Band of the Day: The Arctic Monkeys

I just saw this item, thanks to keywords alerting, and was amused by how big winners the Arctic Monkeys showed up for one of the awards. Go take a look. I'll see if I can find photos or video this weekend.

UPDATE: And here it is, thanks to loyal reader Bryan F. Irrera. He found it on www.stuff.co.nz.

Oz on Jeopardy

I was rather preoccupied with the Aquaman reference earlier in the show, so it took Eric to point out the Oz reference which came on the very last clue of Double Jeopardy, the $400 clue in the "Not The Dreaded Spelling Category", in which all the questions were only two letters long.

The question for this one was, of course, "What is O-Z?" (They had to spell it, not say it). The first contestant to ring in got it right (by coincidence, he also was the contestant who got the Aquaman question correct).

"One Short Day" in London

Here's the other clip we've found of a number from Wicked, as performed by the London cast on the Royal Variety Performance. The number is introduced by Adam Garcia, who plays Fiyero in the show. Very nicely done. Look for a cameo by some Denslow-inspired characters...

Hey, We're Famous!

Check out this very nice blog entry about our humble efforts on this blog. Be sure to check the comments for a link to a very good Oz news site (unless you click on my link, since it's the same one, in which case why am I directing you to the comments, huh?).

Good news for Noel Langley fans

Neil Gaiman — yes, that Neil Gaiman — has some good news for fans of Noel Langley, the primary writer of the screenplay of the famous Judy Garland film version of The Wizard of Oz. He not only wrote screenplays, he also wrote books. And...well, just go take a look.

Wicked in Britain

Laura found this clip on YouTube, and I said, "I've got to put this on the blog!" It's Idina Menzel and Helen Dallimore in the London production of Wicked. I'm not exactly sure what it's from, but I gather it's some sort of royal command performance, so it was on television or something, and it looks really good. Idina's not quite up to where she was during the original New York run, or how she performed this song on the Tony Awards, but it's all still good, and one of the best ways to see this number without going to the theater. So without further ado...

There are a few more clips up, so maybe there will be more...

Today's Oz comic

In honor of the Super Bowl today... Oh, just go take a look at today's Mother Goose and Grimm. This one will be a little tricky to find. The link takes you to the archive page, but you still have to find today's date (02/04/07) to see it. Still, if it's still 2007 as you read this, that's not too tough, as it's in the pull-down menu to the upper right of whatever cartoon you get when the page comes up. Otherwise, go to the "MMG" menu at the left, choose "2007" and then look for "02/04/07".

And now for a word from our sponsor

Whoever put together this ad sure did their research into the history and development of a certain famous pair of shoes!

eBay Auction with Oz Toys!

Via Mark Evanier, follow this link to see a massive auction for a bunch of vintage toys, including some objects that might be of interest to Oz fans. I spotted a Viewmaster reel and a coloring book for sure, but sharp-eyed Oz fans might be able to spot even more.

Sluggy Freelance Guest Week

So, there's been a guest artist over at Sluggy Freelance for the last week or so. The story starts January 22nd, and progresses through a series of misadventures as the guest artist has profaned the strip by some minor mess-up, and the fans chase her and her friend. She runs to see the creator of the strip, Pete, and meets him in this strip. Well, today's strip... oh go see for yourself...

Room clean-up update

It's been, what, two, three weeks since I announced I was cleaning up my room and turning it into an Oz room, right? So, it's time for an update. First, looking toward the worst of the mess:

Okay, this doesn't look much different, but trust me, it is. The floor is clear, at least from this point of view. (Around the corner, however, is another story, but I haven't quite gotten to that yet.) But here's where most of the work has been going on, facing the other way:



My desk is now cleared off, and the top two shelves of that bookcase are now full of reference books. The top shelf is general stuff about Baum, the books, some exhibit and auction catalogs, and even two books about Fred Stone, the actor who played the Scarecrow in the 1902 stage play version of The Wizard of Oz. The second shelf is entirely devoted to the MGM movie, including three biographies of Judy Garland (a fourth goes up there once I'm done reading it.) The lower four shelves are holding a lot of non-Oz things right now, but I suspect some of that will eventually stay there, particularly computer supplies. On the wall is the set of Oz figurines that a friend gave to me, and over on the left you can just see the wedding present that an artist friend/fellow Oz fan made for Laura and me. It's hung in our living room ever since we moved here, but I think the lighting in my room shows it off better.

I've made some real progress already, but I still have that whole mess on the floor you can't quite see yet, a set of shelves to put into one of the bookcases and the doors to hang, and lots of non-Oz things (comic books and teaching materials, mostly) to figure out what to do with. But the overall shape of things is coming along, and I can start dealing with the little fiddly bits later. So it's looking good and doable, but I suspect it may get a bit cramped in here by the time I'm done.

Today's Oz comic

The comic itself isn't Ozzy, but today's Baby Blues does have a big Oz reference in the title panel. Even if you get Baby Blues in your Sunday paper, you may want to check it out, as that panel often gets cut to make more space. Now, this is going to be tricky to find, so pay attention. For now, click on the link above, and it will take you to the Baby Blues page at The Seattle Times. If it's not today (January 28), in the lower right corner, where it says "Select another date:" choose "January 28, 2007." However, that's only going to be good for a couple of weeks. (Once it's expired, I'll disable that link and cross out the parts that no longer apply.) But that's okay, because then I can link to it directly, and permanently, at the Baby Blues archive. Got that?

By the way, if something seems odd about my blog today, it's because I've finally switch to the new version of Blogger. It shouldn't show up much, but it might in ways here and there. It at least gives me a few more tools to do fun things with. Maybe my technical guru can explain a few of them later on.

Here it comes again!

Can anyone think of a gorilla in the Oz books? (No, not Rango in The Magic of Oz, as he was an ape.)

Today's Oz comic

It's been a while since we've gotten an Oz reference in Grand Avenue, but the current storyline about snowmen has provided Ozzy fruit. Go, check it out! (Just remember, this will only be up for thirty days, so if you're looking at this in, say, June, I'm sorry, you won't see it.)

Threat Down - Wizard of Oz

Last night's Colbert Report featured a Threat Down in which Stephen Colbert discovered some "meaning" in The Wizard of Oz:

Update: YouTube has removed the clip.

Happy birthday to me!

Okay, yeah, I'm going to be just a little self-indulgent here and mention that I turn *cough* *cough* years old today. But the main reason I'm posting today is to give you a chance to see what I look and sound like on television. This was from our local PBS station last night, and we were there raising money to keep Doctor Who on the air. So this clip has no Oz content whatsoever, except that the guy being harassed by the penguin is also an Oz fan.

By the way, if you want to support our station, feel free to call that number on the screen, or you can pledge online here. If you go down to Option 3, you can even get some of the way cool thank you gifts we were hocking last night. (Okay, back to Oz next time.)

Today's Oz music video

Thanks to one of my regular readers, I was alerted to this Brazilian music video, in Portuguese. So, here it is, Pitty with "Na Sua Estante" (er, unless the name of the group is Na Sua Estante, in which case, here they are with "Pitty"...)

My latest Oz project - and you can watch!

The time has come. I've bitten the bullet, and I'm going to do it. One reason we bought this house was so that Laura and I could each have our own little hobby rooms. I moved much of my stuff in, of course, but over the years the actual use I've gotten out of it has ebbed and waned as stuff moved around, got stored in there, etc. Well now we're both going to make an effort to clear out a lot of the clutter in this house. I've already moved a lot of extra stuff out of what I hope will become my Oz room, and even moved in my desk and computer, so I've been doing more stuff in here already. And I have a deadline to keep me going. My Oz friends are coming over for an Oogaboo Rendezvous on April 16, so I want to have it all done by then so they can all see it. Toward that end, I want to document my progress. So here's how most of it stands right now:

Quite a pile, huh? Off to the right, you can see the highlight of my collection. It's a lawyer bookcase that my parents bought for us as a wedding present, and I keep the bulk of my most important Oz books in it. That I won't need to touch, at least for now, but once I get digging through my stuff a bit more, I want to put my books by Eloise Jarvis McGraw in the bottom shelf. Off in the corner is a set of shelves with boxes. Those are most of the rest of my collection, and they're all the books I've inventoried over the past decade or so. At least I have a decent idea where any one book is, thanks to that inventory. Everything else is just stuff I have to figure out a place to put it. As you can guess, this is not going to be easy.

But here's where I will probably start:



This is looking the other way. The clutter in the picture above is behind me. That bookcase? That's a big reason I'm doing this now. My parents recently moved, and they offered to give me three cases like this. I jumped at the opportunity, hoping it would give me the incentive I needed to get going on this project. This one I put up by my desk (the stuff in the lower left corner of this picture is on the desk). Once I got this up, it gave me a place to shove stuff and get it out of the way while I moved in the other two bookcases. They are now on the wall behind me, back-to-back forming a peninsula. Yes, I've screwed them to each other and earthquake strapped them to the wall, so they should be pretty stable now. (By the way, you can see two of the doors just to the left of the case in the picture above. Yes, it's so crammed in here right now that I couldn't hang those doors.) So anyway, to make a long story short ("Too late!"), I want to clear out and organize the bookcase by my desk as a place to keep non-fiction and other reference works so they're easily accessible. I had many in the lawyer case, but the fiction collection just kept growing so much that they got shoved out. Besides, this way I can have more stuff within reach. So, I'm going to start with this case and clearing out my desk, since some of the stuff in there I think I've had since middle school! I will try to give you updates and let you know how it's going, and I also hope to show you all the final results soon. Wish me luck!

Oh, and while I'm here, let me just brag about my latest Oz acquisition. It's a Disney DVD, Your Host, Walt Disney. It's a collection of episodes of Walt's television show, and a few other goodies. The reason I got it? It includes "The Fourth Anniversary Show," where the Mousketeers encourage Walt to make a movie of the Oz books, and to let them star in it. However, The Rainbow Road to Oz never got much further than the sketches on this show, but at least we get a glimpse. There's also a look behind the scenes at another Disney film (one that did get made), Babes in Toyland, starring Ray Bolger. The rest of it looks pretty good, too.

No new music video today

So that Ryan Adams music video I found yesterday? I got word of it from that book I also told you about yesterday, The Wizard of Oz Catalog. On the same page is a listing for another music video, "Scarecrow" by Montgomery Gentry, but the listing made it clear that the author hadn't actually seen it. I went looking for it yesterday, and eventually found the videography on the Montgomery Gentry site. Guess what? No video for "Scarecrow." Oh, well. So I guess that's it for Oz music videos.

My latest Oz readings

It's been busy lately, so I'll just jump right in. I've read not one, not two, not even three, but four new books:

• First came The Discontented Gopher, the old Animal Fairy Tales story by L. Frank Baum, now published as a picture-story book by the South Dakota State Historical Society Press. You can take a look at my review of it right here, on my website's reviews page.
  
• Next came The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the English translation of the French comic book adaptation of the book. It's a very close adaptation, and the English version takes many passages stright from the book. About the only thing that's missing is the China Country on the trip south. The art is...interesting. It's definitely European (as opposed to Oz: The Manga, which is very Japanese, even though the artist is American), and Dorothy has very...interesting hair. The important thing, however, is that it's a new Oz comic! Now if we can only get someone to start adapting some of the later Oz books as well...
  
• After that, I started work on two different ones (yes, I'm nuts, but there's a good reason). The first one is Judy Garland: A Portrait in Art & Anecdote by my close personal friend John Fricke. I found this one remaindered at my local big box bookstore last year, and John put in his usual very long and charming inscription at last summer's Winkie Convention. It's not terribly Ozzy (the The Wizard of Oz section is surprisingly brief, but I guess John thinks it's been covered elsewhere already — and he'd be right), but it's a nice way to present Judy's life, in a number of photos (and it is a large number, as this is a coffee table book) alongside rememberances from many people, including Judy herself. As it is a large and heavy book, it's not easy for me to carry it around and read it wherever I go. So I'm reading this a little bit at a time with breakfast each morning, and I'm just keeping it on my kitchen counter. It will likely take a few more weeks to finish it, but at least I'm already up to the 1940s (it's chronological, divided up by decades).
  
• The other big book I finished recently was The Wizard of Oz Catalog by Fraser A. Sherman. It's an attempt to catalog every Oz and Oz-related book, movie, play, television show, and so forth. It's an impossible task, of course, but this guy gives it a decent shot. Most of the stuff in here I was familiar with — heck, I have most of it — but there were one or two surprises, such as the music video in the last entry in this blog. There were a few items not in it, or that were underrepported, that I'd have been glad to help with if he'd only asked. My biggest complaint, however? Sherman seems to think that the Wicked Witch of the West's name is Blinky. Huh? Where did that come from? I've never seen or heard that anywhere before, and he gives no source. (This is not the same as Blinkie from The Scarecrow of Oz, as she's identified correctly in the entry on that book.) And hey, I'm in it! I'm listed as co-author of Queen Ann in Oz, of course, my site is in the chapter on websites, and I and my site were thanked in the Acknowledgements. Thank you! (But if I was so much help, how come I had to buy my own copy of the book? Nah, don't worry, I don't really mind.)
  
• I should also mention The Wonder Book by Ruth Plumly Thompson. It's a collection of some of her newspaper work, all very short. I'm reading it in small bursts whenever I get around to a new wave of Oz readings, and it works very well that way.