A while back, a guy came out a line of figurines called “The Twisted Wizard of Oz.” Variety called it “a dark, edgy and muscular PG-13, without a singing Munchkin in sight.” Now, another guy is writing a screenplay for this alternate Oz, and apparently Warner Brothers is going to run with it. From Variety:

“I saw those toys, and Dorothy as some bondage queen isn’t something I want to do,” Olson told Daily Variety. “The appealing thing about the Baum books to me is how wildly imaginative they are. There are crazy characters from amazing places. I want this to be ‘Harry Potter’ dark, not ‘Seven’ dark.”

Help us. I guess reworking something established and popular has better chances of getting off the ground than creating something similar but new. That’s how I explain the Camelot and Robin Hood rewrites.

“It is 1 billion light years across of nothing,” they say. A Hawaiian astronomer notes, “It looks like something to be taken seriously.”

What do I have to write about tonight? Can’t think of much. Did the usual thing at work. Came home and mowed the lawn.

The weeks of rainy weather we’ve had have turned my lawn around in a way that amazes me. Very few bald spots now, and the grass is thick—thick, I say! Like hair on an Airedale. OK, granted it’s not all the kind of grass you want, in an ideal world. When I reseeded some bare spots last year, it appears I’d bought an entirely different species of grass, one which now sits ghettoed in minority patches, agitating for equal rights and reparations. And I’ve got some crab grass, and some Creeping Charlie (I actually kind of like Creeping Charlie. And since concrete walls separate my yard from both my neighbors’, so I can’t infect their lawns, I see no reason not to indulge it).

But it’s thick! It covers the ground. Back when I lived in Florida, I used to think back on a lawn almost precisely like this (my aunt’s in St. Paul, which I’d often mowed). For all its departures from canonical orthodox lawndom, folks in Florida would have paid big money to have this kind of thick, green grass. And often did.

What I wrote above is deeply disturbing to me. All my life I’ve been a guy who’s “not into lawns.” I used to say, “Show me a guy who keeps a perfect lawn, and I’ll show you a guy with a lousy marriage.” My dislike for golf springs mostly from my distaste for broad expanses of mown grass. My original intention in buying a house was to get a townhouse, so somebody else would do the lawn.

And here I am now, taking an interest in my lawn.

I must be evolving into a better, finer soul.

I hate it when that happens.

If I ever start talking about aerating and water features, somebody do an intervention.

The Pixel Viking has a beautiful photo which could illustrate evolution wonderfully, if only it were the result of mindless forces or some kind of accident.

Kudos to the writer of the song, A Dad’s Lullabye. Great lyrics.

Does language frame our thinking? Stefanie blogs about it on So Many Books.

I found this video by way of The Evangelical Outpost. Joe didn’t actually link to it, but he linked to something else that gave me a further link to this.

I haven’t tried it and can’t vouch for it. But it seemed too cool not to share.

Not much of a post, I know, but I gave you the Colebatch link this morning, and this evening I’m saving your CDs. Whaddya want from me?

I don’t have a favorite in the presidential primaries yet, and I’m growing more tolerant of all of them (except Ron Paul, whom I like as little as John McCain). So I’m not campaigning here. I’m just blogging. Dennis Ingolfsland points out some interesting commentary on Mike Huckabee, which calls him a reflection of William Jennings Bryan.

On 22 August 2001, The Trojan Room coffee pot was turned off. Now THAT was reality TV. I should put a coffee cam on BwB.

Mowed the lawn tonight, for my evening exercise. The grass was kind of wet. I don’t like to mow wet grass as a rule, but they’re predicting more rain tomorrow and Friday, so if I don’t do it now I’ll have to hack my way through it with a machete (or my new saex), like Ramar of the Jungle.

Anybody out there remember Ramar of the Jungle? I actually recall it from re-runs, but it got re-run a lot. My primary memory of the show is how the characters would be hacking their way through the jungle (with machetes, not saexes), and somebody would pause and point off to the right or left. Then the film would (with extreme clumsiness; you could almost hear the projector clunk) switch to stock footage of lions or giraffes in the savannah. It appeared that they almost never went anywhere in the jungle except along the edge, where it bordered the savannah.

Which raised the question, why not just walk through the savannah, and save yourself all that hacking?

I wanted to link to this post by Gaius over at Blue Crab Boulevard. Partly because I think it’s a pretty clever comic pastiche of Conan Doyle, and partly because the news story that sparked it just makes me mad.

This, in my opinion, is the real problem with increasing government “compassion and care” in our lives. It put this kid’s parents in an impossible situation.

The law allows parents to do only one thing to discipline a kid – talk sternly to him. That’s it. Anything more would be child abuse and get them into Really Big Trouble.

So the only thing the neighbor who found the kid a nuisance could do, in a situation where Stern Talks weren’t working, was report him to the police.

And the police have only one weapon – they put people in jail. Which is what they did with this kid. It was insane, and I’ll bet everyone involved knew it was insane. But the law – the law intended to protect the child – left them with no other option.

This is what happens when the government becomes the parent. The world is full of horror stories about traditional families that abused and mistreated children (I have a story like that of my own). But that’s how freedom works. You get a small percentage of excellent homes, a large middle of middling homes, and a small percentage at the bottom of very bad stuff.

But when the government raises the kids, Churchill’s description of economic systems kicks in. He said Capitalism is the unequal distribution of wealth, and Communism is the equal distribution of poverty.

Traditional families are an unequal distribution of good nurturing. But government parenting is the equal distribution of dysfunction. Has anybody raised in a government institution ever grown up well-adjusted?