The Express Tribune hi five - July 29

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The real truth behind disney movies

THE EXPRESS TRIBUNE, JULY 29, 2012

Hi light

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once upon a tim

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veryone knows and loves the Disney Princesses. Little girls adore them, adults love them and now there exists a princess for everyone, even fish!

The Disney Princesses include Cinderella, Ariel, Aurora, Snow White, Belle, Pocahontas, Mulan, Tiana, Rapunzel and Jasmine.

That’s all well and good but the fairy tales are not all about princesses and happily-ever-afters. The original versions of some of our best-loved fairy tales are quite different from the Disney versions.

Aurora

(Sleeping Beauty)

As a baby, Princess Aurora, daughter of King Stefan and Queen Leah, are visited by three good fairies, Flora, Fauna and Merryweather, who each present the newborn with a gift. Flora gives the gift of beauty and Fauna the gift of song. Before Merryweather can bestow her gift, evil fairy Maleficent arrives, angry she wasn’t invited. She puts a curse on Aurora, saying that on her 16th birthday, Aurora will prick her finger on a spinning wheel and die. While Merryweather can’t reverse the curse, she adds the condition that Aurora will not die, but instead fall asleep any can only be awakened by true love’s kiss.

Now what is the first thing that Aurora does when she encounters a spinning wheel, after being told all her life that touching it would put her in a coma forever. She touches it almost immediately. Isn’t that stupid?

The Disney film was actually based on the fairytale by Charles Perrault. In the original fairytale, after the prince breaks the spell, the witch does not offer any resistance and the prince and princess both get married. The prince hides his marriage from his step-mother, who comes from an ogre family. Once he becomes the king, he brings his wife and children to the castle but as soon he is away from the country, the ogress queen mother sends the young queen and the children to a house secluded in the woods. She tells her chef to cook the children but the chef is horrified and instead of cooking the children serves the queen some lamb. When the king returns and the evil deeds of the ogress are discovered, she kills herself and everyone else lives happily ever after.

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Pocahontas (Pocahontas)

In Pocahontas, Captain John Smith and Governor John Ratcliffe travel with settlers from the Virginia Company to North America. They land in Virginia and begin digging for gold. Their actions soon come to the attention of Pocahontas, the daughter of Indian Chief Powhatan. John and Pocahontas soon meet and fall in love but the Indians are not happy. Pocahontas has promised to marry the warrior Kocoum and the settlers believe the natives are keeping the gold for themselves. A battle ensues, and Kocoum is killed with John accused of his murder. Before he can be executed, Pocahontas appeals to her father and saves him.

John is still injured though and the movie ends with John returning to England for medical treatment.

The film was the first animated feature Disney film to be based on a real historic character, based on the known history and also the folklore and legend that surround the Native American woman Pocahontas.

In the Disney movie, John Smith was a tall handsome man but in reality he was short, had a full beard, and wore puffy pants (like everyone else). In the movie, John Smith and Pocahontas met in the wilderness and fell in love, like Romeo and Juliet but John Smith first met Pocahontas when she rescued him from execution. After the Powhatan adopted Smith in to the tribe, Pocahontas and her new kinsman became good friends but neither of them fell in love with each other. Do you remember, Percy the dog? Well in real life George Percy was a prominent colonist who followed Smith as council president, and wrote two books about his experiences. A clever name for the dog!

THE EXPRESS TRIBUNE, JULY 29, 2012

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Hi light

Snow White

(Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs)

Snow White, whose skin is fair as snow, lips red as blood and hair black as night, was the very first Disney princess. The movie has it all – a lovely, orphaned princess; an evil stepmother; a talking mirror; a handsome prince; seven adorable, sweet, dependable friends and a happily ever after.

You have to admit though; Snow White is a little dumb. Minutes after the dwarves warn her that there’s a crazy person who wants to kill her, Snow White accepts an apple from a strange woman. Wasn’t she taught not to accept gifts from strangers?

In the movie, the queen falls to her death, and her body is crushed by a boulder but in the original story, the queen has a more gruesome death. As punishment for her wicked ways, a pair of heated iron shoes are brought forth with tongs and placed before the Queen. She is then forced to step into the iron shoes and to dance until she drops dead.

Cinderella

(Cinderella)

Cinderella lives a life of servitude with her stepmother, Lady Tremaine and stepsisters Anastasia and Drizella. When every young woman in the kingdom is invited to a ball at the castle to meet Prince Charming, Cinderella is not allowed to attend by her jealous family. But her Fairy Godmother comes to the rescue and Cinderella not only goes to the ball but also wins the heart of the prince. When she loses her glass slipper in her haste to get home before midnight, all is almost lost but truth and true love prevail when a kingdom-wide search for the special girl finally locates her.

In the original tale, after the prince proclaims that he would marry the maiden whose foot would fit the shoe, Cinderella’s stepsisters’ cut off pieces of their feet since they don’t fit in the shoe. They slice off parts of their toes and heel, and then try to shove their feet into the increasingly bloody slipper.

The prince is alerted by two doves from Heaven and he comes back to inquire for another girl and finally finds Cinderella. In another version of the tale, instead of doves, the prince is alerted to the trick by two pigeons that peck out the stepsisters’ eyes. They spend the rest of their lives as blind, lame beggars while Cinderella lives in luxury with the prince.

Ariel

(The Little Mermaid) The youngest daughter of King Triton, Ariel was a mermaid whose only wish was to be human and when she fell in love with a prince, she was willing to trade her most prized possession, her voice, so she could be with him.

Now in the movie, Ariel lived happily ever after but in the original fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen, the little mermaid never gets married to the prince and dies. Since mermaids don’t have souls, she has to do 300 years of good deeds in order to earn one and every time a child cries, she has to do an extra day for each teardrop.

Want to know something really crazy? Before giving up her tail forever in order to live with humans, Ariel knows that they eat fish. In her underwater world, fish can talk, swim, and even dance, and yet she completely fails to understand that her husband and fellow countrymen will essentially be eating her friends almost every day.

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THE EXPRESS TRIBUNE, JULY 29, 2012

Activity Corner

4 Bird Feeder

Supplies needed: • An old 1L milk carton (washed) • A loop of string (any size) • Scissors • Stapler • Natural found items (leaves, bark, gum nuts) • Glue • A dish for glue • Brush for glue • Bird food from a pet store

Instructions: • Collect leaves, bark, gum nuts or other natural findings from your backyard or even the park.

• Staple the top of the carton together.

• Punch a hole in the top of the carton and thread the string through, tying a knot to create a loop to hang the bird feeder.

• Cut out an insert/hole towards the base of the carton.

• Using glue, get your child to stick the natural found items to the bird feeder, to create a feeder that can blend in with the natural environment by mimicking the birds’ natural habitat.

• Let it dry.

• Fill the base with bird food and hang it on a tree in your garden, or from a high spot on your verandah/ balcony.

Notes: You may want to make this outside, where you can spot birds, and so that the mess is easier to clean up.

Remember kids, always get permission from your parents before you start.

It’s always a good idea to have a helper nearby.

THE EXPRESS TRIBUNE, JULY 29, 2012

World wide weird

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Get your weekly dose of the unusual and funny from across the globe!

The press-up bus!

The strongest athlete at this year’s Olympic Games won’t be winning any medals — it’s hard to compete when you weigh six tons.

Forget the athletes, check out this London bus doing push-ups at the Olympics.

An artist transformed a London doubledecker bus to promote the Olympics. Czech artist David Cerny created the unique red mechanical artwork in honour of the London 2012 games.

Cerny bought the six tonne bus in Holland before attaching two gigantic electrical arms which lift the body of the vehicle up and down. Since the masterpiece would be incomplete without sound effects, the bus is powered by an electrical engine so that each push-up is accompanied by a recording of sounds evoking tough physical effort.

Mr Cerny hopes the vehicle, named the London Booster, will become the unofficial mascot of the Games.

He said: “There is one common exercise for every sportsman in the world, and that is push-ups.”

SOURCE: WEB.ORANGE.CO.UK

Sky is the limit Imagine how ‘high’ they might be feeling! A total of 88 women skydivers of Russia’s Zhemchuzhina Rossii team have set a world record for the number of people linked together in a single arrangement.

The team made a flower over the town of Kolomna near Moscow. “With this result they beat last year’s record of the German parachutists who had managed to form a figure of 84 people,” the country’s sports ministry said in a statement.

It took the Russian athletes about a week to prepare for the performance and four attempts to perform the feat successfully, the statement said.

The team is planning to break the record with a figure of 100 people next summer.IANS

Around the world The Swiss sun-powered aircraft, Solar Impulse, proved that it’s all about energy as it landed back home in Switzerland after completing the final leg of its historic transcontinental flight.

The high-tech aircraft was greeted by an enthusiastic crowd of supporters at Payerne airport in western Switzerland two months after it took off from there on May 24th on a journey that took it from Europe to North Africa and back.

“This was an extraordinary adventure, not only because of what was achieved with this plane... but also because of the solid team,” Andre Borschberg, one of the co-founders of the project, said in a statement.

The pilot, Bertrand Piccard, took the plane up into a cloudless sky from an airfield near Toulouse, southern France, where it had waited for a week for the right weather conditions to complete a journey which took it to Spain, Morocco and back again to Switzerland. The high-tech aircraft, which has the wingspan of a large airliner but weighs no more than a saloon car, is fitted with 12,000 solar cells feeding four electric engines.

With the final stage completed, the 6,000-kilometre (3,700-mile) journey, which approximately covers the distance from Washington DC and London, became the longest to date for the aircraft after an inaugural flight to Paris and Brussels last year. The trip was intended as a rehearsal for a round-the-world flight planned for 2014 in an updated version of the plane. AFP

Top cop busts a move Who says the police don’t know how to have a bit of fun? A policeman entered into the Olympic spirit by entertaining crowds along the torch relay route with some impressive dance moves.

It happened as the Olympic Torch made its way through Sevenoaks, Kent, on day 63 of the nationwide relay.

Swept along by the carnival atmosphere, the unidentified policeman decided to provide the crowd with some entertainment as they waited for the torch.

His routine began with some robotic dance moves before he began to hop around on one leg. Encouraged by the reaction from the crowd, the officer attempted some breakdancing before finishing with an energetic hip thrust.

The moment was captured by photographers and on a mobile phone video camera and later uploaded onto YouTube. SOURCE: WEB.ORANGE.CO.UK

THE EXPRESS TRIBUNE, JULY 29, 2012

Did you know?

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s n i g i r O Word Bite the bullet To ‘bite the bullet’ is to endure a painful or otherwise unpleasant situation that is seen as unavoidable. It is often stated that it is derived historically from the practice of having a patient clench a bullet in his or her teeth as a way to cope with the extreme pain of a surgical procedure without p anaesthetic, though evidence for biting a bullet rather than a leather strap during surgery is sparse. It may also have evolved from the British empire expression “to bite the cartridge”, which dates to the Indian Rebellion of 1857. In this version of the etymology, the idea of tolerating necessary hardship refers to the British wish that the sepoys would ignore any small presence of animal fat in their paper cartridges.

It’s a good thing you don’t live in...

Ancient Sparta So you might think that you have it rough, what with school, homework and your parents nagging you to eat healthy and sleep on time BUT believe me, it could me a LOT worse!

When a Spartan baby was born, soldiers came to the house and examined it carefully to determine itss sstrength. If the baby was weak, it they threw it off a cliff or took it aw awa away to become a slave. Until the age of seven the child was reared by his mother, after which the child wa was given to the state. Every day, th the poor kids had to exercise and tr train with weapons. They were m made to walk without shoes, a and bathe in cold river water.

A Also they had to steal their own ffood or go hungry! If you think tthat the girls didn’t have to go through this, think again! Girls also were removed from the home at seven and sent to school. Here they learnt wrestling, gymnastics, were taught to fight and endured other physical training.

Spartans believed that strong mothers produced strong children.

Cool facts

There is only one pink bottlenose dolphin which has been discovered, in an inland lake in Louisiana, USA. China has the most goats in the world, they have over 170 Million.

A chicken with red earlobes will produce brown eggs, and a chicken with white earlobes will produce white eggs.

Snakes do not blink.

A squid’s eye can get as big as a basketball.

A puppy is born blind, deaf, and toothless.

Agrizoophobia is the fear of wild animals.

If you have a fear of chickens, then you actually have Alektorophobia.

There are 3,000 kinds of lice in the world.

The life of a housefly is only 14 days.

The lifespan of 75% of wild birds is 6 months.

THE EXPRESS TRIBUNE, JULY 29, 2012

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Fun & games

Want to be hi five’s artist of the week?

Send your drawing with your name and age to: hifive@tribune. com.pk

THE EXPRESS TRIBUNE, JULY 29, 2012

Make your way through the maze

SOURCE: PRINTACTIVITIES.COM

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