Monday, February 27, 2012

GO GET SOME HONEY. GO GET SOME MORE. GO GET SOME HONEY FROM THE HONEY STORE: Writer/illustrator Jan Berenstain, who met her late husband Stan at their first day of class in 1941 at what's now Philadelphia's University of the Arts, is now permanently hibernating with their Bears as well. She was 88.

Charles Krauthammer did not much care for their books, some 260 million of which have been sold, writing in 1989: "It is not just the smugness and complacency of the stories that is so irritating. That is a common affliction of children's literature. The raging offense of the Berenstains is the post-feminist Papa Bear, the Alan Alda of grizzlies, a wimp so passive and fumbling he makes Dagwood Bumstead look like Batman."