Yup, another Oz clue already, this one from the game of September 21 (and again, I'm on top of this so fast it's not even in the J-Archive yet). In the Jeopardy! round, the category is "Poly" Wanna, which means the letters "poly" will show up in the correct response. (Naturally, the following category was Cracker, but that doesn't enter into things here.) The $600 clue proved to be this:
No, that's not a typo, as I have concluded my reading of the 1973 issue of Oziana with Frederick Otto's poetic rendition of The Patchwork Girl of Oz from his saga, The Oziad. It Oziana, Fred maintains that he is merely translating the traditional Oz folk poem into English from its Old Ozzish original. But I knew Fred and heard him recite many chapters of The Oziad at the Winkie Conventions, so if it really is a translation, it's a pretty loose one, and Fred injected a lot of his own droll, wry humor into it! It is otherwiso a pretty straightforward retelling of Scraps' first adventure, but Fred mercifully mentions a lot of the side incidents in rapid passing, and focuses on Ojo's quest to get the ingredients for the antidote for the Liquid of Petrifaction. It actually zips by pretty quickly, even for an Oziad.
Hmm, today in The Argyle Sweater, we seem to have found a previously unknown character. (An additional hmm, it seems Dorothy may be about to channel her inner Frogger!)
My man in Japan, Michael-sensei, has found us another one! Today'sThe Gray Zone shows us what might happen in a sci-fi-based version of The Wizard of Oz.
Donald Trump went on The Dr. Oz Show last week. Jeff Darcy of the Cleveland Plain Dealer makes the expected themed comments.
Drive is an awesome, sprawling space epic that also happens to have a very well-developed funny bone. And for some reason, it's printed in blue, not black. So you can imagine it's not terribly Ozzy, and it's not—but there is a very appropriate Oz reference in today's installment.
This weekend I continued my reading of Oziana with the second story, "The Improbable Forest" by Harry Mongold from the 1973 issue. Technically speaking, it's not really a short story, but three chapters from the then-unpublished novel The Sawhorse of Oz. (Mongold would later go on to privately publish the entire novel in 1981, and yes, I have it. Hmm, maybe that could be something to throw onto the reread pile.) Fortunately for readers of Oziana over forty years ago, this excerpt works very well as a self-contained short story. The Sawhorse, having gotten separated from the rest of the adventure, is trying to find his way to Glinda's castle so she con intervene. (Considering how many times the Sawhorse has made that run from the Emerald City to Glinda's and back, he must have gotten way off course to forget the way!) HE wanders into the Improbable Forest, an area where unlikely things happen quite frequently. Among the denizens he meets is a sprite who may have been at least partially responsible for enchanting that forest in the first place. She recruits the Sawhorse to help defeat her nemesis, an enchanted green serpent. The Sawhorse, after a couple of little mini-adventures, finds the serpent, but things do not go anywhere near the plan! It all turns out well in the end, however, and the Sawhorse even manages to find his way to Glinda's as a result. I liked it, and remembered just enough of the complete novel to put it in its place. It's a good thing this takes place in an Improbable Forest, however, as the Sawhorse is pulling the Red Wagon the entire time! I find it highly improbable that the forest could be navigable for the Red Wagon, or that it didn't at least get all kinds of bumps and scrapes and scratches. But maybe the Improbable Forest had a way of making that easier. (Either that or the Sawhorse just has a lot of experience hauling that thing around in any conditions.)
No, unlike most of last season, I'm not going to waste any time posting Oz clues from Jeopardy! this season if I can possibly help it. For that matter, Jeopardy! didn't waste any time, either, posting a clue in only the fourth show of its thirty-third (!) season, in the game for September 15. (The only one falling behind here appears to be the Jeopardy! Archive website, which doesn't even have this game up yet!) It was the Double Jeopardy! round, in the category A Song In That Movie — they give the title of the song and the year, the players identify the movie. The very first clue uncovered, at the very top for $400, was:
The Oz Museum in Wamego, Kansas has been around for quite some time now, and they are looking to freshen up their entrance and make it really, truly Ozzy. So they've started a crowdfunding campaign over at Youcaring.com to raise some of that money. They appear to be off to a good start, but with something like this, every little bit helps. So if you can give, go on over to www.youcaring.com/oz-museum-642050 and give a few dollars. I'm sure it will be worth the effort!
Yes, at long last, they're back! I think I've dealt with most of the other stuff that had to be dealt with, and picked up very few new things, so I am going to do my best to read an Oz short story every week again and write a little something about it here. I picked up where I left off, with the third issue of the International Wizard of Oz Club's literary magazine, Oziana 1973. The first story in it is "Tempus Temporis in Terra Ozis" by George Van Buren. As you may be able to guess from the title, Van Buren originally wrote the story in Latin, but he managed to provide an English translation for publication. In this story, the Wicked Witch of the West leaves a message behind for the king or queen of Oz warning that, if he or she sees it, the country has only a week left before a doomsday device she buried somewhere in Oz goes off, in the event of her destruction. When Ozma gets the message, she, Dorothy, and Glinda have to figure out where it is and how to disarm it. A search through the Book of Records and some detective work leads everyone to figure out that the burial was witnessed by a Gillikin boy named Tip. Longtime Oz fans probably know what that means, but Ozma has no clue. So a little time travel is used to bring Tip to the present day, and I'm sure you can guess the kinds of issues that that could raise. All works out well in the end, of course. Van Buren's writing style can be a little stilted (perhaps an aftereffect of its Latin origins), but the story itself is solid and well put together, even with a bit of a deusex machina ending.
Next week, an excerpt from a novel I haven't read in nearly forty years (hmm, maybe it's time to put that one in my to read pile!)
All I will say about today's Mother Goose and Grimm is: Hey, Scarecrow, you're a scarecrow! You are probobly the most qualified to take care of your own problem!
The Wizard isn't married. In fact, he never seems to have shown a lot of interest in women until Oz the Great and Powerful. So I doubt we'd ever see him in the situation shown in today'sMother Goose and Grimm. But it still makes for an amusing comic.
I'll keep this short: CowTown looks at what happened after the end of The Wizard of Oz.
