Lois H. Gresh - The Truth Behind a Series of Unfortunate Events: Eyeballs, Leeches, Hypnotism, and Orphans—Exploring Lemony Snickets World

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To Beagan, the small man who danced at the fire hall: love forever, once desired, love forever, and then you expired.

This is the book They dont want you to read. It has hip, cool, fun facts about the Lemony Snicket world that you cant get anywhere else. It has games, anecdotes (which means little stories that allow the author to ramble incoherently for ten minutes), and little-known references about history and science.

Were going to dig beneath the fiction into the realities of the Snicket universe: Could all of those horrible things really happen to the Baudelaire orphans? If so, how could they happen?

Here are some examples of the miserable topics youll discover in this book:

What really happens to orphans? What legal rights and types of protection do orphans have? Could someone like the evil Count Olaf really marry the fourteen-year-old Violet?

Is it possible to be allergic to peppermints? What are leeches? What kind of matchbox-sized crab could live in a tin shack at Prufrock Prep? What do crabs eat? What type of funguslight tan, constantly dripping juiceis growing on the ceiling of the shack? Hypnosiswell give you a tell-all chapter that leaves you with real knowledge: Could you be hypnotized (right now, perhaps?), and how would your friends break the spells?

Think of this book as a cool kids Lemony Snicket Monarch, Cliffs, or Barrons Notes. (Those are books that high school and college kids study so they can pass exams about subjects they know nothing about.)

Think of this book as the Ultimate Book Report about Lemony Snicket.

It was near Desolate Lake in the fall of 1990 that Carolyn Catastrophe planted a shrub that changed the world forever. It was a writhing mass of vines called the Nettle of Frankfurt. Its purple stems were littered with sour berries and flowers that smelled like the sewers.

Carolyn was delighted. By the time the snow melted next April, she and her best friend, Jonquil, would be able to sit beneath the Nettle and cast its berries into the water. The berries would float on the mud and eventually slide into the lower muck of Desolate Lake, where flake-haired horny toads would eat them, gain gas, and belch all those gorgeous bubbles to the surface of the water. Ah, I cant wait! Carolyn cried.

Jonquil, who was thirteen, peered at her from beneath his grandfathers cap. I know the berries are the best for producing toad gas, but, Carolyn, how will we sit beneath the shrub long enough to throw berries into the lake? The Nettle stinks like sewers.

Ive thought of that, said Carolyn, and it will no longer be a problem. Ive invented a solution.

Carolyn could invent most anything. Shed created Liquid Squid Houseplant Fertilizer, which gardeners used all over the world. Shed created a machine that cleaned pollutants from ordinary city air; her Purifying Roto-Whirlers were on the roofs of skyscrapers everywhere.

And now, Carolyn Catastrophe had created a Nettle of Frankfurt that cast only the sweetest pheromonesa word that means fragrance that makes people dizzy with good thoughtsacross Lake Desolate.

When we throw berries into the water next April, Jonquil, she said, people will dance for miles around.

And she was right, for next spring, as the snow melted and the flake-haired horny toads rose from the lake, Carolyns Nettle blossomed and its aroma filled the air for miles around, and everywhere people stopped fighting and grubbing for money, and people danced together upon the shores of Lake Desolate.

Now in the case of the Baudelaire orphansViolet, Klaus, and Sunnylife was as bad as the smell of the original Nettle of Frankfurt. Yet life got a little betterjust as it did with Carolyn and the people who lived near Lake Desolateeach time Violet invented a contraption to get them out of a jama jam, in this case, meaning all those times when the evil Count Olaf tried to kidnap, torture, roast alive, or otherwise hurt the children.

And while Carolyn Catastrophe may or may not be real, and she may or may not be based on the early teenage years of the authorand while there may or may not be a Nettle of Frankfurt on the banks of Lake Desolate, nor any flake-haired horny toads (though there may be some gill-footed sapsucking eagles)there is indeed an underlying truth about the brilliant inventions devised by Violet Baudelaire.

And that underlying truth is that Violets inventions could indeed be real, and that you, the reader of this dreadful book, could indeed make her inventions yourself.

In this chapter, well take a look at some of Violets inventions and tell you how to make them. Well also have fun pondering Violets more unusual creations, and well introduce you to some of the real worlds youngest inventors of really cool stuff.

Do you remember how Aunt Josephine tells the orphans in The Wide Window (Book the Third) that the telephone is a very dangerous device because it can electrocute people? Klaus insists that the telephone is quite safe. And, of course, Violet declares that shes built a telephone and would be happy to take apart Aunt Josephines telephone to explain how it works. This way, figures Violet, Aunt Josephine will no longer be afraid of telephones.

While reading the book, did you wonder how Violet might build her telephone? Well, I did, and so I read a lot of books and papers about telephones. And then I thought about the telephone for a few weeks. I wondered if Violet created a regular telephone or a cellular one.

I was interested to learn that a man named Elisha Gray invented a telephone around the same time that the more famous Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Each man zoomed to the patent office, but Bell got there firstliterally, within hours of Grays arrivaland after a lengthy legal battle, Bell was given credit as the true inventor of the telephone. In fact, I thought this stuff was so interesting that I wrote about it for you in Fascinating Tidbit #1 (see box at right).

But, for now, lets get back to Violet and how she might have built her telephone.

A telephone is actually a simple device. It has a speaker near your ear and a microphone near your mouth. The speaker is tiny and might cost fifty cents. The microphone can be made of carbon granules pressed between two thin pieces of metal. As you talk, sound waves compress and decompress the granules.

Fascinating Tidbit #1: Who Really Invented the Telephone?

Everyone thinks that Alexander Graham Bell was the one and only inventor of the telephone. This is what we all learned in school.

But this is not quite accurate.

During the 1870s, when Bell patented his telephone, another guy named Elisha Gray created a telephone, too. After a long legal battle, Bell won the right to proclaim himself inventor of the telephone.