vovat | Lions and transcripts and Nomes, oh my!

First of all, happy birthday to

twobitme.

I saw someone at McDonald's today with a shirt with a picture of a lion, and the caption, "Blood Donor: the real King of the Jungle." Um...okay. I sometimes think I should give blood, but I never actually do. I guess I can rationalize it somewhat by pointing out that my blood is Type AB, which can't be accepted by as many people as most of the other types.

Actually, one of the first things I thought about that shirt was, "Lions don't LIVE in the jungle!" The stuff about blood donation came later.

I know I have a spare copy of my Drexel transcript somewhere, but I can't find it. I was supposed to send an official, sealed transcript to this one place, so I twice asked Drexel for that specifically, and they sent me student transcripts in regular envelopes both times. Then I had to send a copy of my transcript to someone else, but I didn't know they would accept photocopies, so I sent them one of the two student copies I had, and now I can't find the other one. I have one on order, but it would still be nice not to have wasted the $5 that I spent on the missing one. I also can't find the power cord for my old stereo. They'll probably turn up eventually, but I have no idea how soon "eventually" will be.

As I mentioned in my last post, the latest Baum Bugle has an interview with Claymation creator Will Vinton, who designed the Nomes [1] in Return to Oz. I saw Return before reading any of the Oz books, and when I did read the books, I had to wonder why the movie-makers decided to make the Nomes into talking rocks, rather than rock-colored elves. This is discussed in the interview, in which Vinton says, "Walter [Murch] knew from the beginning that he wanted the Nomes to live in the rock and basically be rock people; sort of like fish in water, moving underground and so forth, and actually forming themselves at the surface of the rock." I do have to wonder how the Nomes would have been portrayed if the team behind Return had ever made any other Oz films. Even the Nome King's most human form in the movie wouldn't have really worked for the plot of, say, The Magic of Oz. They probably would have just come up with some bizarre composite character like the Mombi/Langwidere hybrid, though. Return is a really cool movie, but come on, Mombi and Langwidere are nothing alike.

[1] In his Oz books, L. Frank Baum left the leading G off the word "gnome," allegedly to make it easier for children to pronounce. I was amused by one critic's comment on this, which was something along the lines of, "How did he think they spelled and pronounced 'gnaw'?" Baum's non-Oz fantasies use the more traditional spelling of "gnome," as do the Oz books by Ruth Plumly Thompson and John R. Neill.