jameswharris

Why Blog?

This will be my 671st post. I must be approaching or just passing my millionth word written, so I think it’s time to evaluate why I blog. When I started I wrote whatever I felt like and didn’t worry if anyone read what I wrote. Sometimes I’d ask my wife Susan or a friend to read something, but for the most part I considered my blog a diary that I left around opened. I’m interested in a lot of things my friends aren’t, so I used blogging as an outlet for discussing various topics I had no one to talk about with. I guess that might mean I use blogging as kind of therapy. Blogging is also a great way to practice writing, organize thoughts, and learn to research – sort of junior journalism. All of these various purposes are great so long as I don’t think too much about being read.

During the last year I’ve been getting more readers. Mostly by accident. Sometimes I write about a subject that people are researching on Google, like encrypting files for Dropbox, or science fiction books from the 1950s. I have a few friends that actually follow what I write, but you can count them on one hand. I do have 468 followers on WordPress, but I think that’s mostly due other bloggers wanting to attract readership themselves. But it does make me think about what I write. If I hit the publish button and hundreds of people get an email then what I write can be an annoyance or entertainment. That thought has made me delete most of the posts I’ve written lately.

My friend Annie has even been critiquing my posts, with comments like, that one rambled on for far too long, or you didn’t stick to your point, or that topic was boring. I don’t disagree with her assessments either. If I’m going to write something people will be reading then I have a responsibility to make it worth reading. And this presents some problems.

There are three kind of readers on the internet: browsers, subscribers and searchers. Some people get to my pages because writers link to me, others subscribe and get everything I write, but most people read what I’ve written because it’s something they Googled or Binged. Just look at my stats. (You might need to click on the image to make it large enough to read.)

I get the most hits for writing about something specific, like a Toshiba netbook or LG Blu-ray player. But I also write about a lot of topics few people are interested in.

Most of my favorite essays I’ve written get few readers. That’s because they are personal and personal essays don’t get hits.

If I want lots of readers then I’d need to write about something that lots of people want to read about. Well, that doesn’t actually work either. Writing about what everyone else is writing about gets damn few hits. The key to getting search engine hits is to write about something few people have written about, but enough people want to read about.

The key to get subscriber hits is to always write about a specific topic and find fans for that topic.

I don’t do ether. I write about whatever interests me at the moment. That’s good for me but bad for regular readers, and gets few search engine hits.

What I need to do is decide what kind of writer I want to be – at least when it comes to blogging.

JWH – 6/25/13

What Makes You Cry?

I don’t cry, not the boo-hoo kind of weeping, I’m more of a Mr. Spock when it comes to emotions. But I do get misty-eyed from time to time, and as I’ve gotten older, those wet eyed moments come more often. What makes us cry? And obviously, we all cry for different reasons. Yesterday my friend Mike sent me a video, “Bittersweet Melodies” by Feist, that choked me up. If I wore mascara it would have run. It had gotten to Mike too. I forwarded the link to some of my friends and to the online book clubs I’m in. So far I’ve heard from about fifteen women and a handful of men. Men get choked up. Women think its nice, clever, but no tears. I’m waiting for more responses, but so far it’s quite gender specific.

Like I said, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to observe that everyone has different buttons to push to turn on the waterworks. But of my small sample, it seems the Feist video worked with men but not women. So here’s an experiment, watch this video and let me know how you reacted. Do you think it’s just clever, or does it choke you up?

[The original photographs used in the video can be found here and here.]

Before and after pictures of people getting older is a definite emotional button for me, but understanding why, is harder to explain. The wistful Feist song does create an emotional mood, but it’s the photographs that poke me in the heart. Why? Well a couple of anecdotes might help.

When I was a little fella, I remember this time I had to get a shot. I was in a full blown bawling meltdown and the doctor and my mom were trying to get me to cooperate and get punctured. I remember the doctor patiently waiting for me to settle down.

When I had calmed down a bit he said, “You don’t have to cry.”

I don’t think I said anything, but I was thinking, “Huh?”

He again said, “You don’t have to cry.” He had gotten my attention. Then he came closer and whispered, “You can choose not to cry.”

I thought about it for a moment, turned off the faucets in my eyeballs and let him give me the shot. I was amazed I didn’t have to cry. I remember consciously choosing not to cry the next time my mother switched me, and when my dad gave me the belt. I then learned not crying enraged my parents who would switch and belt harder because of my lack of reaction. Not crying had a kind of empowerment. I went with it.

Babies cry, I believe, because they have no other outlets for communicating their needs. I think as adults we cry when we have no other ways to express what we feel. Most of the time we do, so we don’t cry.

The other anecdote from childhood that is useful for this topic is about separation. To kinds of separate. As a kid my family moved around a lot. A whole lot. I’d always make a best friend wherever we moved, but ultimately, that friendship would be torn apart, just something beyond my control. Starting at an early age, looking back and thinking of lost friends always choked me up. I think that’s why most people cling to the idea of heaven – they can’t bear that they will never see some people again. That’s why death tears us up, we can’t communicate our feelings of loss and separation.

When I was very little, I woke up in the middle of the night and went out to the living room where my dad was watching all-night movies. He let me stay up and I watched a film about two kids being separated when one family moved away, then they were reunited during WWII, in the Pacific. I was too young to understand this, I just felt it. That film burned into the core of mind, at the bottom of all my memories. Years later I caught it again, when I was old enough to remember its name, High Barbaree, and the actors, Van Johnson and June Allyson. Eventually I learned that it was based on a book by the same name, written by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, the writers of The Mutiny on the Bounty. The story was about the last memories of a dying man, but of course, in the Hollywood version, he’s rescued from death. His dying thoughts were about his childhood and teen years. I think men feel separated from their young selves, in a way that women don’t. I know there are no hard and fast gender generalities, but this one sort of works.

The key to my deepest emotional buttons are encrypted in that movie and book. Events in that story resonate at the core of my being. And that reveals probably my most powerful emotional button, the desire to return to childhood. We can return home, to the physical location where we grew up, but we can’t return to the state of mind when we called it home. I wonder if my lady friends didn’t respond to the Feist video because they don’t have that urge to return to childhood. Women want to be young again in body, but guys want to be young again in mind.

I’ve read there are two kinds of people, those that would pay anything to relive their adolescence, and those who would pay anything to erase the memories of those same years.

“Bittersweet Melodies” is incredibly wistful to me. When I really like a person I want to see photos of when they were kids. I want to know what they did when they were kids, and where they lived. Sometimes I think our true souls are the ones we had at age twelve.

JWH – 6/17/13

All Things SCRABBLE: Word Freak, Word Wars and Scrabylon

I’ve always been a piss-poor SCRABBLE player, so it’s strange that I picked up this book about SCRABBLE tournaments and got totally engrossed in reading about the fanatical world of SCRABBLE players. Words With Friends has changed my attitude towards playing SCRABBLE, a game I’ve always thought as tedious. Words With Friends is easier to play, and always handy. I keep ten games going and make plays throughout the day. When I saw Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive SCRABBLE Players by Stefan Fatsis I bought it thinking it might help my game. Word Freak came out in 2001, but in 2011 it had a 10th anniversary edition, with a 30 page update. Because the Word Freak was so fascinating I went searching for more information about SCRABBLE players, and their tiny world of word geeks. I thought I’d collect what I found for a blog post, since I love reading about micro-subcultures.

Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis (2001)

For some reason Word Freak just grabbed me and I couldn’t put it down. Stefan Fatsis, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and NPR, started out doing a short article on SCRABBLE players, and their tournaments. Then he got hooked on competing himself. Word Freak is a memoir of Fatsis getting to know many of the major SCRABBLE competitors and his efforts to improve his own skills to get higher rankings in the tournaments. SCRABBLE players have a rating system somewhat like chess players. Fatsis started off playing in the 700s and by the end of the book was ranked 1697. He’s currently ranked 1597.

Even if you hate playing SCRABBLE you might find Word Freak worthy of reading. Fatsis takes a complex subject and explains it in very clear details. Word Freak is really about three subjects that Fatsis weaves together. At one level the book is about the history of a game and how the tournaments work. At the next level its about lexicology and studying words. Finally, the story is about obsessive people, and how far they will go to become great at playing a game, and how that changes their lives.

Reading the book does require some patience – it’s somewhat technical when it comes to words and wordplay.

Word Wars – Tiles and Tribulations on the Scrabble Circuit (2004)

After reading Word Freak I checked Netflix and found Word Wars, available on disc and streaming. The documentary film by Eric Chaikin and Julian Petrillo credited Stefan Fatsis and Word Freak as their inspiration. The film followed four players Joe Edley, Matt Graham, Marlon Hill and Joel Sherman for nine months as they prepared for the 2002 National Scrabble Championship. All four were profiled extensively in Word Freak, so it made me happy to meet them on film.

Scrabylon (2003)

Finally, I got to see Scrabylon, a film by Scott Petersen, which was made before Word Wars, but is pretty much about the same cast of characters. By now I was beginning to burn out some on SCRABBLE documentaries, but I still want more. I can’t help but wonder how things are ten years later? Are the old players being pushed out by bright new word freaks? In the book and films, all the players talked about SCRABBLE tournaments becoming more successful, to offer bigger prizes and get more public attention. I’m not sure that’s happened. Quite often I have seen short pieces in the news about SCRABBLE championships, but they don’t reflect the hoped for growth.

After reading the book and seeing these films I started thinking about my own skills. In Words With Friends I’m averaging about 22 points per words, but there are players that average over 200 points per word. I assume they are cheating, but maybe not. I win a lot of Words With Friends games, but I don’t think I’m a particularly good player. Reading Word Freak made me want to improve at Words With Friends, but maybe also play SCRABBLE itself, live with friends.

SCRABBLE v. Words With Friends

Many people think they are playing SCRABBLE when they are playing Words With Friends, but it’s really two very different games. Which is why Words With Friends isn’t being sued out of existence. The boards are different, the tile values are different, the number of tiles are different, but most importantly, you have to know how to spell to play SCRABBLE, whereas you can endlessly guess in Words With Friends. In SCRABBLE you can intentionally play a phony word to bluff your opponent. But if she challenges you and the agreed upon dictionary supports her, you lose your turn. SCRABBLE is all about memorizing real words. Words With Friends is all about finding real words that’s acceptable to the game. You can try as many as you want. With SCRABBLE you only get one try.

Words With Friends is also notorious for people cheating. Playing real SCRABBLE, with real people, with a real board, not in cyberspace, but real space, means you’re on your own to come up with words out of you’re own little brain. When I get together with someone to play SCRABBLE my average word values go way down, and it feels like I’m straining my brain to play.

Skill Versus Luck

Chess is a game that is all skill. SCRABBLE is a game that involves a huge amount of luck with a lot of skill. SCRABBLE appeals to more people because it is accessible, and easier to play than chess. Words With Friends is even easier and more accessible than SCRABBLE, which explains its huge success.

Tournament SCRABBLE players often whine about the poor tile combinations they pulled from the bag, but the real experts can use their tremendous word knowledge to make a bad rack of letters into a high scoring word. That’s why they memorize tens of thousands of obscure words. Knowing words and how they can be played in novel combinations in a board arrangement can thwart an opponent’s “lucky” streak of drawing good letters.

SCRABBLE Dictionaries

Professional SCRABBLE tournaments use various standard dictionaries. Players spend time every day learning the words in those dictionaries – often without learning their meanings. Because English is a world-wide language, SCRABBLE is even played by people whose first language is not English, deciding on an official dictionary is difficult. Basically it breaks down into three groups of English words. Tournaments in the U.S., Canada and Thailand use the Official Tournament and Club Word List (TWL) (178,691 words). For international play, SCRABBLE players use SOWPODS, which combines American and British words (267,751 words). Players using SOWPODS have more words they can play, but it also means potentially memorizing almost a hundred thousand more words. This also makes it difficult for world players to compete in America, because they need to know which words not to use, or for Americans to compete internationally, which means they need know all the additional words that can be used. Plus players need to know when to challenge a phony.

For non-professional, home players of SCRABBLE, Hasbro recommends The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD), now in the 4th edition. The OSPD doesn’t have “offensive” words in it, which many professional and amateur players like to reply on. Strangely, the internal dictionary for Words With Friends allows some offensive words and not others.

Because on July 1, 2013, Hasbro, the American maker of SCRABBLE, is dissolving the National Scrabble Association (NSA), which it has hosted for 25 years, things might change. Since 2009, North American tournament SCRABBLE is organized by the North American Scrabble Players Association (NASPA). Here is NASPA’s most recent statement on word lists.

Word Freak has an extensive discussion and history of SCRABBLE players struggling to come up with an official dictionary. It’s a fascinating problem. Words are constantly added to the language. Words also go out of favor, but should they be removed from the official dictionaries? Players want to use them. As SOWPODS grows, the number of playable words grows, which makes it harder and easier for players. It’s much easier to build elaborate tile combinations if they get to use all words, but at some point many of the words look like gibber-jabber.

Now, I’m not a tournament player, so my opinions don’t count. But while reading Word Freak I was appalled by herculean efforts some professional players go to memorize words. If all the top players have to become Rain Man to compete then it makes the idea of tournament play far less appealing. It also bothers me that the players aren’t required to know the definitions of the words they play.

Learning Words

Professional SCRABBLE players spend hours a day learning words, usually from word lists. 2-letter, 3-letter, 4-letter lists, and so on. Or from lists of special words, like all the Q Words, or Q Words Without U. Most non-tournament SCRABBLE players eventually get around to memorizing short lists, but few people have the stomach for the long lists. That’s what separates the living room players from the rated players.

Tournament players often print out long lists of words, thousands and thousands of them, and cut them into flashcards, so they can study them a hundred at a time. I would never do this. I’m surprised by how much memorization Stefan Fatsis had to pursue to write his book and become a expert player. I think it’s the willingness to study the long lists that separate merely great players from wannabe tournament champions.

Anagramming

Another astonishing feature of word power shown by professional SCRABBLE players is their ability to anagram verbally. You know how parents often spell out words in front of young children so kids won’t know what the grownups are talking about, well, I’m 61 and if people verbally spell out words I don’t understand them. So it blows me away that these SCRABBLE players can spell out 8, 9, 10, 11 or more letters and they can anagram them in their heads. Fatsis reported that the tournament players often sat around playing anagrams after the tournament ended each night. But Fatsis was also told that learning to anagram was a key tool to learning to compete in SCRABBLE competitions and raising his competitive rating.

Strategy and Bingos

Another big difference between living room players and tournament SCRABBLE players is their ability to plan ahead, and especially, plan their end games. Competition level plays constantly seek to get Bingos – playing all seven letters from their rack at once. Great players track the titles played and know which letters might be in the bag or on their opponents rack, and they often play short words one round in hopes of pulling the letters to make a bingo in the next round.

Average Words With Friends players love getting the Q and J because of their 10 point values, but competitive SCRABBLE players often consider these letters a burden. They’d rather get letters, with lesser values, that help them make bingos. They are always collecting prefixes and suffixes thinking about 7 letter words + 1, those words that can be made from 7 letters on the rack and hooked to one letter on the board. They especially love making 8, 9, and 10 letter words by playing 7 titles across three lines of words.

You can follow the game where Mark Landsberg achieved the highest score ever to see how such strategy works.

Visit cross-tables.com to follow games, tournaments, strategy and tools.

If you really want to get caught up in SCRABBLE competition you can read The Last Word newsletter or join SCRABBLE Club or Internet Scrabble Club.

Word Freak chronicled Fatsis meeting many champion players and their own personal strategies they used to win. Most of their strategies involved game play or word study, but sometimes it involved brain drugs, meditation, positive thinking, attitudes towards winning, and even methods to achieve Zen-like flow.

Postgame Analysis, Quackle and Zyzzyva

Fatsis spends a lot of time analyzing games in Word Freak, and he reports that most competitive players write down all their racks for every game they play and then analyze them later for possible better plays. Often at the tournaments, players will gather together to tell each other better possible words to each play. Many players use computer software to analyze their games. Two such programs are Quackle and Zyzzyva. There are many online programs and dictionaries to help players find more word combinations from any given set of letters. Many Words With Friends players use these tools to cheat. but they can also be used to practice

Changing My Game

I still enjoy Words With Friends, but I think I need to switch to SCRABBLE. I know I will never push my mind to be a SCRABBLE champion, but I do think I should push it to memorize words. I have started paying more attention to word spellings as I read books. Like I said earlier, I was disappointed that SCRABBLE masters don’t focus on word definitions. Stefan Fatsis spent a lot of time in his book dealing with word play and it made me want to study words more, maybe even read some books on lexicology. I think I’ll start with Word Buff.

I won’t be making lists of words to memorize, but I might start studying words in general, and their definitions. Reading Word Freak and watching these documentaries made me aware of my wimpy vocabulary. My wife Susan has always loved anagrams, crossword puzzles, and other word puzzle games, and she’s always been much better than me at SCRABBLE and Word With Friends.

JWH – 6/16/13 (Happy Birthday Susie)

Remembering Oz

I have written this essay many times over. Starting out, I merely meant to review Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond, edited by John Joseph Adams & Douglas Cohen. Oz Reimagined is a new collection of short stories inspired by the Oz books by L. Frank Baum. That led to trying to explain what the Oz books were, and finally, trying to psychologically explore what reading those stories in childhood meant to me. Cramming a full memoir and literary study into one blog post of a few thousand words is very difficult.

Fifty-one years ago, when I was ten, I discovered the magical world of libraries, and a set of moldy old books with Oz in each title. CBS began showing the 1939 film version of The Wizard of Oz every year around Christmas since I was eight and it had a huge impact on me. So discovering two rows of Oz books at Homestead Air Force Base Library in 1962 was a major find. I was just discovering the world of books, and I hadn’t understood that movies were often based on books. Nor did I know about series books – what a fantastic idea, returning to the same fantasyland again and again. When I first started reading for fun, all I read was series books, starting with the Oz books, then Danny Dunn, Tom Swift and on to the Hardy Boys. The Oz books had started my lifelong addiction to fiction.

The Oz books were not as dazzling as the MGM movie, but they were incredibly far out. I can’t recommend that you run out and read the Oz books, because you need to discover them when you are young to come under their spell. The Oz books aren’t like the Harry Potter novels where both young and old can enjoy them. Nor do I think they are well written. So I thought it strange that Adams and Cohen would be trying to sell Oz stories to adults. Is there a large enough market of people who discovered Oz books as kids who might want to return to Oz as adults?

The original Oz novels were seriously whacked – beyond bizarre, but not clever like Alice in Wonderland. Oz was not a gentle children’s world like Winnie the Pooh, but more cracked like Dr. Seuss. They were aimed at older children who could read a three hundred page book. If you want to get an idea of what the Oz books were like, Mari Ness over at Tor.com has been rereading all 40 books in the Oz series. Follow the link to see the covers of the books I found in the library 51 years ago. If you click on the title beside each cover you can read Mari’s summary with critical comments. This is about the best introduction to the Oz books for an adult that I can find. You can also go to Gutenberg.com and read the original books.

Rereading them now brings back memories, but not the experiences I felt when I first read them. This is embarrassing to admit, but when I was ten I wanted to believe that Oz existed. I knew Oz was made up, but it was so charming I wanted it to exist. It’s a kind of meta-magic. Oz makes you want to believe in magic. I think all kids want to believe in magic. But when we get old we become skeptical. However, with all the fantasy in our culture, I get the feeling many adults wish that magic existed for them too. But how many adults really loved the recent Oz The Great and Powerful? Why is Oz suddenly making a pop culture comeback? Some people are trying to elevate L. Frank Baum’s stories into American fairytales. Oz Reimagined attempts to build the classic Oz characters into archetypes, which makes me wonder just how deeply rooted Oz is in our subconscious minds? How many Americans know of Oz outside of one great movie and Wicked?

There are other embarrassing things to confess. Reading Oz books brainwashed me. Even though the books aren’t particularly well written, and were childish even to my childish mind, they did a number of me. And if you read far and wide, you’ll find a lot of people who grew up between 1900 and 1970 that also imprinted on Oz. As a child, Oz books had a far greater impact on me than the more famous brainwashing Bible and going to church. It’s funny, but fantasy books, science fiction and religion all have common themes that prey on young minds.

I have fond memories of reading those Oz books and daydreaming about magical worlds as a kid, but when I look now at the books I have to wonder what a goob I must have been as a kid. But then all kids were once naïve goobers who will believe anything you tell them.

Okay, after that long introduction I need to get now to reviewing Oz Reimagined. Why go back? Why write new stories about Oz? And it’s strange, I’ve returned to Oz twice in the last couple of months, because Oz The Great and Powerful also came out around the time the book did. What’s with all these people returning to Oz?

Within weeks we had a new Oz movie and a new Oz book. Even if you have no interest in Oz, this is still rather interesting if you are fascinated by the concepts fiction and myths. In the year 1900, L. Frank Baum published the original Oz story, The Wizard of Oz, and since then there have been hundreds of sequels and many movies based on this imaginary place called Oz.

From time to time, a writer will create characters and a story world that readers just won’t let die. Think of Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Scrooge, Superman, Kirk and Spock, Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, Harry Potter – maybe you’re surprised by the last one, but just gander at the list of Harry Potter fan fiction stories. There’s over 645,652 of them. One measure of obsessive popularity with fictional worlds is fan fiction, where young people write stories set in their favorite fictional worlds. Just check this list sorted by popularity. Harry Potter has 645,652 entries, Twilight has 210,560, Lord of the Rings has 49,016, and Hunger Games has 32,298. Way down the list, with 42 entries is Oz books. The young just aren’t interested in Oz anymore, and I doubt the new movie will create many new fan writers.

Fan fiction is an amazing pop culture barometer. If it existed in 1920, I’m pretty sure Oz books would have topped the list. Fan fiction shows a deep level of love by some readers for their favorite story worlds and characters. Most of these entries are just fragments, scenes or short stories, but many are fully developed novels. For example, Watchers & Dancers is 108,631 word novel that takes The Little Women March sisters from the 19th and puts them in the 21st. You have to admit that such dedication reveals the power of fiction to inspire the imaginations of young people.

There’s only 42 Oz stories at fanfiction.net. If we could collect all these Oz inspired stories that’s ever been written, I’d bet there would be thousands. Oz Reimagined adds 15 more. But here’s the weird thing, some of the stories in Oz Reimagined are just stories set in Oz, but many stories are about being memed by Oz stories. I think there are two kinds of grown-ups who read Oz books as a kid. The first want to return to Oz, and the second want to deprogram themselves from the influence of Oz as a child. You’re either an Oz believer, or an Oz atheist. It all depends on your attitude towards magic.

Do you believe in magic? Did you believe when you were a child? Do you like reading stories and watching movies even now as a grownup that features magic? The success of Harry Potter seems to indicate that many of you will answer yes. Does that reflect a secret longing for magic to exist in our very scientific reality? Or does it reflect that when were children we thought magic should be real?

Obviously the history of the human race has involved a lot of magic and myths. I am a solid believer in science, an atheist, and know absolutely that magic does not exist. Yet, I have this hang-up about Oz. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know about Oz. I can’t remember when I first saw the classic MGM film, but I think it was in those twilight years before the beginning of memories and self-awareness.

If you only know of Oz through the famous 1939 movie, then you really don’t know Oz. The Land of Oz was a powerful fairyland first created in 1900 by L. Frank Baum with his book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Baum didn’t intend for it to be a series, but fans wouldn’t let go. Baum created thirteen more books about the citizens of Oz over the next twenty years, infecting millions of children with a deeply psychological desire for magic. I read the fourteen Baum books as a child, before switching my reading addiction to science fiction. I guess if I couldn’t find over the rainbow on Earth, I’d go much further to find it.

Right from the start people tried to ban the Oz books. The faithful considered them spreading ungodly ideas and undermining gender roles. Librarians banned them because they believed Oz books gave children unrealistic ideas about reality.

The funny thing is they were right. Oz books do undermine religion, promote feminism and give kids unrealistic expectations about life.

Is you become addicted to Oz as a child, you’ll spend you’re whole life trying to get back to Oz. Just read The Number of the Beast – Robert A. Heinlein was a major Oz addict. For the most part, the Oz books are slowly becoming forgotten, but not their legacy, because stories with magic for children have come to dominate our culture. Has there been an era that’s embraced fantasy so deeply as now? Many mainline fantasy hours a day through their television, movie and ebook screens.

However, there must be plenty of readers still discovering the Oz books, because we have this new anthology of original stories set in Oz.

Oz Reimagined, is aimed at an audience I’m be curious to know. How many kids growing up today read the original Oz books by L. Frank Baum? People have been writing new stories set in Oz since 1920 when Baum last title, Glenda of Oz, came out the year after he died. Wikipedia has a great list of Oz Books. Writers just can’t forget Oz. But how many kids today grow up reading the Oz books? It can’t be many.

And we also know the long checkered history of Oz movies, including the latest, Oz the Great and Powerful, which I thought was beautiful but had too many flaws – and by the way, there’s no sex in Oz, at least not the Oz I grew up with. The Wizard might have been a humbug, but not a horndog, but that’s my interpretation. Who brought adulthood to Oz? Was it Gregory Maguire and his Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, who writes an introduction to this collection? I don’t know, but probably not. I haven’t read or seen Wicked, so I don’t know how much current pop culture Oz is related to Maguire’s re-visioning of Oz.

See, that’s the thing about the new anthology, Oz Reimagined, depending on how you picture Oz, will determine how much you enjoy the many types of stories. This collection isn’t for kids, but a few of the stories are aimed at us who try to remember being kids. Some of the other stories show a bitterness, maybe from the realization of their Oz addiction is corrupting. And even other stories show a cynical view, having Dorothy reliving her adventures inside a mental hospital (“One Flew Over the Rainbow” by Robin Wasserman).

There is a common theme in all Oz stories, a search for transcendence from the mundane. There is a wistful recognition that magic doesn’t exist, but if we could become innocent again it might.

My favorite of the collection, “Off to See the Emperor” by Orson Scott Card. It’s the deepest story emotionally, when it comes to remembering being a kid. I can’t help but wonder if Card’s personal belief in magic – Mormonism – allows him to write such a wonderful story about magic. Most of the writers in the anthology aren’t true believers. Magic is just a story gimmick. It takes powerful writing to make readers believe in magic, or want to believe in magic. The Harry Potter books are the best example today.

I bought both the Kindle and Audible editions of Oz Reimagined, and have to say the narrators, Nick Podehl and Tanya Eby do such a fantastic job, and I highly recommend getting the audio edition if you decide to try this book.

But in terms of creating a Oz like story for kids, I’d say “The Cobbler of Oz” by Jonathan Maberry came closest to how I remember the books.

The book contains 15 stories plus a forward, “Oz and Ourselves” by Gregory Maguire and an introduction Adams and Cohen.

“The Great Zeppelin Heist of Oz” by Rae Carson & C.C. Finlay
“Emeralds to Emeralds, Dust to Dust” by Seanan McGuire
“Lost Girls of Oz” by Theodora Goss
“The Boy Detective of Oz: An Otherland Story” by Tad Williams
“Dorothy Dreams” by Simon R. Green
“Dead Blue” by David Farland
“One Flew Over the Rainbow” by Robin Wasserman
“The Veiled Shanghai” by Ken Liu
“Beyond the Naked Eye” by Rachel Swirsky
“A Tornado of Dorothys” by Kat Howard
“Blown Away” by Jane Yolen
“City So Bright” by Dale Bailey
“Off to See the Emperor” by Orson Scott Card
“A Meeting in Oz” by Jeffrey Ford
“The Cobbler of Oz” by Jonathan Maberry

Like Tarzan, or Sherlock Holmes, or even Star Trek, we have discovered that fans of the these original story worlds love them so much they want to return time and again, even after the original author has died. Unlike these other stories, which are character driven, Oz is really place driven. We see many new Dorothys, Scarecrows, Tin Woodsmen, Cowardly Lions and Wizards, but the real appeal of Oz, is it’s rich magical landscape.

You can read the original books at Gutenberg, and I recommend you try them, or a portion of them, to get a feel for what they were like. Most everyone today knows Oz from reflections and reflections of reflections. It very important to remember these were books written for kids, and they were written around a hundred years ago when times were much simpler.

Here is The Patchwork Girl of Oz with the beautiful John R. Neill illustrations from the 1915 edition. This is how Oz looked when I was first introduced to the books when I was ten. The story is about a magician who has a potion, The Powder of Life, that will make inanimate objects come to life. One of his first experiments is on a glass cat, who is also one of the main characters in “The Boy Detective of Oz: An Otherland Story” by Tad Williams, from Oz Reimagined.

The cat was made of glass, so clear and transparent that you could see through it as easily as through a window. In the top of its head, however, was a mass of delicate pink balls which looked like jewels, and it had a heart made of a blood-red ruby. The eyes were two large emeralds, but aside from these colors all the rest of the animal was clear glass, and it had a spun-glass tail that was really beautiful.

"Well, Doc Pipt, do you mean to introduce us, or not?" demanded the cat, in a tone of annoyance. "Seems to me you are forgetting your manners."

"Excuse me," returned the Magician. "This is Unc Nunkie, the descendant of the former kings of the Munchkins, before this country became a part of the Land of Oz."

"He needs a haircut," observed the cat, washing its face.

"True," replied Unc, with a low chuckle of amusement.

"But he has lived alone in the heart of the forest for many years," the Magician explained; "and, although that is a barbarous country, there are no barbers there."

"Who is the dwarf?" asked the cat.

"That is not a dwarf, but a boy," answered the Magician. "You have never seen a boy before. He is now small because he is young. With more years he will grow big and become as tall as Unc Nunkie."

"Oh. Is that magic?" the glass animal inquired.

"Yes; but it is Nature’s magic, which is more wonderful than any art known to man. For instance, my magic made you, and made you live; and it was a poor job because you are useless and a bother to me; but I can’t make you grow. You will always be the same size—and the same saucy, inconsiderate Glass Cat, with pink brains and a hard ruby heart."

"No one can regret more than I the fact that you made me," asserted the cat, crouching upon the floor and slowly swaying its spun-glass tail from side to side. "Your world is a very uninteresting place. I’ve wandered through your gardens and in the forest until I’m tired of it all, and when I come into the house the conversation of your fat wife and of yourself bores me dreadfully."

"That is because I gave you different brains from those we ourselves possess—and much too good for a cat," returned Dr. Pipt.

"Can’t you take ’em out, then, and replace ’em with pebbles, so that I won’t feel above my station in life?" asked the cat, pleadingly.

"Perhaps so. I’ll try it, after I’ve brought the Patchwork Girl to life," he said.

The cat walked up to the bench on which the Patchwork Girl reclined and looked at her attentively.

"Are you going to make that dreadful thing live?" she asked.

The Magician nodded.

"It is intended to be my wife’s servant maid," he said. "When she is alive she will do all our work and mind the house. But you are not to order her around, Bungle, as you do us. You must treat the Patchwork Girl respectfully."

"I won’t. I couldn’t respect such a bundle of scraps under any circumstances."

"If you don’t, there will be more scraps than you will like," cried Margolotte, angrily.

"Why didn’t you make her pretty to look at?" asked the cat. "You made me pretty—very pretty, indeed—and I love to watch my pink brains roll around when they’re working, and to see my precious red heart beat." She went to a long mirror, as she said this, and stood before it, looking at herself with an air of much pride. "But that poor patched thing will hate herself, when she’s once alive," continued the cat. "If I were you I’d use her for a mop, and make another servant that is prettier."

"You have a perverted taste," snapped Margolotte, much annoyed at this frank criticism. "I think the Patchwork Girl is beautiful, considering what she’s made of. Even the rainbow hasn’t as many colors, and you must admit that the rainbow is a pretty thing."

The Glass Cat yawned and stretched herself upon the floor.

"Have your own way," she said. "I’m sorry for the Patchwork Girl, that’s all."

As you can see, the prose is not magical, but, if you have the right frame of mind, and can imagine Oz, and things like glass cats, phonographs, saw horses and patchwork dolls coming to life with a magic powder, then you might be a Oz person. It helps to be a kid, or childlike, or maybe stoned, to get into the spirit. I think the 1939 film did it best, whereas other films never quite caught the magic. I gave you this average sample from an Oz book to show you how it compares to the new stories.

Tad Williams reimagines Oz as a computer simulation where he must solve a murder. Many of the writers in Oz Reimagined try to come up with a rational reason for Oz, and in this story Orlando Gardiner, System Ranger, is debugging the kansas simworld. Something must be terrible wrong with the simulation if a murder happens. Here is Williams’ introduction to the Glass Cat.

But that still didn’t answer the main question: If everything was good in Kansas, why had he been summoned?

Whatever the reason, someone seemed to be waiting for him. She would have sparkled if the sun had been on her, but since the Glass Cat was sitting in the shade grooming, Orlando didn’t see her until he was almost on top of her. She looked up at Orlando but didn’t stop until she had finished licking her glass paw and smoothing down the fur on her glass face. The Glass Cat might be a sim of a cat— and a see-through cat at that— but she was every inch a feline. The only things that kept her from looking like a cheap glass paperweight were her beautiful ruby heart, her emerald eyes, and the pink, pearl-like spheres that were her brains (and also her own favorite attribute).

“I expected you to show up,” said the Glass Cat. “But not this quickly.”

“I was in the area.” Which was both true and nonsensical, since there really was no distance for Orlando to travel. He existed only as information on the massive network and could visit any world he wanted whenever he chose. But as far as the Glass Cat and the others were concerned, there was only one world— this one. The sims didn’t even realize they were no longer connected to the Oz part of the simulation, although they remembered it as if they were. “I hear there’s a problem,” he said. “Do you know what it is?”

She rose, swirling her tail in the air as gracefully as if it had not been solid glass, and sauntered off the path, heading down toward the stream. “Am I supposed to follow you?” he asked.

She tossed him an emerald glance of reproach. “You’re so very clever, man from Oz. What do you think?”

Following a snippy, transparent cat, he thought: Just another day in my new and unfailingly weird life. Orlando’s body had died from a wasting disease as he and others had struggled against the Grail Brotherhood, the network’s creators, a cartel of rich monsters and other greedy bastards all looking for eternal life in worlds they made for themselves. But now they were all gone, and this was Orlando’s forever instead.

“I hope this is important, Cat,” he said as he followed her down the embankment, into the rustle of the birch trees. “I’ve got plenty of other things to do.” And he did. Major glitches had looped Dodge City— the simulated outlaws had been robbing the same simulated train for days— and the gravity had unexpectedly reverted to Earth-normal in one of the flying worlds, leaving bodies all over the ground. He planned to fob at least one of the problems off on Kunohara, who, like most scientists, loved fiddling with that sort of programming problem.

“There,” the Cat said, stopping so suddenly he nearly tripped over her. “What do you think of that?”

This isn’t the same Oz as Baum’s, but it has the same spirit, just modernized. Most of the stories are like this, all quite inventive. Another story, “The Veiled Shanghai” by Ken Liu sets Oz inside of 1919 Shanghai like the dual cities in The City & The City, the Hugo winning novel by China Miéville. Jeffrey Ford has an old Dorothy returning to Oz in “A Meeting in Oz” that has a rather chilling reimagined meaning to “There’s no place like home.”

Like I keep asking, why do we keep going back to Oz? But why do we keep going back and retelling classic Grimm tales? Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow have six volumes of retold fairy tales for adults. I think it’s more than writers just wanting to modernize old folk tales. I think it’s a kind of cultural psychoanalysis with each writer taking their turn at bat being Joseph Campbell. Maybe they are like me, feeling they were bamboozled as kids by stories that were so much more exciting than reality. Maybe it’s fun to dress up old fairytales in modern language. Maybe it’s just more fan fiction.

Reading these fairy tales for adults, I wonder if they are either deprogramming tools, or remembering reprogramming tools, because we want to forget magic, or we want to return to believing in magic. Writing stories for adults that retell children stories is a weird business. They either try to make us think like kids again, or they make us think like kids again, but with brutal winks and nudges.

JWH – 6/11/13

Is an International Nonprofit Space Program Possible?

Ever dream of being an astronaut? Ever fantasize about developing a new rocket system to take people to Mars? Ever wanted to be a colonist on the Moon? For decades only the richest of nations could afford a space program. In the last decade several rich men have started their own space programs for rich space tourists. But what about us poor folks, with big final frontier dreams? Could we collective scrape up a few billion to build our own space program? The idea was once silly, but now that ordinary people are winning lotteries approaching a billion dollars, digging up the money to finance an amateur space program doesn’t sound as impossible as it once did.

Space programs 1.0 for most of history have been huge nationalistic affairs. Only rich governments and astronauts with the right stuff could participate, leaving most would-be final frontier explorers on the ground. The last decade has shown the rise of private space enterprises with the focus on space for profit, space programs 2.0. But you still have to be a billionaire to own a space company, or a multi-millionaire to be a space tourist.

I’m asking if a 3.0 generation of space exploration isn’t possible, one based on non-profit, open source, volunteerism, where ordinary people design, build and travel into space?

What motivates people? As Daniel H. Pink explains in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, it isn’t the outer rewards that drive us the hardest, but the inner desires. There’s not enough people interested in colonizing the final frontier to motivate Congress to spend more tax money on space exploration, but is there enough people interested by their own inner desires to finance a space program collectively? We are seeing more and more projects developed around the world by volunteer effort. Linux, the operating system that fits on everything from tiny embedded controllers to giant supercomputers, is produced by volunteer effort. Kickstarter and Kiva show the power of individuals to financially back new ideas. TED and Khan Academy illustrate the power of individuals with ideas to influence change. Projects like Wikipedia show that people all over the world are willing to spend long hours working without pay to create something that almost everyone uses.

If you don’t know about the open source movement you should follow the link and read about it. It’s about why and how programmers develop free computer programs for everyone to use. Eric S. Raymond wrote a famous philosophical essay about open source software called The Cathedral & The Bazaar. It’s hard to explain the open source movement in a few words, but it’s about people all over the world working on large projects, and through their own self-starting initiative, creating something very valuable, that’s used by millions and billions of people.

The open source movement follows in the footsteps of the 19th century amateur scientist. Now this power to the people philosophy is moving on to bigger projects, such as ARKYD: A Space Telescope for Everyone by Planetary Resources.

By using the crowd source funding site Kickstarter, Planetary Resources promises to build a space telescope for everyone to use. You make it happen by donating money, and depending on how much you donate, you get various participation rewards. The ARKYD is no Hubble Space Telescope, but it does show the power of people working together.

But what if we could crowd fund something bigger, like a manned lunar base? The Bloomberg link sites one study claiming it will take $35 billion to put a four person base on the Moon. The ARKYD project is aiming for $1 million dollars, and they are half-way funded, a Moon base would require 35,000 millions. That’s several quantum leaps in crowd funding success. Is such people funded projects even possible?

What would a people’s space program cost? Let’s imagine a private open source crowd funded space program with an annual budget of $5 billion dollars. That’s 5,000,000,000 – lots of zeros. It would require 50 million people donating $100 a year. There’s probably not that many space enthusiasts in the world, because if there were, NASA would have solid public support when it comes to Congressional appropriations.

A five billion dollar space program is also 5 million people donating a $1,000 a year. That sounds like a lot, but that’s $83.33 a month, or about the cost of a monthly smartphone bill. What if such a commitment would get you into a lottery to fly in space? What if you got to help design a lunar colony? That’s the kind of inner motivation that inspired Daniel Pink’s book, Drive.

A club of 5 million people might be possible. Especially when you think about how many volunteer type tasks would be required to start an open source space programs. Let’s assume our open source space program doesn’t build rockets, but hires the 2.0 generation of private rocket builders, and our goal is to develop a lunar colony, it could take decades to evolve such a space program. Let’s say for the first twenty years we devote ourselves to robotic missions to the Moon, how many people out there would love to design and build robots for the purpose, get no pay, but spend their their own money?

If we look around we can find thousands, if not millions of people already spending lots of their own money in scientific-like endeavors. If you just include open source programmers, robot builders, amateur astronomers, amateur rocket builders, the Maker crowd, amateur AI developers, gamers who love to create complicated simulations, X-Prize enthusiasts, and get them all working on one big project, could we have an open source, non-profit space program?

In recent weeks I’ve seen quite a few internet stories that make me think such synergy is possible.

Amateur Astronomy

Amateur astronomers has always made significant contributions to real science. Timothy Ferris wrote a whole book on the topic, Seeing in the Dark : How Amateur Astronomers Are Discovering the Wonders of the Universe. With modest equipment, dogged determination, and disciplined systematic effort, people without PhDs can add important information to scientific journals and research. Take a look at the trailer for the PBS documentary that’s based on the book. It’s available on Netflix.

Amateurs have recently discovered exoplanets by going through public data. Amateurs often discover comets and supernovas. Amateurs track asteroids and near Earth objects. Amateurs monitor sunspots and double stars. Telescopes are becoming more powerful and affordable to amateurs, and CCD astronomy lets amateurs take astronomical photographs that surpass what the Mt. Palomar telescope could take back in the 1960s.

The ARKYD space telescope is probably just the first of many amateur spaced based telescopes. Because of the internet, there are many robot control ground based telescopes around the world that amateurs can use.

Imagine amateur astronomers having a robotic lunar based telescope to share.

Make, Makers and Robots

Make Magazine has had a tremendous impact on the world of Do-It-Yourselfers. Small cheap microcontrollers like the Raspberry Pi and Arduino inspire people to become inventors of intelligent gadgets. Look what Dave Ackerman did with a Raspberry Pi and a weather balloon. Please follow the link to read a fascinating article. These pictures look better than what the U.S. government with German scientists took with early sounding rockets back in the 1940s.

Make Magazine shows the tip of the iceberg for how many would-be inventors live in our world. Now take a look at Robot Magazine. How many boys and girls out there dream of building a robot that does something really cool? Why should only JPL and NASA scientists have all the fun?

Science Fairs

Eesha Khare, an 18-year-old student from Lynbrook High School, Saratoga, California, won second place in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair this year for developing a super-capacitor that would allow cellphones and other electronic devices to be recharged in 20-30 seconds, instead of hours, and upped the recharging lifetimes from 1,000 charges to 10,000. Ionut Budisteanu, 19, of Romania, developed AI for a self-driving car. Henry Lin, 17, of Shreveport, Louisiana, develop a computer simulation “that simulated thousands of clusters of galaxies, providing scientist with new data that will allow them to better understand dark matter, dark energy and the balance of heating and cooling in the universe’s most massive objects.”

It’s obvious that individuals, without years of graduate school can do significant science. Is it possible to coordinate amateurs to work on a much larger project that spans years of effort?

Open Source Space Program

What if we applied the open source programming philosophy to amateur science to develop larger amateur projects? The way open source software begins is when a software inventor starts a project and then Tom Sawyers other people to volunteer. I imagine an open source space program to be an organization like Wikipedia that gives a collection of centralized tasks to thousands of volunteers.

An open source space program could start by designing itself with a virtual world version first. That initial projects would be created in simulations, and once they are worked out, then start building real world projects. Let’s imagine the first project is to design a lunar lander. Given the constraints of costs and the payload capacity of private launch rocket services, how big of a lander can we design? For example, lets say we can get a 1000 pounds sent towards the Moon for $300 million. How sophisticated can we make such a lander?

For any self-sufficient lunar colony to succeed it will require living off the land. What elements exist on the lunar surface or in it’s scant atmosphere that can be used to build a base for human habitation? The Moon has water, and that gives us raw material for oxygen to breathe, and oxygen and hydrogen for rocket fuel. But can we find nitrogen on the Moon? Trace amounts have been found in the atmosphere. Could we build a machine that gathers significant amounts of nitrogen, so we could have a safe breathable atmosphere for when we robotically dig our underground Moon City?

The possibilities are endless. We design a series of robots that process lunar resources into goods we don’t have to send to the Moon. We keep sending robots to build what we need until we have a base that’s safe for humans. Then we send people.

Now, is this possible through volunteer effort and open source techniques?

JWH – 6/5/13