Yeah, but how's Eeyore going to take the news?

Looks like Christopher Robbin is day drinking again.

To celebrate the 90th anniversary of Winnie-the-Pooh's first book, an authorized sequel will come out next month in the form of four short stories written by four different children's authors.

One of the authors, Brian Sibley, has decided to introduce a new character into the world of Pooh Corner. In his short story, The Best Bear in All the World, on a cold and snowy day Penguin arrives and befriends Pooh. As the name implies, Penguin is just that, a penguin, one that apparently has bad directional skills since he's somehow ended up in a remote British wood.

"The thought of Pooh encountering a penguin seemed no more outlandish than his meeting a kangaroo and a tiger in a Sussex wood, so I started thinking about what might have happened if, on a rather snowy day, Penguin had found his way to Pooh Corner," said Sibley to The Guardian, trying to sound all rational and reasonable.

Indeed, Sibley's motivation came from an old photo he saw of Winnie-The-Pooh's original author, A.A. Milne, playing with his son in the 1920s, a photo that includes the original Winnie-the-Pooh teddy bear playing alongside a nameless penguin.

Squeak looks as charming as muscle for the mob.

The famed Harrod's of London, which sold all the original toys that inspired the characters, told The Guardian that it believes the Milnes might have been playing with a toy the department store sold in the 1920s, a rigid, stock-still penguin the store named Squeak.

We all really know this just means Eeyore is being pushed to the side again. No one ever mentions Eeyore, and Penguin is now compounding matters. Poor Eeyore's just going to enter a level of donkey ennui unmatched in the animal kingdom at this point.




Photograph: Culture Club/Getty Images

Gather around children! Let's all look at Winnie-the-Pooh's skull!

The skull that belonged to the original black bear that inspired author A.A. Milne to write the series of honey-obsessed Winnie-the-Pooh books has been put on display for the first time at the Royal College of Surgeon's Hunterian Museum. And the skull shows that, indeed, the lovable bear had serious tooth decay due to a penchant for sweets.

You might be wondering why Pooh's skull is even at a surgeon's museum to begin with--or that there was an original bear to be the inspiration for Pooh. First off, A.A. Milne's son, Christopher Robin's (yes, same name as the book) favorite male bear in the children's books was, in real life, actually a female black bear, named Winnipeg, named after the city in Manitoba. Winnipeg's owner, Canadian Captain Harry Coleburn bought the bear as a cub in 1914--and took the bear with him to England for training during World War I, in what we can only assume was one hell of a transport across the Atlantic.

The original Winnipeg snacking on sweets and somehow not snacking on a child.

When deployed to France to fight, Capt. Coleburn left Winnipeg at the London Zoo, where she would live the rest of her days over the next couple decades. It wasn't until Milne took his son, Christopher, to the zoo--and that the boy decided Winnipeg was his favorite attraction--that the author began to create a children's book. Winnipeg had a sex change, went from black to gold, and became the classic we know today. Winnie-the-Pooh was born.

After the books were a huge success, visitors to the zoo routinely fed Winnipeg sweets (she was apparently a very friendly and docile bear). That surely made Winnipeg fat and happy, but it also rotted her teeth savagely. Dentistry on animals not being what it is today, no one thought much about it. When she died in 1934, her remains were donated to the museum, and the skull we see today ended up at the Odontological Museum section of Royal College of Surgeon's Hunterian Museum.

No word on whatever became of Eeyore.




I kind of wish I had a bear named Saskatoon now.