Circadian Shift

There's a post over on MetaFilter that has a bunch of linkage pertaining to fairy tales by the brothers Grimm, many of which contain "bizarre and disturbing stories with less than happy endings".

I'm not too familiar with Grimm Classic (as opposed to the happy Disney-fied transmogrifications), but there's another set of tales in German that were seared into my memory as a small child....

Struwwelpeter ("Slovenly Peter") is a collection of vignettes that instruct children on such basic lessons as:

• Don't play with matches.


• Don't suck your thumb.


• Look where you're going when you walk.


• Don't goof off at the dinner table


• Eat all the food on your plate.

Most of the children who ignore these simple rules meet with ghastly endings. I couldn't understand the text of the book when I was little (I still have a copy in German), but the illustrations left no doubt as to the lessons to be learned.

(The web site provides English translations, purportedly written by Mark Twain. The illustrations are the same, but -- to my eyes -- don't have the vividness of the printed versions.)