James L. Cambias's Blog, page 43

Ozblogging: Tik-Tok of Oz, Part 3

Chapter Seven begins with a nice bit of Baum's own particular fairy mythology. The Rain King gets too much water in his basin and it spills over, causing rain on Earth. Then the Rainbow arrives, and the Rainbow's Daughters dance on the bow, daring each other to touch the ground. And ��� as happens so very often ��� Polychrome, the most adventurous of the Rainbow's Daughters, lingers too long on the ground and gets left behind when the Rainbow leaves again. (Again, it's easy to imagine this as a musical number on stage.)

Polychrome is lamenting her carelessness when Betsy, Hank, Ozga the Rose Princess, and the Shaggy Man come along. There's a little comic wordplay, and the Shaggy Man wins over the disconsolate Polychrome with his Love Magnet. (I've already mentioned elsewhere that the Love Magnet turns every scene involving the Shaggy Man into a mass of sleazy innuendo.) Neither Shaggy nor Polychrome remember their previous meeting in The Road to Oz, which may be due to Mr. Baum trying not to remind his readers how much material he's recycling here. She agrees to accompany them to search for the entrance to the kingdom of Ruggedo the Nome King.

The five of them wander about for a while before stumbling across an abandoned well. Hank spies something at the bottom of the well and does the classic Lassie maneuver until the others come over to look, and then the Shaggy Man hauls out Tik-Tok, the clockwork man!

Shaggy actually remembers Tik-Tok, and Betsy follows the directions printed on the clockwork man's back to wind up his speech, thought, and action workings. Once he's wound, Tik-Tok relates (in his in-im-it-able sty-le) that Ozma located Shaggy's brother by means of the Magic Picture and sent Tik-Tok to help Shaggy find him, but the Nome King found Tik-Tok first and pitched him down the well.

Despite having been sent to help Shaggy locate the Nome King's realm, Tik-Tok doesn't know where the entrance is, and the six of them are standing around trying to decide what to do when they are interrupted by the sound of marching feet.

The Oogaboo Expeditionary Force has arrived! Private Files plants a flag and announces that this territory has been conquered by Oogaboo. Queen Ann orders him to conquer the Shaggy Man et al, but Files is too much of a gentleman to take arms against Betsy, Ozga, and Polychrome. Hank the mule and the Love Magnet are too much for the Army of Oogaboo, and the Shaggy Man talks them into helping conquer the Nome King ��� who is, he points out, extremely rich and thus will furnish lots of plunder.

Since World War I hadn't actually gotten rolling when Mr. Baum wrote this book, I wonder if the Oogabooan campaign of world conquest isn't a little dig at the scramble for colonies among the Great Powers of Europe (plus America and Japan). Strangers showing up, planting a flag, and informing the locals that they had just been added to somebody's Empire was a feature of life in Africa, the South Pacific, and parts of Asia in the late 19th century.

The United States had recently joined the club by taking the Philippines and Puerto Rico away from Spain, and had joined in the multinational mission to Peking to put down the Boxer Rebellion. President Theodore Roosevelt had sent a fleet of American battleships on a round-the-world cruise not unlike the march of Queen Ann's Army.

Because of her sole Private's mutiny, Queen Ann's Army is unable to fight, but Tik-Tok volunteers to take the job. The question of finding the Nome King's cavern is solved when ex-Private Files suggests that the Rose Princess Ozga ask some of the nearby flowers. Being a flower herself, she can talk to them. She does, and a stand of daisies point the way.

Let me now point out that our story currently has eight major protagonists (Queen Ann, ex-Pfc Files, Betsy, Hank, the Shaggy Man, ex-Princess Ozga, and Tik-Tok) along with twenty supporting characters (the officers of Ann's Army). That's a huge cast for a stage play and a rather unwieldy one for a short novel. Why is ex-Princess Ozga in this story at all? Polychrome could do all the "lovely fairy maiden" jobs (and has a much more colorful personality; Ozga's a bit of a wallflower).

Thinking about it, this is a feature of many Oz books, and I'm not sure why Mr. Baum felt it necessary to cram so many speaking parts into his later stories. Was it just padding? If six or eight people have to introduce themselves every time they encounter some new wacky wayside tribe or band of randomly hostile freaks, that's good for an extra page or two per chapter. Or was he being governed by his dreams of making the books into shows? But I can't really think why he would want to crowd his stage ��� each extra character meant an actor who'd want a paycheck. Perhaps he was playing to his strengths: Baum was good at creating interesting characters, and maybe he found that easier than plotting.

Next time: Nomes!

 

If you want stories about colorful characters in exotic settings, which aren't too crowded, buy my new ebook!

Ozblogging: Tik-Tok of Oz, Part 2

In Chapter Four the scene shifts to a ship caught in a terrible storm. Betsy Bobbin is introduced and falls overboard in one sentence, followed by a thin, sad-faced mule named Hank. Then the ship explodes and sinks (well, it is 1914 . . . ). Betsy and Hank climb onto some floating wreckage. Betsy falls asleep, and when she wakes up the storm has cleared and he makeshift raft is approaching a coastline covered in flowers.

If you read Ozma of Oz, this section may strike you as kind of . . . familiar. In that book, Dorothy is swept overboard from a ship bound for Australia (which does not explode), and floats to safety in a chicken coop, accompanied by the incomparable hen Billina. Turn Dorothy into Betsy and Billina into Hank, and rush through the whole thing as if you're trying to save typewriter ribbons, and you've pretty much got this chapter.

And if you know anything about the stage and early film versions of the Oz stories, you know how often small animals were replaced by larger ones, as hiring some aspiring comic actor like Hal Roach to wear an animal costume was a lot cheaper than getting trained dogs or live donkeys to behave on stage or on camera. So Billina had to become Hank, and since Dorothy has already become a Princess of Oz, she's not going to be cruising around on exploding ships, with or without a mule. Enter Betsy Bobbin.

It would be easy to say that Betsy is just a "re-skinned" Dorothy ��� she's a little girl from Oklahoma with a devoted animal friend and a tendency to get into dangerous situations in magical lands. But Betsy, while certainly courageous, lacks Dorothy's aura of unstoppability. It's difficult to imagine her tossing a bucket of water at a Wicked Witch, or telling off Princess Langwidere when threatened with decapitation.

Betsy and Hank wash ashore in a pretty countryside, but there is no one around. There is, however, an imposing greenhouse, and the two castaways take a look inside, hoping to find a gardener. Instead they find a bunch of giant Roses (note the Baumian Capital Letters) with the faces of pretty girls. The Roses inform Betsy that she and Hank have arrived in the Rose Kingdom (duh) ��� and that non-Roses are not allowed in that land.

Now since the Roses are plants growing in pots inside a greenhouse, and don't seem to have hands, you'd think that Betsy and Hank aren't in much peril. But you'd be wrong: enter the Royal Gardener (capitalized). He's a funny little man dressed in rose-colored costume with ribbons in his hair, who repeats the warning that Betsy and Hank must leave ��� when he isn't having hysterics and falling over at the sound of Hank's bray.

The confrontation with this entirely un-terrifying threat is interrupted by the shattering of the glass roof of the greenhouse as a man falls from the sky. It's not just any man, though, it's the Shaggy Man, with his Love Magnet. Unlike most people who smash through a glass roof (in either direction) the Shaggy Man is quite calm and unhurt. The Royal Gardener immediately demands that the Shaggy Man also leave the Rose Kingdom on pain of death, but Hank kicks the little man outside long enough for the Shaggy Man to inform Betsy of some key points:

1.) The wonderful Land of Oz she has read about in Baum's books is real,

2.) The Shaggy Man is a pal of Ozma et al (evidently Betsy only read the earlier books in the series), and

3.) He's looking for his brother, who disappeared in a mine in Colorado.

The Shaggy Man is convinced that his brother was captured by the Nome King, and has come to the Rose Kingdom looking for a way to find the Metal Monarch. The Gardener insists they must leave, and even the Love Magnet can't dissuade him from his duty, but he does admit that at the moment there isn't actually a Ruler of the Rose Kingdom, because none of the royal Roses in the Royal Garden are ripe yet.

. . . Except that Betsy comes across a Princess who looks ripe, and picks her. But the Roses of the Rose Kingdom insist on a King rather than a Princess, and poor Ozga (the Rose Princess) is obliged to accompany Betsy, Hank, and the Shaggy Man into exile.

It's hard not to notice how "stagy" this whole sequence is. The Roses could be played by chorus girls in costume, the Royal Gardener scenes are full of comic slapstick, and most of the action is conveniently indoors. As usual, Baum even helpfully gives costume details for the speaking parts. Most of Baum's ventures into stage and cinema were financial disasters, and it's kind of a shame to see him constraining his fantasy stories to fit a medium he never really got the hang of.

It's also hard not to notice that Mr. Baum is really blatantly recycling material here. The whole Rose Kingdom sequence is taken almost verbatim from the Mangaboo section of Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz. You've got a kingdom of plant people, a political crisis due to a lack of ripe rulers, and the brash outsiders defying the rules to pick a vegetable Princess. There's also the crash-landing of a familiar character which interrupts a tense moment.

Self-plagiarism aside, we can assume that the sentient plants of the Rose Kingdom are related to the Mangaboos ��� either a closely-related subspecies or a strain cultivated by generations of (non-Rose) Royal Gardeners. Interestingly, it appears that only the Royal Roses are fully humanoid and capable of movement; the other Roses grow in pots. This makes me wonder if the Royal Roses are sort of like the "royalty" of ants and wasps: the mobile, reproduction-capable members of the hive. Perhaps Royal Roses can travel about to cross-pollinate with other Rose colonies.

Anyway, Our Heroes cross over the drawbridge leading out of the Rose Kingdom, now intent on locating the Shaggy Man's brother.

Next time: Even More Characters!

 

For two stories which don't involve any talking plants, have a look at my new ebook!

Ozblogging: Tik-Tok of Oz, Part 1

It has been nearly four years since my last Ozblogging effort, but since Oz is a timeless fairyland we can pick up where we left off as if nothing had happened.

Tik-Tok of Oz (first published in 1914) has a rather complicated history: it's an Oz book based on a stage show written by L. Frank Baum, The Tik-Tok Man of Oz, which in turn was based loosely on the book Ozma of Oz. But over the course of two adaptations Baum made so many changes and threw in so many new story elements that Tik-Tok of Oz has only the faintest resemblance to its grandparent Ozma.

The chapter titles are charmingly alliterative, running from "Ann's Army" through "Tik-Tok Tackles a Tough Task" and "The Jinjin's Just Judgement" all the way to "The Land of Love." It is dedicated to Louis F. Gottschalk, who composed the music for the stage show The Tik Tok Man of Oz, and later was one of Baum's partners in the Oz Film Manufacturing Company. He wrote musical scores for several silent Oz movies made by the Oz company. Louis Ferdinand Gottschalk should not be confused with his more famous uncle Louis Moreau Gottschalk, the New Orleans-born composer who died in 1869.

Our story opens in the tiny mountain valley of Oogaboo, an isolated and quasi-autonomous province of the greater Land of Oz. Oogaboo is ruled by the ambitious and dissatisfied Queen Ann Soforth. She is ambitious because her kingdom has only 89 inhabitants, and is dissatisfied because she has to sweep the floor herself while her younger sister lazes in the hammock out in the yard.

So, in a grimly prophetic move (did I mention the book was published in 1914?) Queen Ann Soforth decides to go forth on a campaign of conquest and plunder. She intends to start by conquering Oz, then the rest of the world, and possibly the Moon as well, if she can figure out how to get there.

Of course, if you're going to conquer the world, you need an army. Ann recruits most of the male population of Oogaboo to be in her expeditionary force. She has to let most of them be generals and colonels in order to persuade them to join, but the equally ambitious and warlike Jo Files agrees to be the sole private in the Army of Oogaboo, so that he can win glory by doing all the fighting.

The imbalance in size between Oz and Oogaboo is offset by Oogaboo's superior military organization: both armies are top-heavy, but Ann actually has a private in her army, while Ozma's own military has none at all. Nattily turned-out in a green unform with gold braid and a purple plume, Queen Ann accompanies her army as it marches forth on a bid for interplanetary domination.

Queen Ann Soforth is of course making one of the classic blunders of grand strategy: convincing herself that the quality of her troops can overcome their numerical disadvantage. This happens over and over throughout history: some leader decides that bushido spirit or Nordic blood or the dialectical forces of history will allow a small army to beat a bigger one. It does sometimes happen, but it seldom lasts. Charles XII of Sweden's army routinely beat much bigger Russian forces during the Great Northern War of 1700. He beat the Russians and Saxons so soundly that eventually he ran out of Swedes and had to go home again.

Of course, even the biggest battalions are pretty much irrelevant given that Oz is defended by the might of Glinda the Good. In this novel her seat of power has inexplicably moved north of the Emerald City, but since the Good Witch of the North has dropped out of Baum's novels since the birthday party in Road to Oz, maybe Glinda has taken over her territory as well.

Glinda, of course, has magical intelligence-gathering systems in place which tell her everything going on anywhere in the world, so she's on top of the Oogaboo situation from the beginning. She uses her space-warping magic to bend the road out of Oogaboo away from the rest of Oz, depositing Queen Ann and her Expeditionary Force in some desolate land beyond the Deadly Desert which guards the kingdom. Glinda is so helpful she doesn't even bother to inform Ozma, the lovely Girl Ruler and her nominal sovereign. In modern parlance, Glinda is a rogue agency.

The Expeditionary Force does manage to acquit itself well in battle against a vaguely dragon-like creature called a Rak, which surrounds itself with a dark cloud of salt-and-pepper scented breath. Private Files blasts it out of the sky with his musket, and the Army of Oogaboo heartlessly ignores the Rak's polite requests to stay around until it recovers and can eat them properly. Cheered by their victory, the Oogabooans make camp.

I don't know if the Rak is Baum's take on the gigantic Roc of middle-eastern folklore, a bird so vast it hunts elephants to feed to its chicks. This one is big enough to lie atop the entire officer corps of Oogaboo, but isn't heavy enough to crush them. It is very polite, though.

Next time: Deja Vu!

 

For more stories about ambitious women and unwise plans, check out my new ebook!

Where's My Flying Journalist?

This is slightly more serious-and-thoughtful than my usual posts, but it's something that has been bothering me more and more of late.

It has become a rather tired joke, since 2000 came and went, to ask "Where's my flying car?" Or, more generally, to wonder why this or that gee-whiz prediction about Life In The Twenty-First Century from 1972 or whenever didn't come true. The answer is almost always "because the person who made that prediction didn't know about this reason," or possibly "because you shouldn't base your ideas of the future on something a cover artist for OMNI dreamed up back in 1986, especially since that was stock art anyway."

But I do have a personal "flying car" and it's very puzzling to me why it isn't flying around: where's my wide-ranging and in-depth news reporting?

If you are old enough to recall, that was one of the big advantages that cable television was going to bring us, in the days when people were still getting used to the idea of having more than four channels to watch. The enormous number of cable channels would mean that news reporting wouldn't be squeezed into a two-hour window between Jeopardy! and T.J. Hooker. There might be whole channels devoted to nothing but news! With a full 24 hours of news programming, they wouldn't be limited to brief, superficial coverage; they'd be able to do in-depth reporting, rivaling print journalism. And with so much time to fill the news wouldn't be limited to covering Washington, New York, Hollywood, and this week's disaster scene; they'd be able to report on developing stories in other parts of the country, and keep viewers informed about the whole world!

And then, a bit more than a decade later, that was also one of the big advantages that The Internet was going to bring us. News stories would have links leading to background information or related news, so reporting would be factual and provide plenty of context.

None of that happened. Instead, the perennial complaint nowadays is how vapid, superficial, emotive, and sloppy news reporting has become, in all media.

My question is why? Where's my Information Age?

It's easy to be cynical and say "well, audiences are stupid and they want stupid reporting." But if that's true, why are news audiences shrinking and aging? Why are newspapers becoming little more than a status symbol for billionaires, like yachts and baseball teams? If people wanted sloppy, superficial reporting, you'd think they'd be tuning in by the tens of millions, and they're not. (As I've said before, blaming the audience's stupidity usually says more about the stupidity in front of the camera.)

As to the sloppiness, there's the oft-trotted-out reason that "It's so competitive: there's enormous pressure to be first with a story." But I don't think that's true. Who chooses a news station to watch based on how quickly they report things? If I like the reporting on WWL-TV in New Orleans, I'm not going to click over to WVUE to see if they're covering something that WWL hasn't gotten to yet.

In fact, I can recall that during the first Gulf War back in 1991, my wife and I found we were much better informed by waiting for newspaper reports than by watching the live reports on TV of reporters standing on a dark rooftop in Riyadh saying "We think something is happening ��� there's planes flying around, we think," accompanied by shaky, blurry images of something unidentifiable. Quicker isn't better and I suspect being first matters much more to the egos of journalists and network execs than it does to the public.

I've also heard the excuse that "Well, it's too expensive for CNN to keep reporters all over the country and in foreign lands. They can't afford it!" That is true, but it's also irrelevant: there are at least a couple of hundred local news shows in the United States, and it would not cost much to repeat some of their stories on a national news network. The same is true for foreign news reporting. CNN or MSNBC could fill their spare hours with local reports about interesting events. This would also give local news outfits an incentive to do better work, since a well-done story could get picked up nationally ��� much as print reporters in the old days could hope an article got picked up by the wire services.

Now there may be problems with this, but the point is, I'm not a news network executive. I'm a science fiction writer with a blog. If I can come up with this idea, why can't they? That sort of programming could provide the bulk of CNN's air time, and the savings in not having to produce original shows to fill the emptiness would help the profit margin.

And as to online journalism, reporters are still writing "stories" which are "published" on news sites. That's like using TV cameras to broadcast images of each page of the daily newspaper, and calling that a TV news report. Every online news report should include, at a minimum, links to all relevant original source material, links to biographies and home pages of all individuals in the story, links to related stories, and links to other relevant facts.

So if I'm reading a news story about something Donald Trump said during a visit to a steel mill in Youngstown, I should get links to a profile of Trump, the full text of his speech, the home page of that steel company, stories about the steel business, stories about Youngstown, and perhaps an archive of other Presidential speeches about the steel business. That's not hard: I just did it myself (except for the speech, because it's hypothetical).

We can't even blame this on reporters not understanding these Internet thingies. Most journalists now are children of the 1980s, if not younger. They have grown up in an on-line world. I hear the excuse that reporters have to "generate a lot of content" ��� well, a huge infodump of background material and links sure looks like content to me. Much more useful than a vox pop quote from someone who couldn't run faster than a reporter.

So: where's my Information Age? Why hasn't some clever venture capitalist tried to put something like this together?

 

One amazing feature of the Information Age is that you can buy my ebooks!

Future Creep

I recently spent an informative day sitting around a big table discussing medical robotics with a bunch of people who knew a lot more about medical robotics than I did. Since we were talking about modern cutting-edge technology or next-ten-years developments, the technical experts were all very clear that the "robots" in question will be highly sophisticated tools being used by human surgeons.

The robots may be able to reach places a human can't, or work at scales too tiny for a surgeon's hands, or do other things to expand human capabilities in the operating room. But they aren't robots, at least not in the R2-D2/Robbie the Robot/The Terminator sense. Nobody tells a medical robot "Do a heart transplant!" and certainly not "Cure that sick person!"

So why do we call them robots?

While there's no precise legal definition of "robot," I think most people understand that a "real" robot differs from a tool, even a very sophisticated tool, in the area of autonomy. Factory robots do their jobs without some bored technician controlling them with a joystick (in point of fact they work so fast I don't think anyone could control them without slowing them down to near-uselessness). And even they barely qualify as autonomous.

The popular, "folk" concept of a robot is a "mechanical man." Not necessarily humanoid in shape, but human-like in having at least some degree of volition. They may be slavishly obedient, but they don't need to be operated. A car is not a robot, not even one with fancy collision-avoidance systems and cruise control. But a self-driving car like the ones Google is trying to develop . . . that's more like a "real" robot. You don't steer it, you don't even give it directions; you just tell it where you want to go and let it solve the problem of getting you there, exactly as you would do with a human chauffeur. If the processor was in a humanoid body operating the car's existing controls with metal hands and feet, we would call it a "robot driver."

So, again: why do we keep inflating the term robot to describe things which don't actually match our idea of what robots are? Why this urge to call a surgical manipulator tool a "medical robot?" Or the urge to call a military remote-piloted vehicle a "war robot?"

I think it's because we want there to be robots. We, as a civilization, fell in love with the idea of robots a century ago and have been trying to wish them into existence ever since. (There was a "mechanical man" named Electro at the 1938 World's Fair.) We may use them in fiction as emblems of scientific hubris or technology out of control, but in the real world we love our robots.

One sees the same kind of "future creep" in other areas. I've commented elsewhere about how every tactical defensive system gets dubbed a "force field" by the media. And how every roadable aircraft becomes a "flying car."

We want the future. In particular we want the optimistic, no-limits, four-color future of a Frank R. Paul cover painting for Science Wonder Stories. We want to fly to Mars, or beyond the Solar System entirely. We want a friendly robot pal to ride along in the rumble seat ��� and an infallible robot doctor to patch us up if anything goes wrong.

It's frustrating how long the future is taking to arrive. Where's my Moon base?

I can't claim that science fiction has conquered the world, however flattering it may be to my fellow science fictioneers. It's more accurate to say that science fiction illustrators, and concept artists, and model makers, and costume designers and prop makers and matte-painting artists and set designers have conquered the world. In dozens of films, TV shows, magazine covers, and comic books, they showed us the future and we said "We'll take it!" and we've been trying to remake the world ever since.

 

If you want to enjoy two future worlds right now, buy my ebook!

Some Bad News

It wasn't just 2016. It's not a "bad patch" we're going through. Your beloved childhood media icons are going to keep dying. FOREVER. Here's why.

It's about television. Movies have been around for a century. Movie stars have been dying almost as long. But I submit that movie actors, even the biggest and most enduring stars, never had the emotional connection to audiences that television stars do. It's simple arithmetic: even in the glory days of the studio system, even the hardest-working actors didn't make more than six or eight pictures a year. So if you were an obsessive William Powell fan and made sure to see every single picture he starred in, you might see something like twelve hours of William Powell in a year.

By comparison, if you were a fan of, say, Bonanza during its original run on NBC, you'd see thirty-four episodes a year, plus summer reruns. You'd spend an hour a week with Lorne Greene and Dan Blocker.

Movie stars were out-of-town relatives. TV stars were neighbors.

The rise of beloved TV icons came as Americans born after World War II grew up ��� the first cohort to spend their childhoods with a television in the house. So the first "iconic" TV stars are the ones whose careers began in the 1950s: Lucille Ball, Milton Berle, Robert Young, and others. But note that the first group of television stars were all established performers, born before the First World War in most cases. They began reaching the ends of their lives in the 1980s, as anyone who remembers the wave of nostalgic TV specials of that era may recall.

In the mid-1960s the TV networks made a push to recruit and feature younger performers, the better to cater to the "youth market" of the massive Baby Boomer demographic beginning to flex its consumer muscle. So on a show like Star Trek, for instance, both William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy were born in 1931, and thus were in their mid-thirties when the show premiered. That has remained the sweet spot for TV stardom ever since: the leads on the sitcom Big Bang Theory were also in their mid-thirties when that show began, forty years after Star Trek.

(Obviously all these points are generalizations: there are old actors and young actors, but unless one is a "child star" it's unlikely an actor can have the experience and exposure to be the lead on a series before age 30.)

Do the math: people who were in their mid-thirties in the 1960s were born about 1930, which means in 2017 they're in their late eighties. Life expectancy in the U.S. is about 80 years.

Much the same math holds for rock stars. The top acts in 1970 were all made up of performers born in the 1940s. They're all past 70 now, and being a rock star seems to have some . . . let's say long-term health effects. (Short-term effects, too: the famous "dead by overdose at 27" phenomenon as new-minted stars suddenly get enough money to buy all the drugs they want, which turns out to be ALL THE DRUGS THERE ARE.) So rock stars are also starting to "age out."

In short, get used to it. From now on every year is going to see the last of multiple beloved figures from your youth. The only light at the end of the tunnel is that the media fragmentation which began in the 1990s means that there aren't as many iconic performers nowadays as there were forty years ago. By the middle of the 21st century, actors and musicians will still be dropping dead, but their fan bases will be smaller. The reaction when that guy who was on an HBO series watched by 10 million people passes on won't be as strong, simply because most people will say "who?" when they hear the news. By 2040 we may hit Peak Celebrity Death Mourning.

 

Actors and musicians come and go, but characters in stories never die. Buy my new ebook and you can be certain those beloved icons will be with you forever!

Poe's Law of Tacos

Recently my son and I were driving along the commercial strip on King Street in Northampton when he asked (as teenagers do) if we could pick up some food. One of us suggested tacos, so we pulled into the unnatural hybrid Taco Bell/Kentucky Fried Chicken store for a snack.

On our way I joked that I was curious about what new way Taco Bell would devise to rearrange the same six or seven ingredients that make up all their menu items. I came up with the hilarious idea of a taco with the meat on the outside. (Well, I laughed.)

Then we went inside, and I ordered a "Naked Chicken Chalupa," mostly because it was prominently displayed on the menu board. I figured "naked chicken" meant some bogus skinless "healthy" chicken food product.

But when I unwrapped my taco, it was not what I expected. The taco shell was very thick and lumpy ��� was Taco Bell going in for artisanal handmade tortillas? I tried a bite.

It was . . . chicken. What I took for a taco shell was a sort of disk of chicken sliced (or pounded) thin, breaded, and fried in a U shape. The usual cheese, lettuce, sauce, etc. were inside this chicken "tortilla."

In other words, a taco with the meat on the outside.

Fast food has now passed the point of parody.

As food, the Naked Chicken Chalupa was adequate, not great. Kind of greasy, as you'd expect from a taco wrapped in fried chicken. I don't think I'm going to order it again. I do have some self-respect. 

The Ultimate Game World

For more than a year now I've been running a Pathfinder roleplaying game campaign at my local game shop. The players seem to enjoy it, and so do I. Though I use the Pathfinder rules pretty much as published, one thing I do not use is the "official" Paizo Publishing game world, Golarion.

I don't have any real beef with Golarion; it's yet another fantasy roleplaying game world, with a kinda-sorta Europeanish part, a vaguely Middle Eastern area, some Asiany places, some jungly places ��� basically all the entries in Diana Wynn Jones's Tough Guide to Fantasyland.

(Revealing note: I wrote the above paragraph with essentially no knowledge of the Golarion setting other than what I may have glimpsed in advertisements, and my familiarity with the tropes and cliches of roleplaying games. Feeling a pang of conscience, I went to Google and found my way to the Pathfinder Wiki, just to make sure I wasn't mis-representing the setting. Nope, I pretty much nailed it.)

I don't use Golarion because I've found a much better campaign world, one with fantastic landscapes, thousands of distinctive cultures, fascinating ancient civilizations, and awesome natural wonders. Best of all, this campaign setting is completely free and open-source, with millions of maps and reference works describing locations, mythologies, and groups in intricate detail.

It's called "Earth."

Now, admittedly, my version of Earth in the game has elves and dwarves and all the other boilerplate "playable races" from the Pathfinder rulebook, and of course it has magic and bizarre monsters, but the map is the same, and the peoples and cultures are mostly the same. I did make the executive decision to delete the Abrahamic religions because I don't want to step on anyone's toes, theologically. And I put Elves in control of Britain and France ��� but that just gives me pointy-eared pirates with West Country accents and swashbuckling sorcerous King's Archers, so that's good.

Why use a fantastical Earth rather than a made-up world? Two reasons: laziness and obsessive attention to detail.

Laziness means I can let Google Maps, the CIA Factbook, and Wikipedia do my world-building for me. Look up a place, look up who lived there around 1600 (the approximate date of the campaign), look up what religion they followed before converting to Christianity or Islam (if they ever did), maybe check one of those "Ten Things to See In X Place" travel articles for some local color or ideas, and voila! Prep work is done. I don't have to spend time reading up on the imaginary history of a game setting, because I've already spent forty-five years reading up on the history of the Earth.

Obsessive attention to detail means I don't have to think about questions like "Why does this fantasy setting in an alternate universe have humans in it?" or "Why do they have made-up gods but use real names of demons and monsters from Terrestrial folklore?" or "Why do these made-up cultures look so much like historical ones except for some annoying concessions to 21st-century sensibilities?"

See, I actually think about things like that, and they bug me. (I guess I side with Tolkein rather than Lewis in that respect.) I want my imaginary game world to hold together, which means I want to know why their human cultures and races manage to fall into patterns from Earth's history, despite radically different geography and history. (Steve Jackson came up with a clever justification in his "Banestorm" setting for GURPS: the humans of his fantasy setting actually are snatched magically from different places and times in Earth's history.)

Now, I don't want to tell anyone they're Doing It Wrong to use published settings. And I certainly don't want to discourage people from buying the products of hard-working game designers. But I do want to encourage gamers to learn about the real world, even if they prefer published settings. If you know more about, say, real Islamic history, it will definitely improve your understanding of the kinda-Middle Easterny places in your setting sourcebooks. The more you keep inside your head, the less often you'll have to stop to look things up.

Incidentally, if you want to compare my ability to create an imaginary setting with the way I depict a real place, check out the two stories in my new ebook!

Most Disturbing Thing You'll See Today

It's Carnival season again, which means it's King Cake season! 

Which means it's King Cake Baby season! 

I love my home town. Where else can one take pride in the "creepiest mascot" in pro sports? Here's a video made by the Pelicans which seems to glory in the unnerving nature of their mascot.

Those eyes. Those eyes in the night.

 

(If you like disturbing things, check out the two gritty science fiction adventures in my new ebook!)

Random Historical Trivia

Anyone who complains that the Electoral College used by the United States of America is too complicated should take a gander at the method employed by the Republic of Venice to select its Doges.

Step 1: The Grand Council (sort of a House of Representatives, except that membership was by invitation rather than election) would snatch a kid off the street and stand him up next to a big urn full of wax balls, some of which contained slips of paper. Then the members of the Council would file past and the kid would hand them each a ball, until thirty men were chosen.

Step 2: Those thirty would then circle around again, drawing lots until nine of them were selected.

Step 3: Those nine chose forty names from the membership of the Council. Each name required the approval of seven of the nine.

Step 4: Those forty then drew lots to reduce their number down to twelve.

Step 5: The remaining twelve then selected twenty-five names from the Council, requiring a vote of nine to approve each one. 

Step 6: Those twenty-five then drew lots again to reduce their number to nine.

Step 7: The nine chose forty-five members of the Council.

Step 8: Those forty-five were reduced by lot to eleven. At this point, the poor kid at the urn was probably near tears, so I assume they'd give him a cookie and send him home.

Step 9: The eleven men compiled a list of forty-one electors, each name requiring at least nine votes to get on the list.

Step 10: The forty-one electors chose the Doge, by a majority of at least twenty-five votes out of the forty-one.

If this system seems over-complicated, keep two things in mind:

1.) It was intended to eliminate the influence of parties and factions, and

2.) It worked for 529 years. 

 

If you like complicated plans with political overtones, check out the two science fictional caper stories in my new ebook!