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My little sister, the female half of summerfields, mailed out our childhood copies of the Beebo and Mop books. I'm going to scan them in, if possible. Thanks, Anney!

The art was just as remarkable and beautiful and strange as I remembered. Full of gears and stairways and strange devices and passageways and melancholy beauty. I've scanned in some samples at 300 dpi. Click through to see them. The artist was Alain Grée.


Beebo, a middle-aged inventor and artist, has just been fired from his job on the Paris Metro. Here, he's returning to his attic apartment. He lives in a jumble of ancient apartments, with modern highrises going up to a clouded sky in the distance.


Beebo inherits a ruined house. He and his friend Mop (and Mop's hamster) turn it into something of a cross between the House on the Rock and The Best Thing Ever. Note the sky. When I was about 12 years old, I read The Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis, wherein he describes a "yellow sky" like a medieval parchment. There it is.


Just part of an image of the inside of the house, on a magical night when Beebo is dozing by the fire. I'm missing the most interesting bit, which spills over on the other page - the throwaway details of hall ways and hanging staircases leading to rooms and rooms and rooms... I've dreamed of those staircases more than once.


Later, Beebo and Mop are threatened with eviction, and built a dragon out of old cars.


It's not all whimsical. Beebo's nightmare is straight out of Hieronymus Bosch.

I will be scanning the complete books as time allows.

We had two of these when I was quite small. They were absolutely wonderful, full of delightful images and heartbreaking dreams. If you find these books, buy them at once. Or give them to me.

Summary from a blog named for the main character:

"Beebo is a character in a series of children’s books... Each book starts with Beebo, his buddy Mop, and Mop’s hamster Hector arriving in an unfamiliar town. They work hard and well, whilst keeping mostly to themselves. In his spare time Beebo builds wonderful things out of junk—an enormous pipe organ, a mechanical fire-breathing dragon, an automatic fence-builder.

By about the middle of each book, Beebo and Mop become happy, if not rich … at which point trouble strikes: in the first book their ramshackle mansion finds itself in the middle of a apartment construction zone; in the second, Beebo wakes up one day to find his face on billboards all over town, his stolen image being used to sell soft-drink; in the third Beebo and Mop are expelled from an angry and nameless authoritarian principality for having no visa, no identity card, and no passport.

In each book, Beebo and Mop get f***ed by the state... The third book is particularly bleak—it ends with Beebo and Mop growing smaller and smaller as they descend into earth."

Yesterday, between the hours of 5 and 6:30, I found myself at loose ends in the most thinly populated area of my "beat," drifting along the north shore of Lake Erie which is the extreme edge of the newspaper's coverage.

At 4:45 I had an interviewed scheduled with some folks organizing a dog-walk fundraiser. The interview took place in the hamlet of Cheapside (pop 120), a cross-roads with an out of business gas station and a recently bankrupt general store/diner/deli/clothing outlet. The interview lasted about five minutes - essentially, I took a picture and left.

My next interview was not scheduled until 6:30 PM, in Fisherville (pop 300). I had insufficient time to drive to one of the larger population centres in Haldimand County and grab a civilized burger before making it back to Fisherville! In range were Cheapside, Selkirk (pop 600), Fisherville, Rainham Centre (pop. 60), Kohler (pop 100) and Nanticoke (pop 180).

Selkirk seemed the best bet, home to no less than two potential eateries and an Es s o gas station! I rarely have cause to visit Selkirk these days, but I spent several summers there at a nearby Salvation Army camp, both as a student at music camp, and later as a counsellor and groundskeeper.

As I passed through the village, I remembered one long summer as a groundskeeper at the camp. I would ride 2.5 KM on my bike into the village to buy junk food or magazines on my evenings off. I decided I wasn't particularly hungry, and turned down the road towards the lake and the camp.

I passed the spot Sharon and Melanie and I had tried to catch a snake. I passed the former location of the abandoned house I'd explored one afternoon with Derek. The place had been empty for a decade, and we found a treasure trove of old books and ancient photographs spilled out on the floors. We wondered about the original inhabitants. I found a copy of "Catch-22" in very good condition, and pocketed it. The house has since been demolished.

I arrived at the camp gates, across the road from a rocky beach. I parked across from the gates, and ventured down to the beach. The wind was quite strong, whipping the waves into meter tall whitecaps. I picked my way long an outcropping of rock, until I was about 30 m away from the shore, and stared out across the water, towards the horizon. The other side was not visible from this spot, despite the clarity of the air, and lake seemed rather endless. The wind was constant and quite powerful. I had to lean forward somewhat, and gulls were being tossed willy-nilly as they tried to fly.

After a bit, I got bored, and sat in the car, reading Carl Sagan's "Dragons of Eden," which sparked some interesting thoughts.

When I got to Fisherville, I interviewed members of a local band who will be playing with Biff Naked and David Usher at an upcoming event in Cayuga. Also attending the event were some on-air personalities and "Rock Patrol" staff from Y108, a Hamilton radio station. One of them, Andrew, was also a member of the band. He looked curiously familiar.

As I took a group photo, Andrew called out "Everyone say 'Tuppenschleimer'!" And they did, instead of "Smile!" Which struck me as odd, you see, because Tuppenschleimer was the name of the Dutchy that my first D&D character hailed from. A silly name I'd come up with during a game when I was 13 years old, in 1987.

Andrew is Andy. He was my best friend in 7th grade. He appeared as the character of "Ghost of Gaming Past" in the stupid Christmas Carol spoof I wrote for Guide to the Non-Existent Universe.
( http://im-chat.com/zine/zine.asp?ID=318 )

How utterly strange. We chatted for a bit, and I got his email.

The interesting thought I had while reading Sagan was that humanity has a programmed biological urge to colonize other planets as a natural extension of our desire to fill every environment we can. There's a true story about Robert Goddard, the father of modern rocketry. Apparently, he was a fairly normal and dull child. In 1899, he was climbing an apple tree, and he had a vivid vision of a vehicle that would take people to Mars. The vision inspired him to the point that he would return to that tree every year on the same date, for the rest of his life. He worked toward the development of rockets that would work in a vacuum, and invented the first functioning liquid chemical rockets.

Certainly, the desire for exploration and expansion is a result of our biology... and other planets and stars are part of nature... is it perhaps possible that we have a hardwired desire for extraplanetary expansion, one that developed as we conquered and colonized all the convenient places on earth?

It would certainly explain the space race, which, apart from the pure science of it, is generally justified with emotional arugments. Why do we want to travel to other planets? Prestige! Great acheivement!

I've heard it suggested that species naturally destroy and foul their environment as they become successful, and this is why we have the desire to explore - to find new places to foul. Humans are unique in our ability to predict consequences and imagine ourselves and our children in relation to future events, so we may be able mitgate this tendency somewhat. Still, perhaps we are programmed to pollute and destroy our environment as a way of forcing us to expand outward yet again.

Anyways. However you try and explain it, my attitude has always been "Hurrah for Space Travel! "|