Then, one day, he challenged me to a race. I knew he’d try to cheat. How else could he beat a hare? But I accepted the challenge anyway.”
Timmy took a big bite of carrot and snuggled down to listen.
“We drew a line across the road,” Grandpa said, “right at the top of a hill. We planned to circle through the forest and across the bridge, and end up back at the starting line. But the tortoise said it wouldn’t be fair to finish the race going uphill. So we drew the finish line at the bottom.
“The tortoise said, ‘first one to the finish line wins!’
“Lots of animals gathered to watch the race,” Grandpa said. “A porcupine counted down: ‘On your mark, get set, go!’
“I darted from the starting line, going so fast I raised a dust devil. And I kept running the whole way—through the forest, across the field, over the bridge, and all the way back to the finish. All those things you heard about how I took a nap along the way or loafed around? Those are lies! I ran my heart out.”
Grandpa was so excited his knobby knees bounced, and Timmy almost poked the old hare’s eye out with the carrot. “Sorry, Grandpa!” He tucked the carrot into his pocket, just to be safe.