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All right. I've no time to go about talking at length on a bunch of separate posts. It's Smush Everything Into a Single Posting Day here at The Fusion, so buckle up tight, hang on by the seat of your pants, and create some unfortunate mixed metaphors in your spare time.

I don't know why I'm leading with this but let's just dedicate it to you fans of modernism in children's books, shall we? The blog Print & Pattern recently had a Kids Week, and you're all invited to coo over the sheer variety and general beauty of the selections. Kidlit Connection: I saw a Lola and Charlie selection nestled in there somewhere. Go wild.

They say you never forget your twelfth. Midwestern Lodestar, remembered for sweeping the MotherReader 48-Hour Book Challenge, has hosted the 12th Carnival of Children's Literature. By all accounts, this is without a doubt the largest Carnival to be hosted yet. If it were a pig it would win first prize in the Hog Contest. Well done.

For those of us who prefer to wear their words alongside reading and eating them, WATAT (which is to say, Adrienne) has compiled a list of useful literary tee sites on which you may buy various forms of apparel.

Posits J.L. Bell at Oz and Ends, would it be a good idea to postdate awards like the Newbery? Think about it. The Secret of the Andes tromped Charlotte's Web, but history has had the last laugh. Why not reward such a morbid chuckle? And while we DO have the Phoenix Awards, they don't really give a view to the best book of a single given year. They jump around a bit. By the end of Bell's piece, he suggests a particularly interesting solution that I'm all for. Go give it a peek.

From Oz to Alice then. Monica Edinger recently linked to this fascinating little article entitled, Alice's New Adventures: The story of how Lewis Carroll's masterpiece came to the Soviet Union is almost as strange as the book itself. I was particularly taken with this quote: " 'There's one important point about Carroll's books . . . Traditional fairy tales of that era -- be they British, German or Russian -- were rather fearsome, and the children in them were often afraid. 'Alice' is different; there's no fear in it. I think that's very important.' " That's one reason so many people like Alice. As a long forgotten commentator once pointed out, in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy is forever moaning about going home. The same cannot be said for plucky Alice.

From Oz to Alice and now to Pooh bear. I'm surprised no one has actually gone and created a kidlit blog with Pooh influences quite yet. I suppose that falls to me, eh? Ah well. The Brookeshelf has come up with an amazing link to Pathology in the Hundred Acre Wood: a neurodevelopmental perspective on A.A. Milne. This is the kind of link only the wife of a medical student would have access to. The piece itself really defies any kind of description.

Not only that, Ms. Brooke also had a piece on The Charlotte M. Smith Collection of Miniature Books that I was very taken with. As this posted last Thursday I'm sure you all already saw it (as, I am sure, you read this blog as regularly as possible, yes?), but I thought I'd link you to it just in case.

That's all I have on my plate. So much faster this way! Maybe I should make this a regular thing.