The Cambias Digression

Notes and thoughts on everything from what I had for breakfast to the fate of the Universe.

  • Ozblogging: The Marvelous Land of Oz, Part 2

    Episode Two:  The Scarecrow and Jinjur Tip and Jack Pumpkinhead leave Mombi and travel south, aiming for the Emerald City for no very good reason. It turns out to be pretty close: they spend a day hiking through the countryside and then come to the main road only nine miles away from the city. This…

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  • Ozblogging: The Marvelous Land of Oz, Part 1

    Episode One:  Tip L. Frank Baum published The Marvelous Land of Oz in 1904. His publisher wanted a new Oz book for Christmas and he obliged. Because Baum was so pleased with the success of the stage play based on The Wizard of Oz, he wrote the new book with an eye to adapting it…

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  • How I Did It #3: Return to Skull Island

    This story has a complicated history. By rights it ought to have been the first entry in the "How I Did It" series, because I originally wrote it back in 1995, but it didn't actually get published until 2001. It's written in the form of an article for a low-budget movie magazine — an article…

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  • Shakespeare As She is Spoke

    I normally save the science posts for Science Made Cool, but this one seems more appropriate to this Web log instead. Ever wonder what Shakespeare's plays actually sounded like? Some language scholars at the University of Kansas have done their best to reconstruct Elizabethan pronunciation and accents for our amusement. The result sounds like a…

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  • Ozblogging: The Wizard of Oz, Part 6

    Episode VI: The Long Slog Home In the movie, once the Wizard is off the scene, Glinda the Good drops down out of the fly gallery to send Dorothy home and wrap everything up in the last five minutes. In the book we still have six chapters to go. Dorothy and her three companions set…

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  • Are We Helping?

    I've lately been reading about the Inklings — C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkein, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, and their buddies, who used to hang out together in Oxford to drink beer, eat ham, and talk about literature and religion. They functioned as a writers' workshop, not unlike the redoubtable CSFW which tolerates my presence. But lately…

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  • Ozblogging: The Wizard of Oz, Part 5

    Episode V:  The Wild Wild Wizard After the Witch dies, L. Frank Baum kind of loses track of his story. I suspect he realized he was getting close to the ending, but was nowhere near the word count. So he did what all of us do in a situation like that: he started padding. How…

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  • Ozblogging: The Wizard of Oz, Part 4

    Episode IV:  Ozpocalypse Now Having been given the mission to kill the Wicked Witch of the West, Colonel Willard — oops, I mean Dorothy — heads off into the wilds of Cambodia, or Winkie Country. There's no road, as the Wicked Witch has cut off her realm from the rest of Oz. Sadly, Dorothy doesn't…

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  • How I Did It #2: The Alien Abduction

    "The Alien Abduction" is a pretty simple story: a group of animal-rights activists free an alien from a lab at Cornell University and flee with him to a house in the country. Then things start to go wrong. The narrator, Brian, is a local boy and chose the hideout, and his brother George turns up…

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  • Ozblogging: The Wizard of Oz, Part 3

    Episode III:  The Crawling Chaos of Oz Once past the poppies, our heroes finally reach the Emerald City. Despite the fact that Oz is a peaceful fairyland, the capital is a heavily-fortified walled city. It's not clear what the wall is supposed to keep out, as the Army of Oz consists of one soldier and…

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The Worldbuilding Index