Mostly about Madam Mim

[Jørgen Andreas Bangor]

David: "The Madam Mim story doesn't sound half bad."
       I meant to answer to this several days ago, but when I was
composing my letter, one of the disk servers went down. The one 
with my home directory...
       David doesn't think it sounds too bad, but hasn't read many
Mim stories. Harry wonders if it's a remake of an older story. The 
reason why I don't like it, and probably why Harry think he has read 
something like it, is, as Fredrik says, there are 537 other stories 
where she's doing about the same thing.
      One of the better, though, is a story where a hole lot of new 
houses are built in the same area as Mim's. When the houses are 
finished and ready to be sold, they want Mim's house removed, because
it doesn't match the other houses. Mim doesn't want to move. They even
offer her one of the new houses if she'll move out of hers. They 
explain to her that her house doesn't match the other houses (Mim's 
house is _very_ old and shabby), and she solves the problem by changing 
all the new houses so they match hers.
      At the moment I can only think of two stories where Mim's not too
nice. One of them is a story I mentioned earlier, where Mim and Magica
works together to get the dime. They fail, but the result is that the
dime is out there somewhere, in somones wallet. The solution is that
Scrooge owns every single chewing gum machine (put on a dime, and a 
chewing gum comes out...) in the entire country. He'll then check 
the dimes from everyone until he finds it.
      The other one is a short story where Ludwig van Drake is going
out in the forest, where it's silent, to read his books. Mim is 
skeptical in the beginning, she doesn't like noise, but when she
finds out that he's seeking silence she's very cooperative. She even
makes the birds sing with no sound, and put slippers on a rabbit to 
make them silent. Then van Drake is going to sleep, and he's snoring...
She haunts him out of the forest, then goes to sleep, and snores so the
roof is lifting from the house.
      And, yes, another story comes to mind. I'm afraid this story 
would upset some people on the list. In this story Mim becomes a
member of the Junior Woodchucks. As far as I remember she's supposed
to be some sort of adult that's supposed to supply the children with
interesting things. In the end of the day they go inside her house, 
and Mim is listing a hole bunch of interesting things (toads, spider
webs, bat wings etc.).

   HDL: "WOW! This is the best science lesson we've ever had!"
   Mim: "Science lesson? This is the evenings menu."

Whereafter HDL, runs away as fast as they can.

   Mim: "Well, this is probably the best after all. I would
         never manage to be as nice as these Junior Woodchucks."  


"A Goofy Midas"
These Goofy stories don't seem to be very popular...
They were published in Norway in the late 70's and early 80's, and, as 
far as I remember, they were very popular. I like them myself, but 
unfortunately I miss a few albums (I've never read the Frankenstein 
story...).


Erik:
> I love the idea of having the "square" people speaking Nynorsk.
> This, to me, gives exactly the right bizarre touch to them, but
> maybe Norwegians don't find Nynorsk bizarre
     Was this sent to the list? I'm actually quoting Dwight here...
Do Norwegians find Nynorsk bizarre? That's a question with a lot of
answers... Some people, usually living in the south eastern part of
Norway (I live there myself), seem to find it very bizarre. I've 
never understood why. All Norwegians have to learn both languages
in school. Some people find this very annoying, and want to use
all the time to learn one of them better (if they can't learn to
write in two languages that similar, I don't even think they can
handle _one_ of them). These are, of course, the "fanatics" that want
Nynorsk removed.
     On the oposite side are the people who are insulted with the 
smallest sign of making fun of Nynorsk (I guess some of them want 
Bokmal removed...).
     The rest of us laugh at the two extremes (remember: This is
_not_ the U.S. :)
     Anyway, the people who use Nynorsk regularly, is a minority,
so in any way, Nynorsk is some kind of different. The "experiment"
with strange people speaking Nynorsk has not been repeated, though,
except for the reprint.


And, yes. Don Rosa is coming to the university on Wednesday :-)



   Jorgen A. Bangor (jorgenb at ifi.uio.no)