1.
Winnie-the-Pooh
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Winnie-the-Pooh, also called Pooh Bear, is a fictional anthropomorphic teddy bear created by English author A. A. Milne. The first collection of stories about the character was the book Winnie-the-Pooh, Milne also included a poem about the bear in the childrens verse book When We Were Very Young and many more in Now We Are Six. All four volumes were illustrated by E. H. Shepard, hyphens in the characters name were dropped by Disney when the company adapted the Pooh stories into a series of features that became one of its most successful franchises. In popular film adaptations, Pooh Bear has been voiced by actors Sterling Holloway, Hal Smith, a. A. Milne named the character Winnie-the-Pooh for a teddy bear owned by his son, Christopher Robin Milne, who was the basis for the character Christopher Robin. The rest of Christopher Robin Milnes toys, Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo, two more characters, Owl and Rabbit, were created by Milnes imagination, while Gopher was added to the Disney version. Christopher Robins toy bear is on display at the Main Branch of the New York Public Library in New York City. Christopher Milne had named his toy bear after Winnie, a Canadian black bear he often saw at London Zoo, and Pooh, a swan they had met while on holiday. The bear cub was purchased from a hunter for $20 by Canadian Lieutenant Harry Colebourn in White River, Ontario, Canada and he named the bear Winnie after his adopted hometown in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Winnie was surreptitiously brought to England with her owner, and gained recognition as The Fort Garry Horse regimental mascot. Colebourn left Winnie at the London Zoo while he and his unit were in France, after the war she was donated to the zoo. Pooh the swan appears as a character in its own right in When We Were Very Young, in the first chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh, Milne offers this explanation of why Winnie-the-Pooh is often called simply Pooh, But his arms were so stiff. They stayed up straight in the air for more than a week, and I think – but I am not sure – that that is why he is always called Pooh. The Winnie-the-Pooh stories are set in Ashdown Forest, East Sussex, the forest is a large area of tranquil open heathland on the highest sandy ridges of the High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty situated 30 miles south of London. In 1925 Milne, a Londoner, bought a home a mile to the north of the forest at Cotchford Farm. And we would spend a whole glorious month there in the spring, in the centre of this hilltop was a clump of pines. Most of his fathers visits to the forest at this time were, he noted, Christopher added that, inspired by Ashdown Forest, his father had made it the setting for two of his books, finishing the second little over three years after his arrival. Many locations in the stories can be linked to places in. As Christopher Milne wrote in his autobiography, Pooh’s forest and Ashdown Forest are identical, the landscapes depicted in E. H
2.
Winnie-the-Pooh (book)
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Winnie-the-Pooh is the first volume of stories about Winnie-the-Pooh, by A. A. Milne. It is followed by The House at Pooh Corner, the book focuses on the adventures of a teddy bear called Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends Piglet, a small toy pig, Eeyore, a toy donkey, Owl, a live owl, and Rabbit, a live rabbit. The characters of Kanga, a toy kangaroo, and her son Roo are introduced later in the book, in the chapter entitled In Which Kanga and Baby Roo Come to the Forest and Piglet has a Bath. The bouncy toy-tiger character of Tigger is not introduced until the sequel, portions of the book were adapted from previously published stories. The first chapter, for instance, was adapted from The Wrong Sort of Bees, the chapters in the book can be read independently of each other, as they are episodic in nature and plots do not carry over from one chapter to the next. In 2003, Winnie the Pooh was listed at number 7 on the BBCs survey The Big Read and it was also translated into Esperanto in 1972, by Ivy Kellerman Reed and Ralph A. Lewin, Winnie-La-Pu. The work was featured in the app for Apples iOS as the starter book for the app. The book Winnie-the-Pooh is the second in a series of published in the 1920s about Winnie the Pooh. These books were adapted from a collection of stories penned by Milne and originally published in Punch, St. Nicholas Magazine, Vanity Fair and others. A variety of famous illustrators were hired by the magazines to decorate Milnes text including J. H. Dowd, Reginald Birch, E. H. Shepard, A. H. Watson and others. Following Disneys licensing of rights to Pooh from Stephen Slesinger. Milne Estate in the 1960s, the Milne story lines were used by Disney in its cartoon featurette Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree. The look of Pooh was adapted by Disney from Stephen Slesingers distinctive American Pooh with his famous red shirt that had created and used in commerce by Slesinger since the 1930s. Winnie-the-Pooh was shortly followed by The House at Pooh Corner, also by Milne. Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, by David Benedictus was the first official post-Milne Pooh book written with the backing of A. A. Milnes estate. Pooh returned with his friends Tigger, Piglet and Eeyore as well as a new companion Lottie the Otter, the illustrations are by Mark Burgess, who had also worked on reviving the Paddington Bear stories. The Best Bear in All The World, by Paul Bright, Jeanne Willis, Kate Saunders and Brian Sibley is the second official post-Milne Pooh book, published by Egmont on 6 October 2016. The four different authors have written four short stories around the four seasons of Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall, woozle effect Winnie-the-Pooh at Faded Page
3.
A. A. Milne
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Alan Alexander Milne was an English author, best known for his books about the teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh and for various poems. Milne was a writer, primarily as a playwright, before the huge success of Pooh overshadowed all his previous work. Milne served in both World Wars, joining the British Army in World War I, and was a captain of the British Home Guard in World War II, one of his teachers was H. G. Wells, who taught there in 1889–90. Milne attended Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge where he studied on a mathematics scholarship and he edited and wrote for Granta, a student magazine. He collaborated with his brother Kenneth and their articles appeared over the initials AKM, Milnes work came to the attention of the leading British humour magazine Punch, where Milne was to become a contributor and later an assistant editor. Milne played for the amateur English cricket team the Allahakbarries alongside authors J. M. Barrie, Milne joined the British Army in World War I and served as an officer in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment and later, after a debilitating illness, the Royal Corps of Signals. He was commissioned into the 4th Battalion, Royal Warwickshire Regiment on 17 February 1915 as a second lieutenant and his commission was confirmed on 20 December 1915. On 7 July 1916, he was injured while serving in the Battle of the Somme, having recuperated, he was recruited into Military Intelligence to write propaganda articles for MI 7b between 1916 and 1918. He was discharged on 14 February 1919, and settled in Mallord Street and he relinquished his commission on 19 February 1920, retaining the rank of lieutenant. After the war, he wrote a denunciation of war titled Peace with Honour, which he retracted somewhat with 1940s War with Honour. During World War II, Milne was one of the most prominent critics of fellow English writer P. G. Wodehouse, Wodehouse made radio broadcasts about his internment, which were broadcast from Berlin. Although the light-hearted broadcasts made fun of the Germans, Milne accused Wodehouse of committing an act of treason by cooperating with his countrys enemy. Milne married Dorothy Daphne de Sélincourt in 1913 and their son Christopher Robin Milne was born in 1920, in 1925, Milne bought a country home, Cotchford Farm, in Hartfield, East Sussex. During World War II, Milne was Captain of the British Home Guard in Hartfield & Forest Row and he retired to the farm after a stroke and brain surgery in 1952 left him an invalid, and by August 1953 he seemed very old and disenchanted. Milne died in January 1956, aged 74, after graduating from Cambridge in 1903, A. A. Milne contributed humorous verse and whimsical essays to Punch, joining the staff in 1906 and becoming an assistant editor. During this period he published 18 plays and 3 novels, including the murder mystery The Red House Mystery. His son was born in August 1920 and in 1924 Milne produced a collection of childrens poems When We Were Very Young, a collection of short stories for children Gallery of Children, and other stories that became part of the Winnie-the-Pooh books, were first published in 1925. Milne was a screenwriter for the nascent British film industry
4.
Donkey
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The donkey or ass is a domesticated member of the horse family, Equidae. The wild ancestor of the donkey is the African wild ass, the donkey has been used as a working animal for at least 5000 years. There are more than 40 million donkeys in the world, mostly in underdeveloped countries, working donkeys are often associated with those living at or below subsistence levels. Small numbers of donkeys are kept for breeding or as pets in developed countries, a male donkey or ass is called a jack, a female a jenny or jennet, a young donkey is a foal. Jack donkeys are used to mate with female horses to produce mules. Asses were first domesticated around 3000 BC, probably in Egypt or Mesopotamia and they continue to fill important roles in many places today. While domesticated species are increasing in numbers, the African wild ass is an endangered species, as beasts of burden and companions, asses and donkeys have worked together with humans for millennia. Traditionally, the name for the donkey is Equus asinus asinus based on the principle of priority used for scientific names of animals. This means that the scientific name for the donkey is Equus africanus asinus when it is considered a subspecies. At one time, the ass was the more common term for the donkey. The first recorded use of donkey was in either 1784 or 1785, while the word ass has cognates in most other Indo-European languages, donkey is an etymologically obscure word for which no credible cognate has been identified. From the 18th century, donkey gradually replaced ass, and jenny replaced she-ass, by the end of the 17th century, changes in pronunciation of both ass and arse had caused them to become homophones. Donkeys vary considerably in size, depending on breed and management, the height at the withers ranges from 7.3 to 15.3 hands, and the weight from 80 to 480 kg. Working donkeys in the poorest countries have an expectancy of 12 to 15 years, in more prosperous countries. Donkeys are adapted to desert lands. Unlike wild and feral horses, wild donkeys in dry areas are solitary, each adult donkey establishes a home range, breeding over a large area may be dominated by one jack. Donkeys have large ears, which may pick up more distant sounds, donkeys can defend themselves by biting, striking with the front hooves or kicking with the hind legs. A jenny is normally pregnant for about 12 months, though the period varies from 11 to 14 months
5.
Male
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A male organism is the physiological sex that produces sperm. Each spermatozoon can fuse with a female gamete, or ovum. A male cannot reproduce sexually without access to at least one ovum from a female, most male mammals, including male humans, have a Y chromosome, which codes for the production of larger amounts of testosterone to develop male reproductive organs. Not all species share a common sex-determination system, in most animals, including humans, sex is determined genetically, but in some species it can be determined due to social, environmental, or other factors. For example, Cymothoa exigua changes sex depending on the number of females present in the vicinity, the existence of two sexes seems to have been selected independently across different evolutionary lineages. There is an argument that this pattern was driven by the physical constraints on the mechanisms by which two gametes get together as required for sexual reproduction. Accordingly, sex is defined operationally across species by the type of gametes produced, male/female dimorphism between organisms or reproductive organs of different sexes is not limited to animals, male gametes are produced by chytrids, diatoms and land plants, among others. In land plants, female and male designate not only the female and male gamete-producing organisms and structures, as of the year 2012, the United Arab Emirates has the highest ratio of human males in the world, followed by Qatar. A common symbol used to represent the male sex is the Mars symbol, the symbol is identical to the planetary symbol of Mars. It was first used to sex by Carl Linnaeus in 1751. The symbol is called a stylized representation of the Roman god Mars shield. According to Stearn, however, all the historical evidence favours that it is derived from θρ, the sex of a particular organism may be determined by a number of factors. These may be genetic or environmental, or may change during the course of an organisms life. Although most species with male and female sexes have individuals that are male or female, hermaphroditic animals. Most mammals, including humans, are determined as such by the XY sex-determination system where males have an XY sex chromosome. During reproduction, a male can give either an X sperm or a Y sperm, a Y sperm and an X egg produce a male, while an X sperm and an X egg produce a female. The part of the Y-chromosome which is responsible for maleness is the region of the Y-chromosome. The ZW sex-determination system, where males have a ZZ sex chromosome may be found in birds and some insects and other organisms
6.
Pessimism
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Pessimists also tend to focus on the negatives of life in general or a given situation. The most common example of this phenomenon is the Is the glass half empty or half full, in this situation a pessimist is said to see the glass as half empty while an optimist is said to see the glass as half full. Throughout history, the pessimistic disposition has had effects on all areas of thinking. Philosophical pessimism is the idea that views the world in a strictly anti-optimistic fashion. This form of pessimism is not a disposition as the term commonly connotes. Instead, it is a philosophy or worldview that directly challenges the notion of progress, philosophical pessimists are often existential nihilists believing that life has no intrinsic meaning or value. Their responses to this condition, however, are widely varied, the term pessimism derives from the Latin word pessimus meaning the worst. It was first used by Jesuit critics of Voltaires 1759 novel Candide, Voltaire was satirizing the philosophy of Leibniz who maintained that this was the best of all possible worlds. In their attacks on Voltaire, the Jesuits of the Revue de Trévoux accused him of pessimisme, philosophical pessimists see the self-consciousness of man as bound up with his consciousness of time and that this leads to greater suffering than mere physical pain. While many organisms live in the present, humans and certain species of animals can contemplate the past and future, the philosophical pessimistic view of the effect of historical progress tends to be more negative than positive. The philosophical pessimist does not deny that certain areas like science can progress, in this sense it could be said that the pessimist views history as ironic, while seemingly getting better, it is mostly in fact not improving at all, or getting worse. This is most clearly seen in Rousseaus critique of enlightenment civil society and his preference for man in the primitive, for Rousseau, our souls have become corrupted to the extent that our sciences and our arts have advanced towards perfection. The pessimistic view of the condition is that it is in a sense absurd. The idea that thought would lead to human flourishing can be traced to Socrates and is at the root of most forms of western optimistic philosophies. Pessimism turns the idea on its head, it faults the human freedom to reason as the feature that misaligned humanity from our world, the responses to this predicament of the human condition by pessimists are varied. Some philosophers, mainly Schopenhauer, recommend a form of resignation, some followers tend to believe that expecting the worst leads to the best. Rene Descartes even believed that life was better if emotional reactions to negative events were removed, Albert Camus indicated that the common responses to the absurdity of life are often, Suicide, a leap of faith, or recognition/rebellion. Camus rejected all but the last option as unacceptable and inauthentic responses, philosophical pessimism has often been tied to the arts and literature
7.
Melancholia
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Melancholy was one of the four temperaments matching the four humours. In the 19th century, melancholia could be physical as well as mental, the name melancholia comes from the old medical belief of the four humours, disease or ailment being caused by an imbalance in one or other of the four basic bodily liquids, or humours. Personality types were similarly determined by the dominant humor in a particular person, in astrology it showed the influence of Saturn, hence the related adjective saturnine. Melancholia was described as a disease with particular mental and physical symptoms in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Hippocrates, in his Aphorisms, characterized all fears and despondencies, when a patient could not be cured of the disease it was thought that the melancholia was a result of demonic possession. In his study of French and Burgundian courtly culture, Johan Huizinga noted that at the close of the Middle Ages, a sombre melancholy weighs on peoples souls. Among those of his contemporaries so characterised by Vasari were Pontormo and Parmigianino, but he not use the term of Michelangelo. A famous allegorical engraving by Albrecht Dürer is entitled Melencolia I and this engraving has been interpreted as portraying melancholia as the state of waiting for inspiration to strike, and not necessarily as a depressive affliction. Amongst other allegorical symbols, the picture includes a magic square, the image in turn inspired a passage in The City of Dreadful Night by James Thomson, and, a few years later, a sonnet by Edward Dowden. The most extended treatment of melancholia comes from Robert Burton, whose The Anatomy of Melancholy treats the subject from both a literary and a medical perspective, Burton wrote in the 17th century that music and dance were critical in treating mental illness, especially melancholia. Ismenias the Theban, Chiron the centaur, is said to have cured this and many other diseases by music alone, as now they do those, saith Bodine, during the later 16th and early 17th centuries, a curious cultural and literary cult of melancholia arose in England. Another major English author who made extensive expression upon being of a disposition is Sir Thomas Browne in his Religio Medici. Night-Thoughts, a poem in blank verse by Edward Young was published in nine parts between 1742 and 1745, and hugely popular in several languages. It had a influence on early Romantics in England, France. William Blake was commissioned to illustrate a later edition and these portraits were often set out of doors where Nature provides the most suitable background for spiritual contemplation or in a gloomy interior. In music, the cult of melancholia is associated with John Dowland, whose motto was Semper Dowland. The melancholy man, known to contemporaries as a malcontent, is epitomized by Shakespeares Prince Hamlet, the medieval condition of acedia and the Romantic Weltschmerz were similar concepts, most likely to affect the intellectual. It has been identified in medical writings from antiquity and was best characterized in the 19th Century, in the 20th Century, with the interest in psychoanalytic writing, major depression became the principal class in psychiatric classifications
listen) EE-or) is a character in the Winnie-the-Pooh books by A. A. Milne. He is generally characterized as a pessimistic, gloomy, depressed, anhedonic, old grey stuffed donkey who is a friend of the title character, Winnie-the-Pooh.
