This is the oldest known film version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, made in 1910. It was made by the Selig Polyscope Company and did not involve the author, L. Frank Baum.
Smithsonian Magazine has an article called Frank Baum, the Man Behind the Curtain. It describes how Baum came to write what amounted to the first American children’s book and how he was so convinced he’d written a great book that he framed the pencil stub he’d written it with.
I just went and uploaded the print version of the Pirate Jack adventure novel to Scribd.com. That’s the embedded preview of the book in their viewer above. You can read about 53 pages of the book for free and then pay $1.99 to get the entire thing. It’s the book version of our Pirate Jack podcast that you can find in our audio section. We’re putting new chapters of the audio up each week. I think $1.99 is a pretty good price for the whole book in downloadable Adobe PDF format. If you buy it have a great read!
The winner of our April 2009 Mystery Contest is Pippa, age 10!
Congratulations to the winner! Pippa has written an imaginative and interesting continuation of the story that is a pleasant surprise.
Riley’s Crypt
The trees of the forest bent over sideways in the howling wind. The white disk of the full moon shimmered behind the swaying branches. Southbay Forest was being battered by the storm. Rain began to pelt the ground. It was an altogether nasty evening.
Riley Hitchens made his way along the muddy path with dread. The lantern’s feeble light swung wildly back and forth across the narrow way as his fingers gripped its handle tightly.
It was just an old crypt. That’s all. Nothing but a pile of old stones with a rusty iron door. That door was clanging in the wind now. It had disturbed Riley’s sleep.
So now poor Riley staggered in his soaking nightclothes toward the crypt that was creating such a din.
A wolf howled.
Riley stopped in his soggy tracks and glanced behind him. A shape flashed between the trees. He lurched forward and bolted down the mud path toward the old stone crypt.
He burst through the half-open door and sucked the dank air into his lungs. His mud-caked slippers echoed in the stone chamber. The rain pounded the forest outside. Just ahead, Riley could make out the dim shape of the tunnel entrance.
He stopped and felt the cold sweat of terror at the back of his neck.
From far down the dark winding way of the tunnel, underneath the raging of the storm, came the delicate sound of… music.
The winner’s story continues from this point…
A fascinating development at YouTube: The Reporters’ Center, where you can get tips on effective journalism from prominent reporters. The new YouTube channel went live today and is already offering some interesting how-to videos like the one above by reporter Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. He shows you how to be careful when trying to interview war lords with big guns, how to hide your money, and how to always be a little skeptical and double-check witness accounts and stories that sound too good. Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post has a video about the impact of citizen journalism best demonstrated by the recent uprising in Iran. During the past few weeks, the government of Iran tried to shut down the operations of journalists and restrict the use of internet and text messaging in order to suppress information about government violence against protesters. But they were not able to prevent people with cell phone cameras from making videos and sending them out of the country for the world to see. These people have also been reporting on the situation via Twitter to give real-time coverage of many events in Iran.
This movement toward citizen journalism is extremely interesting because it democratizes the press. Cameras in the hands of millions become a formidable tool for keeping an eye on government and limiting its ability to suppress information. The press has always functioned like a fourth branch of the U.S. government, preventing the administrative, legislative, and judiciary from thinking they operate out of sight. In fact, it probably wouldn’t hurt to constitutionally formalize the press as some kind of fourth branch!
Penguin’s Puffin Books has a new membership site called We Make Stories, where kids can use an online tool to create stories. There are several types of story creation, including a remix tool to use on existing classic tales, a map maker, and a comic book style creator. It’s all drag and drop type stuff and is intended to teach creativity and encourage literacy.
While this is reasonably fun-looking, I cannot understand why a site would present itself for pay membership and not really give any useful demonstration versions of its tools. There is a single demo based on remixing old stories, but this is not sufficient to make me want to offer $9.99. That price, by the way, is very effectively hidden from view and presented in a rather disturbing manner. Here’s what I mean:
1. First create a user name and password and give us your parent’s email address.
2. Your parent will then get an email asking them to pay for the membership (£5.99/$9.99).
3. Once your parent has paid this, your membership will be activated and you can start to play all the games.
Those are the instruction on the sign-up page. So kids are expected to blunder forth and sign up without the benefit of an effective demonstration. Give away a parent’s email address without permission. Then the parent receives an email demanding money. No sir. Absolutely not. You put the price in big print on the front page and you don’t mislead children into presenting their parents with an unexpected request for money. Everything should be up-front and visible right at the beginning. I just can’t believe what I’m seeing online from a major publisher. Perhaps we have here an example of how the publishing industry intends to get money out of people – by tricking their children.
Egmont Mayer of Germany made this 3D animated film. A man lives with his secret rabbit and cuts his social interactions to nearly nothing as a result of his shame. I like the way animators are starting to revel in making their films look like they are rendered in 3D software rather than trying to defeat the software to make things look realistic.