Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur by Mordecai Richler (illustrated by Dušan Petričić).
Title: Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur.
Author: Mordecai Richler (illustrated by Dušan Petričić).
Genre: Literature, fiction, children's lit.
Country: Canada.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1987.
Summary: When his parents return from a safari with a cute little green lizard, Jacob Two-Two is thrilled. But as the days pass, Dippy grows bigger... and bigger... and he begins to attract some very big attention. Jacob soon finds that Dippy isn't a lizard at all. Before they know it, Jacob and Dippy are on the run from the entire government!
My rating: 8.5/10.
My review:
♥ But now that he was eight years old he felt that he was too grown up to go by such a childish name. All the same, it stuck to him. After all, he still had two older brothers and two older sisters. And, as they were quick to point out, if he had once been two plus two plus two years old, he was now - come to think of it - only two times two times two years old. Not much of a difference, they said, but they really didn't understand.
♥
♥ (But Noah wasn't all bad. He often allowed Jacob Two-Two to tag along with him on his newspaper route. In fact, he actually allowed Jacob Two-Two to deliver the newspaper himself to any house with a sign that warned BEWARE OF DOG.)
♥ She didn't drink beer or wine or whiskey, which was no good for you, or even lie down on a sofa to daydream, which was even worse for you.
♥ Like him, he learned, dinosaurs had a reputation for being dimwitted. Even so, they had been lords of all life on earth for something like seventy million years. Their name came from Greek and means "terrible lizards." In their time, dinosaurs had been gigantic creatures, the largest weighing eighty tons and measuring twenty-seven yards. They had disappeared from the face of the earth about sixty-five million years ago. Nobody knew why for sure. Maybe it was because of their tiny brains, or it could have been due to the fact that other creatures ate their eggs. It was also possible that they had all gotten sick at the same time. Or that there had been a shower of meteorites on earth, wiping them out.
..It was once thought that yet another breed of dinosaur, the Stegosaurus, had two brains: a little one in its head and a much larger one at the base of its spine. In 1912 this inspired a poem written by Bert L. Taylor, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune. It began:
Behold the mighty dinosaur, Famous in prehistoric lore.
Not only for his power and strength
But also for his intellectual length.
You will observe by these remains
The creature had two sets of brains
One in his head (the usual place),
The other in his spinal base.
♥
"I'm going to call him Dippy," Jacob Two-Two said. "I'm going to call him Dippy."
♥ Dippy didn't look like anything anybody on the lake had ever seen before. He had an enormous green head, somewhat scaly, with big red eyes and a wet darting pink tongue as long as a yardstick. There were one hundred and two teeth in his mouth, most of them as high and sharp as the biggest nails you ever saw but gleaming white. His forelegs were very short, ending in scaly fingers with sharp claws. His hind legs were much thinner, far longer, and also ended in sharp claws. He had a huge humpy back, a fat belly, and a curling tail longer than everything else about him put together. Let's face it, if you weren't a personal friend, Dippy looked like something out of a horror movie. Jacob Two-Two thought he was beautiful.
♥ Late one evening as Mr. and Mrs. Sloshed were driving home from a cocktail party they saw - or thought they saw - Jacob Two-Two and Dippy bounding across a field. Mr. Sloshed promptly slammed on the brakes and turned to his wife, trembling. "Did you just see what I saw?" he asked.
"Certainly not," she lied, "because I'm not an old drunkard like you."
Right there and then Mr. Sloshed swore to give up drinking for life.
♥
♥ It was a disgrace. A scandal. And that night an outraged Professor Wacko Kilowatt summoned Jacob Two-Two's father to the club and presented him with a petition signed by all the Snobbers.
"Look here," Wacko said, "we are now, in spite of what hopelessly inferior people say, a very tolerant club. We have come to accept a few members who are black, or Italian or Jewish or Greek, so long as they are also filthy rich. We even accept children for swimming classes whose parents," he added, looking hard at Jacob Two-Two's father, "were not intelligent enough to inherit money and actually work for a living. But we must draw the line somewhere. We will simply not accept any green monsters in our club. That beast must not trample our grass anymore."
♥ A think tank is not quite the same as either a tropical fish tank or an army tank. A think tank is made up of a group of people who are paid to think hard and deep. Every president or prime minister has one. Even the prime minister of Canada.
The prime minister of Canada was the Right Honorable Perry Pleaser. On awakening each morning, Perry Pleaser, even before he brushed his teeth, would hug himself and kiss his reflection in the mirror. He wanted all the people to love him at least as much as he loved himself, which was proving very, very difficult.
Like presidents and prime ministers everywhere, Perry Pleaser seldom went anywhere without his yes people. He had three yes men and three yes women.
Yes people are highly recommended. Everybody deserves two, never mind six. It is the duty of yes people to say yes to everything you suggest, no matter how foolish. So when Petty Pleaser arrived at his office each morning and broke into his famous smile and sang out, "Don't you think I'm absolutely, totally, one hundred percent wonderful?"
Yes, would say the yes men, and the yes women would call out yes, too.
..Yes, said the yes women, getting in first for once, and then yes, said the yes men.
Then the prime minister said, "Now watch this," and he went on to tie his shoelaces without help from anybody.
"Wow!"
"Did you see that?"
The yes women applauded and the yes men whistled and stamped their feet.
♥ Professor Wacko Kilowatt immediately put two hundred scientists to work. They sent satellites into outer space and shoved deep probes into the ground. They traveled from coast to coast, studying animal and plant behavior. They took cloud and soil samples. Then, after they had collected ten tons of data, they fed it into a computer large enough to fill a hockey arena. Two months later Professor Wacko Kilowatt burst into Perry Pleaser's office. "I've got it," he said.
"Shoot," Perry Pleaser said.
"On balance, to the best of my knowledge, with all the information available to us at this point in time, taking one consideration with another, allowing for computer error, human folly, miracles, and unforeseen difficulties... it seems likely that next year it will be colder in January than July."
"This man is a genius," Perry pleaser said.
Yes, said the yes men, and yes, said the yes women, too. "Professor Wacko Kilowatt, I hereby appoint you head of my think tank. You will also serve as my scientific troubleshooter."
♥
Wacko slid down the tree. He pulled his hair. He stamped his feet. "But he can't be a dinosaur, you idiots. There hasn't been one alive on earth for sixty-five million years, give or take a year or two."
Wacko and the three paleontologists conferred. They consulted books. They studied charts. They appealed to their computers. Finally, Wacko was ready to pronounce. "We have," he said, "in accordance with the facts and our unrivaled scientific knowledge, come to a conclusion that cannot be disputed. Dippy is either a hoax or a figment of Jacob Two-Two's imagination."
"What do you mean, a hoax?" Jacob Two-Two's father demanded.
"Well," Wacko said, "how do we know he's not an elephant wearing a Halloween costume?"
"What's a figment of the imagination" Jacob Two-Two asked.
"I mean, and I'm speaking scientifically, you little squirt, that you made him up in your head and he doesn't really exist."
"But here he is," Jacob Two-Two said. "Here he is."
"Here he is, only if you are eight years old, maybe not doing so hot in the second grade, and have not had the advantage of my celebrated intelligence."
"Dippy is a dinosaur," Jacob Two-Two said, "a genuine Diplodocus."
♥ "The professor's nutty as a fruitcake," Dippy said. "I am so a dinosaur. Not a hoax. Not a figment of your imagination. But a Diplodocus, just like you said."
"Dippy, you can talk! You can talk!"
"Of course I can talk, but you mustn't reveal that to anybody else. Or next thing I know they'll expect me to go to school or get a job." Dippy shed a huge tear.
"Today is my birthday."
"Many happy returns. How old are you, Dippy?"
"Sixty-five million two hundred thousand and two hundred and twenty-two years old. I can talk and I can read, but I can't write."
"Oh, my, aren't you ashamed? I mean, at your age?"
"Please, don't you start criticizing me," Dippy said, shedding another tear. "You're the only friend I've got in the whole wide world.
Jacob Two-Two hugged Dippy and kissed him on the cheek.
"How could I be expected to hold a pen or a pencil in these ridiculous hands?" Dippy said, raising an enormous claw.
"I see what you mean."
"No, you don't. The truth is, I'm an airhead. A real bubble-brain."
"Me too," Jacob Two-Two sang out. "Me too."
"That's why my species has been extinct for sixty-five million years, so far as I know."
♥ Dippy explained that he had been a mere babe when that slight earthquake in Kenya had dislodged him from his sixty five-million-year-old prison, shooting him up from far below the surface of the earth, through the steam jet, right onto the chest of Jacob Two-Two's father.
"My good luck," Jacob Two-=Two said.
"But possibly not mine. This is the wrong age for me, Jacob. The way I see it, the future is in computers and I can't even hold a pencil. Professor Kilowatt is right. I'm a freak of nature. Ugly beyond compare."
♥ "I found a picture book about Canada, and there were all those high, high mountains. If there are any of us left I figure that's where they'd be hiding out."
"Oh, you mean the Rockies out in B.C.," Jacob Two-Two said.
"B.C. Right, right!" Dippy began to beat the earth with his forelegs. "B.C. is where I come from and B.C. is where I'm a-heading for. Yippee for B.C.!"
"Dippy, you're getting thins mixed up. I know that in other countries B.C. stands for the years before Christ, but in Canada it stands for the province of British Columbia, which isn't quite the same thing."
"It's a good sign, though, isn't it? B.C., B.C. If there is any of us left, that's where they'll be."
♥ The prime minister wasn't feeling too hot. He had just returned from a disastrous national meet-the-people tour. Out there in Vancouver, he had plunged into a crowd in a shopping mall, saying, as was his habit, "Would anybody like my autograph? Or possibly some of you would like to kiss my hand? Go ahead. I don't mind." But when the people stepped forward it was to throw rotten eggs on him.
They pelted him with tomatoes in beautiful downtown Edmonton. They hissed him in Toronto. They heckled him in Montreal, where a man stood up and shouted, "If you're so clever, Perry Pleaser, tell us how long was the Seven Years War?"
"I do not respond to trick questions."
♥
And even as the family stood there, grieving, the cottage filled with an incredible noise. It shook and shuddered. Something was happening outside. Everyone ran out to look.
"Freeze, everybody!" A voice called through a loudspeaker.
"Hands up! We suffer from itchy trigger fingers. Har, har, har!"
A helicopter was whirring overhead. A mini-submarine surfaced on the lake, its missile launcher pointed right at the cottage. There were tanks everywhere. The cottage was surrounded by soldiers carrying sub machine guns. "Is it safe now?" a trembly little voice said.
"Yes, Prime Minister, it's quite safe."
So Perry Pleaser squirted forward. "In the name of the people of Canada, I demand that you surrender your dragon to em at once."
♥ The following items were discovered to be missing:
6 cans of salmon
6 cans of tuna
1 can opener
1 loaf spiced rye bread
1 pound homemade chopped chicken livers
1 box brownies
Various items of clothing
1 glee club songbook, in case he was feeling blue
1 flashlight
1 Swiss Army knife
1 frying pan
Noah's nylon tent, sleeping bag, and backpack
1 map of Canada
The army intelligence group pondered the list, scratching their heads. Finally one of them said, "Looks like the little fella was planning to set out on a trip."
"Good thinking, Bailey, but where to?"
The intelligence officers studied the list again. "Possibly, just possibly, somewhere in Canada," Bailey said.
"What makes you think that?"
"Well," he said, "after you've been in intelligence for twenty years, you get to trust your hunches."
♥ One, featuring a picture of Jacob Two-Two, read:
WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE
CANADA'S MOST DANGEROUS DESPERADO
JACOB TWO-TWO
$1,000,000 REWARD
Then, at the bottom of the poster, in print so small that you needed a magnifying glass to read it:
Due to a shortage of funds, the government of Canada will pay out this reward at the rate of one dollar a year over a million years.
It was signed:
The Right Honorable Perry Pleaser,
Your lovable, huggable Prime Minister
The other poster, featuring a most unflattering drawing of Dippy, read:
VICIOUS, VILE DRAGON AT LARGE
WANTED BY
PERRY PLEASER, THE DRAGON-SLAYER
Distinguishing characteristics:
He's left-handed and there is a crescent-shaped mole under his right armpit. If in doubt, take his blood pressure. It should read NORMAL.
♥
Jacob Two-Two didn't want to complain, but Dippy, in some respects, was an awkward traveling companion. If he was happy and wagged his tail, he could knock down a stand of trees wider than a team of lumberjacks. If he sneezed, telephone poles would be blown over one mile out of camp. Once, when they had settled down less than a mile outside of Saskatoon, Dippy farted. "Pardon me," he said. But the fact is, he created such a thundering in town that storm warnings went up.
There was an even bigger problem: satisfying Dippy's ten-ton appetite.
For the first few weeks Dippy was content to eat once a day, after dark, chewing his way through a two-acre potato field or an acre of sweet corn. When they moved farther west he would munch through a field of wheat or barley faster than any harvesting machine yet devised by man. He also acquired a taste for apple trees, branches and all, fields of unripe pumpkins, and above all, acres of onions.
♥ "Do kids have a vote?"
"No, but their parents do. Why, I have two kids myself."
"Yeah, and what good are they? Tell me, Pleaser, if you come home from an exhausting trip, what is the first thing they ask you?"
"Did I bring them a present."
"And if you bundle them into all their winter clothing and boots and scarves, because they just have to play in the snow, what happens five minutes later?"
"They want to come in for a pee."
"Let's face it, Pleaser, kids aren't like you or me. They're childish. Why, you put two of them in a room and before you know it they're biting and pinching and scratching each other."
"Weren't you ever a child, Wacko?"
"Yes, but things were different then. I was perfect."
"So was I."
"But I was more perfect than you were," Wacko said, kicking Perry Pleaser in the shin.
"No, you weren't," Pleaser said, kicking him back harder.
"Oh, yes I was too," Wacko said, pinching him.
"Oh, no you weren't," Pleaser insisted, spitting at him.
In an instant they were rolling over and over in the dirt, pinching and scratching and biting. Two generals had to separate them.
"Who started this?" one of the generals asked.
"He did," Perry Pleaser whined between sobs.
"Liar! You did!"
"Sez who, shorty?"
"Sez me, mutton-head!"
"This has got to stop," the general pleaded. "You are setting a bad example for the troops."
♥
♥ "Wait," Wacko said. "Let me think. Kid like Jacob Two-Two in pizza parlor. Green moving boulder wit red eyes. Flying trees. Wind that stinks of garlic sausage. There has to be a connection there somewhere. Let me feed the information into my computer..."
♥ "When do we attack?"
Wacko yanked a twenty-foot-long sheet out of his computer. "We have researched some of the most famous military decisions in history. We know the precise hour the siege of Troy began, the very moment Hannibal started across the Alps, and the exact second Caesar wet his feet in the Rubicon. As a result, we have been able to come up with the most favorable moment to begin any attack. The moment, gentlemen, that absolutely guarantees victory in the field."
"And when is that?" the generals asked, enormously impressed.
"It is our considered opinion that we should attack somewhere between the first light of dawn and midnight. Why don't we toss a coin?"
"We attack at the first light of dawn," the generals insisted.
"C-c-c-couldn't we wait for the second light?" Perry Pleaser asked.
Y-y-yes, sad the yes men, and y-y-yes, said the yes women, too.
"As you wish, but then Canada expects every man to do his duty."
"I-I-I have to go to the toilet right away," Perry Pleaser said.
♥ "But I'm a law-abiding citizen. In more than sixty-five million years I've never even had a ticket for jaywalking."
"Okay, okay. You're perfect."
"I never said that. But people - bah! You've only been around for three million years or so and you've already made a garbage dump out of the earth. When we were lords of the planet there were no factories belching stinky fumes into the air or spilling nasty chemicals into the rivers and oceans. We kept the earth squeaky clean."
"Yeah, sure. But there were also no airplanes or hospitals or TV or books or baseball or glee clubs. Admit it, Dippy, in all your millions of years ion earth you guys didn't even invent the wheel. Or chopped chicken liver."
♥
"Is that how you really feel?" Jacob Two-Two asked. "Yes," Dippy said.
"All right, then," Jacob Two-Two said, beginning to pack his things. "I'll leave right now."
"See if I care," Dippy said.
But as he watched Jacob Two-Two trudge off into the dark and rainy and thundering night, Dippy was weeping buckets. Good-bye, old friend, he thought. Good-bye and good luck. Maybe someday you'll understand that I knew the enemy was approaching with their tanks and heat-seeking missiles and bombers, and that I couldn't bear to have you around once the final battle began.
♥ "Since when did you become so fond of kids?"
"Well, Jakey, kids are a nuisance and that's the truth, but there is hope. Scientifically speaking, on average, kids grow one year older every year. In fact, twenty years after they are born all kids become adults and therefore acceptable company. Isn't that wonderful news?"
♥ There were the WANTED posters he had brought back from the convenience store that time. The VICIOUS, VILE DRAGON AT LARGE poster was intact, but not the poster saying WANTED, DEAD OR ALIVE, CANADA'S MOST DANGEROUS DESPERADO. Dippy had torn Jacob Two-Two's picture out of that poster. Obviously he had taken it with him.
Oh, my, Jacob Two-Two thought, tears of joy coming to his eyes. I'm forgiven. I'm forgiven. His heart soared. He wanted to cheer.
♥
♥
