#TwistedTropes 14. Aladdin's miserly lamp

Photo from Pixabay

There's a very old story that has been handed down through the generations. In it, a young street urchin called Aladdin breaks into a cave. He finds a lamp, and when he rubs it, spectacular stuff occurs. Why Aladdin rubbed the lamp inside a dark cave when he could have be lighting it up baffles me. But rub it he did, and then the magic happened.

Out popped an all-powerful being who seemed more generous than a sozzled granny on Christmas eve. 'Your wish is my command' says the big orange genie who is duty bound to grant three wishes to the holder of the lamp. Aladdin is also in possession of a magic carpet and a magic ring. In fact everything is magic in this story.

But there is a catch.

As generous as the genie claimed to be, the only wish he couldn't (or wouldn't) fulfil was a wish for unlimited wishes. This was pretty useless as far as Aladdin was concerned, because he was a greedy little swine, who earned his sordid living by nicking other people's stuff. It was the first thing that occurred inside Aladdin's diseased imagination when the genie appeared; ask the genie for unlimited wishes, and you could milk this golden goose until the cows came home (that really is the worst mixed metaphor I've ever seen - Editor). But Aladdin didn't get away with it - the genie said no.

Even though he was a mighty, powerful being, perhaps the orange genie had limited resources (he never disclosed his tax returns so we will never know). Or maybe he was just as tight as a camel's bum in a sandstorm. Perhaps you couldn't expect him to keep giving out free stuff ad infinitum. Or maybe too many wishes was a bad thing, even for a greedy little thief like Aladdin. Ultimately, restricting him to an arbitrary three wishes actually turned out to be a good thing, because it made Aladdin think about what was really important to him.

Restricted resources sometimes do that to you. You make the most of the limited chances you have, and necessity is the mother of invention. Teachers make do a lot of the time, because there are no genies or lamps in school, and a MAT isn't a magic carpet (this is now officially ridiculous - Editor). Pity really, but that's probably the reason many teachers are insanely creative. So teachers, if you had a magic lamp - what three wishes would you make?

At the end of the story, Aladdin ends up obscenely rich and marries the princess (as you do) but owning the lamp takes a great toll on him. After wrestling with his conscience, he eventually decides to release the genie. The big orange genie loses all his cosmic powers but eventually becomes the head of state of a very large country. Perhaps the biggest country there is. Everyone says so. Meanwhile, the princess has triplets, and Aladdin is left at home literally holding the babies while she fulfils her official obligations. Aladdin is accused of using performance enhancing rugs, but gets away with it when he receives a presidential pardon (please let me out of here - Editor). Any way you look at this, you should be careful what you wish for.

Next time: Cupid's bent arrow

Previous posts in the #TwistedTropes series
1. Pavlov's drooling dog
2. Chekhov's smoking gun
3. Occam's bloody razor
4. Schrödinger’s undead cat
5. Pandora's closed box
6. Frankenstein's well-meaning monster
7. Thor's lost hammer
8. Noah's character ark
9. Hobson's multiple choice
10. Fibonacci's annoying sequence
11. Sod's unlucky law
12. Dante's lukewarm inferno
13. Plato's empty cave


Aladdin's miserly lamp by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Posted by Steve Wheeler from Learning with e's