A. A. Milne

That's just a unique, um, nature as, as an animal.

So while she was there, she became a very, very popular, um, you know, animal to visit at the zoo, and eventually Christopher, or A.A. Milne, the author, Alan Alexander Milne, started coming to the zoo with his son, Christopher Robin.

And Christopher Robin, as we all know, had a collection of stuffed animals, and one of those stuffed animals was a bear, and he called that bear, uh, Edward.

And he loved visiting Winnie at the zoo, and you can see in the photograph, like, they, they clearly had this bond, and A.A. Milne was sort of watching this friendship unfold between his son and a real bear.

Yeah.

I read, I read the books, uh, the Milne books when I was growing up.

Uh, so I, you know, I've, I, I'm super familiar with these stories.

And of course I've seen the, the Winnie the Pooh shorts that, you know, Disney, uh, had created and then combined into a full length movie.

Okay.

which i was like no but that's god so it's so cute and i did love honey the movie honey growing up cute i was like that is so adorable but no not it other people bear obviously because i did the little bear another guest was winnie which i thought was so cute and like clever um so honey bear winnie and you guys are so on the same track the real name we're gonna let you know here first is poo

Imagine we're like, poo Arnold Scott.

After the High Rocks poop girl.

poo was and i didn't look into it

did you watch any of those

like winnie the poo poo bear but but what's a poo bear this was a trend recently and i didn't look into it i think a poo bear is just the type of bear winnie is and

annie is winnie the poo a boy named winnie see it's all strange never really put a lot of thought

Like, that's just very, that's fun for me to hear them make their case.

But they know that I love Golden Age detective novels, and they had pointed out to me something I did not know, which was that A.A. Milne, author of Winnie-the-Pooh, wrote in fact one classic detective novel, one locked room detective novel, and I have started reading it.

Now, I haven't finished it yet, so, you know, maybe a couple of weeks from now you'll hear me say, "Oh, it was garbage, I hated it." But so far, I'm like five chapters in and I'm really enjoying it, and I got a kick out of the fact that the dedication was to his father, who had a great love of detective novels, so he wanted to try to write, you know, take the challenge on of coming up with a great locked room mystery.

So I started reading it, and he's describing the different characters, and this is a description of one of the characters, and I was actually reading this [laughs] while I was on a treadmill.

Right

... right? So, like, picking up this A.

A. Milne detective novel or the Nancy Mitford, something where my brain's like, "Oh, no, we're in rest mode." That's what-

And, um-

He decides it's the best place for her to stay.

So Alan Alexander Milne, who the world now knows as A.A. Milne, happened to take his young son, Christopher Robin, to that very zoo, and Christopher Robin fell in love with Winnipeg, which at that point had been nicknamed Winnie, Winnie the Bear.

Christopher Robin even fed Winnipeg.

Wow.

Was it E.E. Cummings? Was it A.A.

Milne? Was it R.R.

Martin? Who is it that...

Yeah, they're all

Chick Young's comic strip Blondie created the Dagwood, an impossibly huge sandwich, and E.C. Seeger's Thimble Theater, the predecessor of his Popeye cartoon, bequeathed to us the word goon.

In one scene from Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne combines elements of onomatopoeia, portmanteau, and spoonerism to create...

A delightful linguistic mash-up.

"'Help, help!' cried Piglet.