This week's column is dedicated to all those people who have almost burnt down their homes because they took a children's story literally.
It can be difficult sometimes, when we're very little, to tell truth from fiction in the books and TV shows we're exposed to on a daily basis. In our early years, we accept what's put in front of us as fact: Owls are smart; worms can read; bears can shoot love from their stomachs. It's just the way things are.
Parents don't do a lot to allay the confusion: You know where your old teeth go?
We sell them to a fairy. You know where that Spiderman kaleidoscope came from? A man snuck it in here through the chimney. You know what your sister came from? A bird.
It's only as we age that we start to be able to pick out the untruths. Unforgiving experience teach us the hard truths one by one: fish aren't always friendly; Frosted Flakes don't make you good at skiing; not all short people have special powers.
By the time we reach high school, generally speaking, we've ironed most of these out. By my mid-teens, I was pretty sure I had expunged the delusions. There were a couple of grey areas - whether or not girls admired ones ability to identify rocks and whether accelerating into curves was a good idea were still questions outstanding - but on the whole I was pretty confident I wasn't harbouring a lot of misconceptions.
I was wrong. And it was because of Ali Baba.
Before I explain, a quick and unsettling jaunt into classic children's literature.
Nowadays, most kids' stories are pretty soft. As a society, we have come to the conclusion that themes like arson, sexual assault, wholesale slaughter and so on shouldn't come up in bedtime stories. It's the reason books like Marty Mob Boss Gets Answers and Toby the Tumour Wins Again don't make it into print.
Not so, back in the day. Ever read an old book of fairytales? They're horrible. Imagine trying to pitch some of our favourite classics today.
Children's author: "So, basically, these two German kids almost die of exposure after getting deliberately abandoned by their parents in the forest, but then they find this house where an old lady lives, but it turns out she's a cannibal, so they kill her by burning her alive. There'll be cute pictures."
Prospective publisher: "That seems kind of dark."
"Fair point. OK. How about this: A girl breaks into a house, eats some porridge, breaks a chair and then falls asleep in a bed."
"Well, that's nicer, I guess. Then what? Does she meet friends?"
"No she gets torn apart by bears."
"I don't know. What if we say she gets rescued by a pony?"
"Who am I, the Family Channel?"
The Arabian Nights, where the story of Ali Baba comes from, were no exception. For those of you unfamiliar with hyper-violent literature, the Arabian Nights came about when a murderous king's new wife tried to stop him from killing her by regaling him with 1,001 of the most disturbing children's stories ever written.
A typical Arabian Nights story goes like this: "Once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess with slaves who was kidnapped and tortured by a horrible manmonster. Then there was some magic plus some random killings, and then everybody got dismembered. The end. Sleep well, Sweetie."
Ali Baba was very much along these lines.
In the original Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, a criminal gang sets out to kill Ali Baba after he removes his brother's body from a treasure cave, where they had killed and quartered him. The thieves decide the best way to catch Ali Baba is to hide in jars and get themselves delivered to his home. Fortunately, Ali Baba's slave sees through the ruse and kills the criminals by pouring boiling oil into the containers.
Sleep well, Sweetie. What's important here is that, aside from the idea that slavery is fine and murder solves problems, I also took away from that story this fact: Oil boils.
Fact check: It doesn't. Not without some serious complications, anyway.
Somehow, while all the other misapprehensions from childhood fell away in the face of real world experience, this idea remained tucked away at the back of my mind unchallenged. Oil boils. You can use it in case of thieves.
This came to a head one evening when I was 15 years old, and I found myself at home alone and hungry. At the time, it seemed to me that the easiest, healthiest and safest way to solve this was to jury-rig a deep fryer and use it to make French fries.
This is where Ali Baba became a problem.
To make French fries, I reasoned, drawing on my knowledge from childhood, you just have to fill a pot with cooking oil, bring it to a nice, rolling boil, and put potato bits in it.
Turns out that when you heat up oil on the stove - and then get bored waiting for the bubbles to start and leave to watch TV for a while and come back to lift the lid like 40 minutes later - the oil doesn't come to a nice rolling boil so much as a terrifying four-foot high column of flame.
To make a long story short, I quickly responded by panicking. What followed was a series of increasingly dangerous crises involving dropped pots, spilled molten fire, smoke alarms and a lot of saying, "Mom's not going to like this."
My mother came home some time later to find the smoking remains of a pot of oil on the porch, a charred crater in the kitchen floor and me cowering in the living room, swearing never to cook again. Which, thanks to Chef Boyardee, I've come pretty close to achieving.
Looking back, it makes me wonder what other nuggets of wisdom are tucked away in there.
Bicycles can fly, right?
