Ron's Info-Closet Annex
The online extension of Ron's Info-Closet.
Book links are usually to my Powell's affiliate program; game links are usually to Funagain Games, and benefit the Games to the Rescue Project.
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Ron Hale-Evans
rwhe@ludism.org
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Beating depression: Had a bout of black depression this week. I guess it wasn't so bad as depression goes; Marty pointed out that I could walk around, and I replied that I didn't want to kill or cut myself either. Still, I've had my depression fairly under control for a number of years now, and getting blindsided is no fun. I found myself sleeping a lot and fighting with Marty for hours with no reason. On the day it broke, the way a fever breaks, Marty left me to myself and I realised what an incredible asshole I had been to people around me. I apologised to her and did what I could to patch things up with everyone else. It looks as if my relationships are on the mend.
Working for the weekend: What's so great about spending your Sunday alone at work? Not much, unless you're doing it because you had very strong personal reasons for taking a day off during the week and it would be irresponsible to take it as a vacation day. Then you swallow hard and remember that being alone at work can be kind of fun. You can crank away at whatever you have to do without constant interruptions from your cow orkers, and if you have speakers (I should have brought Marty's), you can play Web radio as loud as you want. I got to hear the most recent two episodes of On the Media, myself.
Memory palace effects: I'm experimenting with memory palaces, and I found an odd effect, if it was indeed an effect. After putting my to-do list into a memory palace based on my apartment, and then sleeping on it, my dreams were full of it, and I awoke extremely motivated to do some things I had been putting off, such as...
A website revamp: As I mentioned before, the old home page of the Center for Ludic Synergy needs work. It's much too idiosyncratically philosophical and gives people the wrong idea of what I'm about. For example, I recently asked one gamer to contribute his information to the CLS. He read the front page, and asked, "Is it OK if I'm not religious?" Another person wrote me last month to ask me to be her guru. Really! So you see why I'm worried. I also wanted to get all the CLS projects on one page, finally. A revamp of the front page is nearly ready. Meanwhile, my game group Seattle Cosmic has got a new logo, thanks to SC stalwart Dave Howell (see above).
Weird Games Table: The first permanent floating weird games theme table at Seattle Cosmic was a small but definite success. I started it so that the choices of games available to me and others at game night were broadened. This first time, we played Ploy, "Gateway" from Sid Sackson's Sly system, and Hungarian Tarokk. Check the SC wiki if you care.
The Knight: Halfway through The Giant Horse of Oz, book 22 of my first run through the forty canonical Oz books, I lost the book! I had to start reading The Knight (2004) by Gene Wolfe sooner than I had planned to. I finished it tonight. Marty laughed out loud at the jacket blurbs, which essentially said that Wolfe bested Tolkien and entered the realm of Homer. I would like nothing better than to tell you it is true, but it isn't. Wolfe is a great SF writer, and I do think the Book of the New Sun approaches Tolkien, but The Knight doesn't, unless I'm missing something very important -- and one usually does with Wolfe, so take my comments cautiously. Like the Knight himself, The Knight is head and shoulders above its peers, but it's not the best thing Wolfe has ever written, and it's not the best fantasy I have ever read. And sad to say, while Wolfe is far from a one-trick pony, one of his tricks seems to be dazzling you into thinking that he has more tricks than he does. I'm starting to see the bottom of his saddlebag of tricks. He did teach me something about chivalry, though, and that's a very new trick, at least for me.
Now I'm going to reread Wicked by Gregory Maguire, to slake my slakeless thirst for Oziana. I guess we'll have to buy the Broadway cast album soon.
Yawn. Bedtime and I have a headache. I wonder which will win...
Entered 01:33 [/personal/friday5] permalink
I visited Piecepack.org yesterday and saw that at long last, James Kyle's seminal article on the piecepack from Grampa Barmo's Discount Games Magazine has been posted.
I also noticed that you can download beautiful, colourblind-friendly JCD printable piecepacks there now too.
Finally, the piecepack has just made an appearance on MonkeyFilter also.
Entered 14:05 [/games/game_systems] permalink
Markdown: Markdown is a human-readable markup language that can also be parsed by computers. It's really cool! This blog entry is written in Markdown and converted to HTML on the fly.
Productivity: I am making better use of my time lately, getting more writing and game design done. I have had slightly more energy and have been in a slightly better mood. It reminds me of the hypothesis that most people are already living at or above the level of their own cognitive resources, and that so-called "geniuses" have only a little more razzmatazz than the average human being. Therefore, the reasoning goes, if one can raise her own resources just a little bit, she'll cross a threshold and be able to do tremendous things.
Game design: Marty and I started working spontaneously on a second entry to the latest piecepack game design competition. We don't think it has much chance to win, but it's fun to design anyway.
Seattle Cosmic: Over the 4+ years it has been in existence, the focus of the game group I founded, Seattle Cosmic, has shifted significantly toward games that don't interest me. It has been disappointing and frustrating, but last night I announced an initiative to (a) reintroduce regular Cosmic Encounter games, and (b) have a regular "alternative games theme table" at which would be played the kind of oddball game I like. Response so far has been mostly positive, and I am glad.
Halfway through Oz: I am now reading canonical Oz book 21, The Gnome King of Oz (1927), so I am more than halfway through the Famous Forty. Unless Marty and I have a windfall, I am going to pause at book 23, Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz (1929), which is the latest one I currently own. Although I already have sources lined up for the next ten Oz books (through the end of Ruth Plumly Thompson's tenure as Royal Historian in 1939), at a book a day, my Oz habit is getting expensive. Instead, I am going to plunge into Gene Wolfe's latest novel, The Knight (2004), which will take me at least a week or two.
Mom: As I've mentioned before, my mother has a kind of senile dementia closely related to Alzheimer's, if not Alzheimer's itself. The disease is not yet in its advanced stages, and she is reasonably well medicated given the current state of the art, as far as I can tell. She has good periods and bad periods. For the last couple of weeks she's been in a good period. I try to call her every day, but usually my calls are a couple of days apart. Lately she's been bringing up things I talked to her about in our previous conversation, and mentioning things that have happened in her life since I last talked to her. Since Alzheimer's research is advancing incredibly rapidly, it gives me hope that if we can just keep her stabilised as long as possible, an actual cure for Alzheimer's will be found in time to help her.
Entered 12:14 [/personal/friday5] permalink
This blog is now running Markdown for Blosxom. Markdown is a human-readable markup language that can also be parsed by computers. I like it a lot! It seems to be the realisation of what the Setext project set out to do a decade ago, before its designers lost their gumption and disappeared. It certainly makes writing these blog entries a lot easier. (The first post here that explicitly invokes Markdown functionality is A little song about Grampa.)
One thing that isn't made clear at the Markdown site is that if you are already using HTML for your Blosxom blog posts, you can pretty much drop in the Markdown plugin and start using it right away without affecting your old posts.
Entered 14:17 [/news] permalink
I swore I would never write lyrics to the tune of "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer", but sadly, here some are. My wife Marty co-wrote them. She thinks my Ozzy obsession is silly but likes to hear about the characters secondhand.
Grampa got run over by Kabumpo,
Limpin' home from Ozma's chic soirée.
Elephants don't like iv'ry prosthetics,
So if you wear one, don't get in their way!
That's the chorus. You probably don't want to hear the verses.
Entered 13:56 [/books/oz] permalink
Grampa's got himself an Emergency Game Kit:
Grampa, too, had much to occupy him, oiling his gun, packing his knapsack and polishing his sword and game leg. Many old soldiers do a lot of talking about game legs, but Grampa had the real genuine article. It buckled on at the knee and was an oblong red and white ivory box that opened out like a checker board when one wanted to play. Jointed neatly on the end of this was another red box that Grampa used for a foot, and that contained the little red figures one used for playing. The game itself was known as scrum and was a great favorite in Ragbad, being a bit like checkers, a bit like parchesi and a bit like chess.
Grampa was very proud of his game leg, for it not only served him in place of the one he had lost in battle, but whiled away many dull hours, and being hollow was a splendid place to store his pipe and tobacco.
--Grampa in Oz (1924), Ruth Plumly Thompson, chapter 2
Don't try to Google for "scrum oz" or you'll get hundreds of hits on Rugby in Australia...
Someday I need to work out the rules to Scrum. Also to write an article about prosthetics in Oz. (I could write a book, actually.)
Entered 13:37 [/books/oz] permalink
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In rough order of occurrence:
And by the way, happy freakin' birthday, Melinda Hale! |
Entered 18:25 [/personal/friday5] permalink
Memory, like the shadow of... uh... uh...
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I have some interesting anecdotal findings for people who think they may have lost some cognitive ability as they aged, and would like to recover some of it. Introduction My mother has Alzheimer's or a similar ailment, and since I am somewhat worried about having to endure it myself, I have been taking a combination of nutritional supplements that more or less duplicates the mixture in the commercially-available "youth pill" Juvenon, which is a combination of alpha-lipoic acid and acetyl L-carnitine. This combination of antioxidants is supposed to have a strong effect over time on both physical and mental health in older people. The theory is that Juvenon repairs one's mitochondria and makes them more efficient (mitochondria are your cells' "energy factories"). I am only 38, but I thought I would try it for three months and then wait to try it again later in life if I didn't experience any effect (and yet it was shown experimentally to have an effect). Fortunately, I seem to be experiencing significant health improvements. Subjective evidence Juvenon users are reputed to experience improvement in brain function before improvement in body function because the brain uses such a significant portion of the body's energy. However, I noticed increased physical stamina first. Where I used to need to pause on a walk uphill in Pioneer Square, Seattle, I now keep walking. Climbs up multiple flights of stairs that used to be impossible (I weigh 400 pounds) are now merely difficult. My appetite has also decreased recently, something that I have not seen mentioned as an effect or side effect. I have been taking these supplements nearly a month now and lately I seem to have begun to experience an improvement in cognitive function also. You wouldn't think that at 38 my memory would need much improvement, but I had unrecognised and untreated sleep apnea for a number of years, and I may have experienced some low-level brain damage through hypoxia. In any case, I have begun to surprise myself. I was talking to my sister-in-law Melinda Hautala recently, and she asked me if I knew the name of the cartoonist who drew strips about the lawyer for children: "You smelt it, you dealt it. That's the law" -- that sort of thing. "Wait a minute," I said. "Ruben... Bolling." I haven't read a Ruben Bolling strip in a long time, but it might be argued that I could remember his name anyway since I still see links to his strips sometimes on the front page of Salon.com. However, I had better anecdotal evidence for memory improvement later. Marty said that she had encountered an island-sized fish in a game of Tales of the Arabian Nights she had played. "It was called a c-- uh, something that begins with a 'c'," she said. "Kraken?" There was a medieval myth that krakens would appear to be islands, then submerge and drown sailors who landed on them. "No, that's a squid. It was called something else." "I know what you're talking about. It's on the tip of my tongue," I said. "I think it was some kind of turtle. It's in The Tolkien Reader... Catoblepas? No, that's a different kind of mythical animal. I have it: Fastitocalon!" Marty said she didn't think that was it, and it may not have been the name of the creature in her game, but it was indeed the name of Tolkien's creature, and it was an island-sized turtle. I haven't cracked The Tolkien Reader in five years or so. I doubt I've read the poem "Fastitocalon" more than once since high school. I couldn't even find The Tolkien Reader on my shelf to verify the name; I had to use Foster's Complete Guide to Middle-earth. I'm having the tip-of-the-tongue feeling all the time now, and I seem to have felt the stuff kick in a few nights ago: after I talked to Melinda, I carried on another complex phone conversation while surfing and downloading files. This kind of multitasking is something I had been finding difficult, but it seems now I have the spare cycles. Objections Of course, my subjective self-reports aren't even a single-blind scientific study, let alone a double-blind one. Maybe it's all a placebo effect caused by increased confidence in myself. That's the kind of thing the National Institute of Health study they're doing on Juvenon is meant to discover. I am merely reporting three apparent positive changes to my health: two apparent cognitive changes (memory and concentration) and one apparent physical change (endurance). There is experimental evidence for similar changes in rats, however, and there are other subjective data for humans, such as Stewart Brand's report. While subjective or self-reported data cannot be counted as being as scientifically valid as data from a double-blind study, it should not be discounted altogether, because that's where practically all medical science starts. Imagine that you were the first person in history to drink alcohol. How much would you have to drink, or how many times, before your subjective data counted as something worthy of investigation? Similarly, as an early adopter of this chemical cocktail, I am reporting two alterations of consciousness: first, the sensation (if one can call it that) of something (whatever it was) "kicking in", and second, a constant sense of things at the tip of my tongue. Having something at the tip of one's tongue is not a rare sensation, but I would argue that experiencing it for extended periods (on the order of hours) is qualitatively as well as quantitatively different -- for me. Where do these consciousness alterations come from? I'd be committing a fallacy (post hoc ergo propter hoc, "after that therefore because of that") if I concluded it was the supplements, but my experience is suggestive -- to me, maybe to you. As for the possibility that the increase in my endurance comes from increased exercise rather than the supplements, I very much doubt that it did initially, since at the time I first noticed the improvement, I was only walking through Pioneer Square once a week to have lunch with my friend Chad, and not getting any other significant exercise. Alpha-lipoic acid by itself (without acetyl L-carnitine) has already been shown experimentally to increase endurance. Conclusion I am looking into getting my mother to start taking this stuff. If it works for me, I hope it will work even more for her. I recommend a trial for anyone who is worrying about their cognitive functions as they age, or their physical health for that matter. See for yourself whether it works. Just to be clear: I am taking the following twice a day: alpha-lipoic acid 300 mg I get mine from iHerb.com, which seems to have pretty good deals. The supplements are certainly less expensive when bought separately than under the brand name Juvenon, although of course they are a little less convenient this way. (I am not affiliated with iHerb.com in any way other than as a customer.) As to whether more is better, I have no idea. I am taking a little more than is in the Juvenon preparation because I am larger than average, and because it is more convenient, given the size of the tabs and capsules I ordered. I assume that if this stuff can be shown experimentally to affect humans in the way predicted, that there will be a threshold beneath which it is ineffective, but beyond that I am not willing to speculate. As for safety, both L-carnitine and alpha-lipoic acid have been used by humans for years, if not decades, and seem pretty safe. It is the combination that is novel. Their interaction may produce some negative side effects, but so far I haven't noticed any, or read of them. Postscript My sister-in-law Meredith Hale tells me the island-sized creature in the game is called a Dindan. I am fairly sure I have never heard that word before in my life. |
Entered 17:32 [/mentat] permalink
For anyone who is interested in creating their own personalised version of the Dominic System of mnemotechnics, here is a blank template in ASCII text format with the numbers 00 through 99 and the corresponding letters, ready to be filled out with well-known people. I suggest you print it out at full size and carry it around, filling in people as you think of them. When you have all your names, type them into the file, delete unnecessary whitespace, and print it out for drill and reference. It should fit onto a single piece of paper when printed 4-up (or 2-up, double-sided).
I have also provided a file containing the mnemonic pegs I use, including my own version of the Dominic System. Use this only as an example, since many of the names in my list are highly idiosyncratic. In fact, some of them refer to my friends and family, and these I have simply removed in my public version and replaced with the word "PERSONAL".
As my first test of the Dominic System, I used it to memorise the titles of the Famous Forty, the "canonical" books set in the Land of Oz. For example, book 23 is Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz. 23 corresponds to BC in the Dominic System, for which my person/action pair is Thor, the character from the comic strip B.C., riding his stone unicycle. Thus, the image I use to remember this book is Jack Pumpkinhead riding a stone unicycle.
Subtracting interruptions, memorising the titles of the Famous Forty took me about 45 minutes, so I did approximately a title a minute. A minute is about as long as it takes Dominic O'Brien, the system's inventor, to memorise an entire shuffled deck of cards. I guess I have some room for improvement.
I am also considering creating a memory palace based on the palace at the center of the Emerald City in the Oz books.
Entered 09:45 [/mentat] permalink
I'm giving up on Friday Fives. Although management at my office must think I spend every minute I'm there either surfing the web or reading/writing email, since out of pure Resistentialism or butter-side-downedness, they always pick just the wrong moment to look over my shoulder, I simply don't have time during the working day to do more than glance at my most important personal email. Writing Friday Fives at home on Friday evening is no good, because it seems as though 90% of the social list where I initially post them are members of the Eastern Standard Tribe or live in even more exotic locales like Singapore and Wales, so the list goes dead around 2:00-3:00 PM Pacific Time on Friday and remains slow throughout the weekend. If no one is going to read my Friday Fives until Monday anyway, then goddamnit, I'm going to start doing Sunday Sixes, and right leisurely too. Sunday is the real end of my week anyway.
My first Sunday Six:
GREs: The big news in the Hale-Evans household this week was that Marty, who wants to get an advanced degree in Electrical Engineering, took her GREs (standardised graduate school entrance exams) on Monday, and from what I can glean on the Web, her scores for the verbal and math portions of the test were both in the 99th percentile. Hoo-ray! There was an essay portion of the test, distinct from the verbal portion and intended to discern how well she can reason and formulate an argument. It has to be graded by a human, so we won't know that result for a few weeks, but as Marty says, "All we do around here is argue anyway", so I'm sure she'll do fine. If the grad school admissions committees have even a fraction of Marty's brains, she ought to get into any school she applies to.
Spring: I woke up and walked the dogs last Saturday, and it was Spring. Little green shoots were poking out of the ground. The air was warm, and although I am fairly anosmic (which is one reason I have the option to do the fast-but-disgusting household chores like taking out the garbage and cleaning drains, rather than the long-but-interesting ones like cooking), by Goddess, Spring shoved itself down my nostrils. A few days later I saw my first robin. Soon I'll be able to take my shoes off and wiggle my long, hairy toes in the grass. (I am secretly a six-foot-two, 400-pound hobbit.)
PATO: Broken into a separate entry for easier handwaving.
Oz: I've read all of L. Frank Baum's Oz books and the first of Ruth Plumly Thompson's, his successor's. Now I'm waiting on a big order of books, maps, etc. from the International Wizard of Oz Club. The last time that I had to wait to get the next books in the series, I read a "non-canonical" Oz book to tide me over, Paradox in Oz (2000) by Edward Einhorn. I'm doing much the same thing this time. Tuesday I read Visitors from Oz (1998) by Martin Gardner (yes, the former "Mathematical Games" columnist for Scientific American). It was fun and Ozzy. Then I took a few days to read A Barnstormer in Oz (1982) by Philip José Farmer: darker and more adult, but still a fun ride. Unfortunately, about two-thirds of the way through, the book turns into a cross between Riverworld and Doc Savage for a few chapters. I guess that's always a risk when you read Farmer.
I had some communications problems with the club (for some reason, PayPal never sent them my initial order), but the problems seem to be solved, so in a few days I should be spreading out my maps of Oz and the Nonestic Ocean as I pore over books 16 through 23 of the Famous Forty -- an ironic name for the series, as few people today are even aware that the movie starring Judy Garland was based on a book, let alone that the book had 39 official sequels.
If you wonder why I read these "little bonbons of literature", as my friend Dave Howell calls the Oz books, ask yourself why you read Harry Potter, because I know that you do.
Window: My boss Todd, whom I liked very much (I suppose I should use the present tense, because he's not dead, although he is working for Microsoft now), resigned from my company a while back. His cubicle had a window view. My original cubicle was right behind his, so I could see out of the window a little, but not much. When Todd left, his cubicle was vacant for a few weeks. I finally asked to move into it, and my request was approved.
Now I have a window looking onto the intersection of 2nd and Yesler from the fourth floor of the Smith Tower, Seattle's oldest skyscraper. My new cubicle is shielded from the noise of my cow orkers, but the noise from the street more than compensates. Yesler is the original Skid Row, or Skid Road, down which the loggers used to skid their logs to Puget Sound, and there are still plenty of homeless people surreptitiously drinking and trying to stay warm down there. About once a day the cops come around and make these foot soldiers in the Armies of the Road move along. I have even seen a few arrests, although I have not seen any police brutality. The Barking Man, who repeatedly barks like a dog -- it's very distracting -- seems to have gone south for the winter, but I have noise-reduction headphones for when he returns. Metaphorically, that's pretty ugly, I guess. I try to salvage a few laughs by telling people I "work with the unfortunates on Skid Row". Depends how you define "unfortunates".
Despite the depressing poverty blocked out by my headphones, and despite the nasty draft (did I mention the draft?), when the sun is shining, I get a full draught of it poured into my lap, and the seagulls are always wheeling at eye level. A week or two ago, a snow-white gull bigger than some dogs landed right outside my window. It was carrying a complete, full-sized donut in its mouth and it just sat and looked at me for about a minute. I said, "Holy crap, it's the Great Seagull of the Apocalypse!" and my cow orkers laughed. A week later, a smaller seagull landed outside and tried to peck at some papers on my desk through the glass.
It's all fun and games until the Great Seagull of the Apocalypse pecks your eye out. I'll keep the window seat anyway.
Barcharts (again): I mentioned last week how I had found some good study aids for Marty called Barcharts. After Marty did so well on her GREs, I said, "I want to be smart too!" and bought some Barcharts from Powell's, which has nearly the complete line. I bought the German Grammar and German Vocabulary charts, and Chess 1 and 2. I don't know if the latter will improve my Chess game, but I already feel I have an overview of German grammar as never before, despite the tonnage of German dictionaries, textbooks, and study tapes strewn around the house. The Note to Students on the back of the grammar chart reads,
This QuickStudy® chart is an outline of the grammar taught in German courses. Due to its condensed format, use it as a German guide, but not as a replacement for assigned classwork.
Fornicate those feces! (Yes, I know that to fornicate is intransitive.) This is how I aced Latin in high school: -o, -s, -t, -mus, -tis, -nt, drill on vocabulary and dive the hell in. Get 80% of the language from simple rules, then pick up the finer 20% from context. All languages should be taught this way, with a healthy helping of mnemotechnics. (Example: Need to remember that die (pron. "dee") is the German feminine and plural definite article, while der is the masculine? Envision a squad of diminutive female cheerleaders giggling "die hee!" next to a hulking, apelike male football player drooling and saying "der...". It's an offensive image, and that's one reason it works.)
I can feel my brain crinkling as I write. Next up I plan to review Marty's math charts, and possibly obtain some charts to review Logic and Latin. And despite Marty's protests that she doesn't need it, I'm buying her the one for Linux.
If you've read this far, bless you and have a good week. If you haven't read this far, bless you and have a good week anyway.
Entered 14:46 [/personal/friday5] permalink
I find "intellectual property" an obnoxious concept. Although I am fairly anosmic (or smell-blind, to coin a kenning), I find that the concept of IP stinks. Whereas trademarks can be almost benign, copyright is awful, and given the current practices of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, under which effectively all it takes to obtain a patent is money, patents stink the worst. Have you seen US patent #5,443,036, on teasing a cat with a laser pointer? The patent is self-satirising; it almost looks as though there's a Discordian at work here.
There are some interesting proposals to fix our broken patent system. One is OpenPatents.org, which is developing a kind of GNU General Public License based on patents rather than copyrights. Another is PATO, a similar but simpler system that would act like NATO in that it would be a "mutual defense" collective. The only requirement for joining such a collective is that you must agree to license your present and future patents to everyone else in the collective. In return, the rest of the collective license their patents to you. You now have access to a vastly larger patent pool with which to defend yourself against litigation, so if someone comes to you and says, "You're in violation of my patent on using a laser pointer to tease a cat. Pay up!", you can say, "Well, you're in violation of my licensed patents on laser pointers, teasing, and cats, so back off, Greyface!"
I spoke informally about this with an IP attorney I know (whom I rather like), and he told me that defensive patent pools are actually standard practice in many industries. John Walker of Autodesk developed the PATO idea independently circa 1993, so I don't know whether the world has caught up with him in the past ten years or so, or whether he was just out of touch with computer industry practice back then.
Entered 13:43 [/polyticks/ip] permalink
Shaggy Man, eyeing little girl with bad intent
"THIS, MY DEAR, IS THE WONDERFUL LOVE MAGNET."
If you were Aunt Em, would YOU trust your niece with this man? That's some unintentional humour in the Oz books by L. Frank Baum. It comes from Chapter 1 of The Road to Oz, the fifth book in the series, and concerns a jolly homeless fellow named the Shaggy Man, whom Dorothy loves and trusts even after she learns he has stolen and pocketed Toto, because he has a magic magnet that makes everyone who meets him love him.
While there are whimsy and puns in the Oz books (I was surprised at how many puns there were when I started reading Baum; I had considered them the exclusive domain of Lewis Carroll), there aren't many laugh-out-loud moments, but there are a few. Here's some rather more intentional humour from later in the same book. The party on the Road to Oz (some of whom now have the heads of animals, and one of whom is Dorothy but not Dorothy Lamour), are surrounded by hundreds of fierce creatures called Scoodlers, which have faces on both sides of their bodies, can walk or run in either direction, and incidentally are somewhat racist caricatures to the 21st Century eye:
"Ask 'em who they are, and what they want," whispered Dorothy; so the shaggy man called out in a loud voice:
"Who are you?"
"Scoodlers!" they yelled in chorus, their voices sharp and shrill.
"What do you want?" called the shaggy man.
"You!" they yelled, pointing their thin fingers at the group; and they all flopped around, so they were white, and then all flopped back again, so they were black.
"But what do you want us for?" asked the shaggy man, uneasily.
"Soup!" they all shouted, as if with one voice.
"Goodness me!" said Dorothy, trembling a little; "the Scoodlers must be reg'lar cannibals."
"Don't want to be soup," protested Button-Bright, beginning to cry....
Happening just then to feel the Love Magnet in his pocket [!!!--Ed.], [the Shaggy Man] said to the creatures, with more confidence:
"Don't you love me?"
"Yes!" they shouted, all together.
"Then you mustn't harm me, or my friends," said the shaggy man, firmly.
"We love you in soup!" they yelled...
"We love you in SOUP!"
Since all the animals in Oz can talk, and even some of the plants, much of the humour (too much?) revolves around who wants to eat (or doesn't want to be eaten by) whom. In Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, Dorothy meets the once and future Wizard of Oz at the center of the Earth. He has with him his Nine Tiny (and fairly interchangeable) Piglets, real pigs the size of hamsters, whom he has taught to do tricks. Dorothy has her kitten Eureka along rather than her dog Toto:
But the travellers were obliged to rest, and while they were sitting on the rocky floor the Wizard felt in his pocket and brought out the nine tiny piglets. To his delight they were now plainly visible, which proved that they had passed beyond the influence of the magical Valley of Voe.
"Why, we can see each other again!" cried one, joyfully.
"Yes," sighed Eureka; "and I also can see you again, and the sight makes me dreadfully hungry. Please, Mr. Wizard, may I eat just one of the fat little piglets? You'd never miss ONE of them, I'm sure!"
"What a horrid, savage beast!" exclaimed a piglet; "and after we've been such good friends, too, and played with one another!"
"When I'm not hungry, I love to play with you all," said the kitten, demurely; "but when my stomach is empty it seems that nothing would fill it so nicely as a fat piglet."
"And we trusted you so!" said another of the nine, reproachfully.
"And thought you were respectable!" said another.
"It seems we were mistaken," declared a third, looking at the kitten timorously, "no one with such murderous desires should belong to our party, I'm sure."
Oh, please, Mr. Baum, Eureka's right -- surely one or two wouldn't be missed, except by the other piglets... It's never clear where all the mystery meat at Oz feasts comes from, although some of it is created ex nihilo and some of it grows on trees. Nevertheless, when the Cowardly Lion goes off into the wilderness to find something more suitable for breakfast than strawberry jam or whatever Dorothy is eating, it is pretty clear he ain't hunting mushrooms.
In The Patchwork Girl of Oz, the Crooked Magician creates a transparent Glass Cat. It has a ruby heart that is cold, hard, and haughty, and pink brains that roll around in its head when it is thinking. The cat is very proud of these visible brains, and states no less than 12 times, "My brains are pink -- you can see 'em work!" or some variation thereof. (I counted. This is my new email signature.) That's the only joke not related to eating that really made me laugh in the 14 Baum books. This running gag is certainly less tiresome than Baum's repeated description of food as "smoking hot", which I'm sure he says far more than a dozen times.
Turning to a contemporary Oz author, Martin Gardner made me laugh aloud twice in the first 14 pages of his non-canonical Visitors from Oz, in which Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman visit the New York City of 1998. The first laugh happened when Ozma, who is on the Internet (anonymously of course) and thus in touch with the ordinary world, called her council chamber in the Emerald City "the Green Room". The second laugh happened when Ozma asked the council members which of them would like to go back to Earth:
Ozma turned to Button-Bright, the little boy who was always getting lost. "Would you like to go along with Dorothy and perhaps see Philadelphia again?"
"Nope," said Button-Bright.
The Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger shook their huge heads vigorously. "We wouldn't be able to talk outside Oz," said the lion. "The police would try to capture us and lock us up in some awful zoo. After all, on Earth we're considered ferocious beasts. No thanks. We'd rather stay here where we're loved and respected, and no one is afraid of us."
"Or think that I'd eat one of their precious babies," said the Hungry Tiger. He paused, then added, "Much as I would like to."
The Hungry Tiger's claims that he wanted to "eat fat babies" have always rung hollow to me. After a hundred years of sumptuous banquets in Ozma's palace, he's probably stuffed (apologies to the Scarecrow). His disclaimer in Gardner's book strikes me as pro forma, merely keeping up appearances. We're back to jokes about eating people, of course.
Gardner has a contemporary sense of humour, so it's not surprising that he can make me laugh twice in one book, whereas Baum takes 14 books to make me laugh thrice. However, for charm and whimsy, Baum is a much superior author to any of his successors that I have read. There are some kinds of amusement that don't necessitate laughter.
Entered 00:24 [/books/oz] permalink
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