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Lions, Tigers and Bears
The Effects of the Megafauna on the Fall and Restoration of the Monarchy in Oz
by Jared Diamond
In the majority of his written works, scientist and author Jared Diamond attempts to show how the natural environment has influenced history. Previously, he has, with some skill, shown how distribution of biological resources led to the cultural predominance of Eurasian civilization and also how environmental factors precipitated the downfall of societies ranging from the Mayans to the Norse. Lions, Tigers and Bears tells a similar story; that of the collapse and eventual restoration of the Ozma government and how large animals came to play a crucial role in the unfolding political drama.
Diamond begins by examining the history of the realm of Oz and how its unique and tenuous monarchy came to power. Initially four separate sovereign nations; Munchkin, Gillikin, Quadling and Winkie became united by a monarchy which ruled from the city-state of Emerald City. It is through this history that Diamond makes the first and most crucial of his points; that geography made the eventual toppling of the monarchy a near certainty. Emerald City, situated on the central plain of Oz was unable to consolidate complete control over the rough and mountainous terrains in the outlying region. Throughout the Outlands, small societies were able to prosper in isolation and were often ignorant of the very existence of the centralized monarchy.
Furthermore, the cultures which grew up around the central plain were able to travel from one place to another easily, allowing for a cultural fusion of ideas, inventions and economies while the outlying mountainous regions and those beyond the Deadly Desert gave rise to isolated civilizations which could not share in the central plains culture. While the Ozma government could technically claim to rule the Land of Ez or the Dominions of the Nome King, the inhabitants of those lands, due to geography, would continually assert their independence causing a great deal of external stress to the central government. These outlying cultures developed societies entirely alien to the central plains societies; including differing religious systems and different domestication strategies. Thus, it was via environmental factors that Ozma was never able to consolidate complete control over the continent of Nonestica.
This would prove the monarchy’s undoing. Cultural fears of the desert and mountain regions made Ozma unwilling to expand. Without a coastline, and surrounded by alien cultures, the central plain became isolated, surrounded by hostile peoples. Continual attacks by the Nome King as well as by the Wicked Witches, a theocratic sect found in isolated mountainous regions of the West, weakened the power of the monarchy. The Wicked Witches were able to domesticate only one species; a flying monkey, found only in the mountains. The central plains societies were ill-adapted to fighting the soaring simians that would occasionally raid the central plains, further destabilizing the monarchy.
The flying monkeys (Brachyteles ecaudata) allow Diamond to introduce his thesis; the influence of the Megafauna on the collapse of Ozma’s government. The inhabitants of the central plains never domesticated any fauna, and were unable to cope with attacks by the flying monkeys. Thus, the Wicked Witches, with the help of the related sect of Wicked Wizards were able to expel King Pastoria of Oz and send his daughter Princess Ozma into exile. While Ozma was able to return to the throne for a short time, she was nevertheless unable to establish true governmental supremacy over the Land of Oz. After she was captured by the Nome King, the central government collapsed. With the central government non-existent, individual fiefdoms grew up and the influence of the trade unions, such as the Lollipop Guild, grew to fill the void of power in the lands.
Diamond then explores the issue of Megafauna, including central plains societies’ cultural aversion to large, predatory animals. Though the people of the plains feared lions, tigers and bears, it would be a lion, a rare form of forest-dwelling lion, that eventually helped secure a new dynasty in the Emerald City. Following the interregnum, the Scarecrow took control of the throne, though he was a weak monarch who ruled over a society near collapse. Trade had nearly broken down, infrastructure was ill-maintained and despite the numerous enemies on the borders, the army consisted of only one poorly built mechanical soldier. Though the Ozma monarchy was eventually restored, the problems inherent in Oz’s social, political and economic systems remain.
As an afterthought, Diamond presents a warning that societies such as the Land of Oz face important issues in their handling of the natural environment. Geographic pressures created a situation where the central plains people considered themselves invulnerable, while the outlying societies considered Oz ripe for the plucking. Had the denizens of Oz, Diamond asserts, taken a clear look at environmental and geographic factors, their society might not have been driven to near collapse.
While Lions, Tigers and Bears, is a good read, Diamond characteristically meanders through his ideas, stopping for several chapters to explore the evolutionary and agricultural history of meat trees. Indeed, the book presents a new and interesting take on the history of Oz, but generally only explores Megafauna in a few small sections, focusing instead on geology, weather and tectonics as an explanation of the political events in question while completely ignoring the fact that Megafauna in the lands in and around Oz would be apparently normal by Earthen standards. There have been several major scholarly works on political and economic life in the Land of Oz, but none have explored the bio-history of the region. Though Diamond’s writing has its faults, the issues he presents allow a new understanding of a troubled area’s past and possible futures.
Historigon: Haduary 2007
This Month in History:
- 2006 AD: Earl Thomas, of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, looks at a website which features images of non-clothed women.
- 1992 AD: U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle correctly spells pusillanimous in the first round of a Trenton, NJ elementary school spelling bee.
- 1967 AD: Producers of Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C. successfully sue the Beatles, who are forced to come up with a new name for their upcoming album Sergeant Carter’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band.
- 1936 AD: Alabama State Legislator Atticus Finch shoots a dog. Not the rabid one, another one not mentioned in the book.
- 1885 AD: The Emperor Meiji, in order to help Japan’s great advance, offers to adopt the name Emperor Mr. Charlemagne Van Der Thompson. Aides most respectfully explain that this would require inordinate amounts of paperwork, and the matter is quietly dropped.
- 1662 AD: John of Strathclyde invents a one-wheeled cart stabilized by primitive gyroscopes. It is not adopted because such an idea is rightly considered stupid.
- 1515 AD: While the location has been forgotten, an East African, an Indian, and a Chinese are the first such people to visit that location many years before a European did.
- 1296 AD: Explorer and traveler Marco Polo decides to leave out the chapter of Le divisament dou monde wherein he describes in detail his love of nubile young Asian women.
- 899 AD: Biff steals a kiss from Magdalen at a mid-Summer’s festival in Burgundy. Magdalen’s father has Biff executed as a lesson to all future osculatory thieves.
- 678 AD: Several kingdoms in Britain which few rightly remember, if at all, go to war for some reason or other. Probably over a fishing hole or a particularly green hill.
- 630 AD: In an episode slightly less stunning than his ascension to Heaven, Muhammad is taken up by the Buraq and shown a vision of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
- 280 AD: Comedians Li Ri Bo and Po Zu Ti win the Emperor’s favor in Datong by setting a live chicken on fire and performing a humorous dance as the hapless fowl dies.
- 40 AD: Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary happened this month. Move along.
- 238 BC: The Parthians invent heavy cavalry through the use of larger horses.
- 753 BC: Rome is actually founded by Romulus in this month, not in April as contended by historians. It is also founded about five feet to the west of where it is traditionally believed to have been founded.
- 849 BC: Court musician Latha of Parsa adopts the stage-name Latha Lyre.
- 1225 BC: Out of barley and wheat, Snebit the Libyan creates a liquor out of grass and palm leaves instead. It isn’t any good and Snebit is thrown into a nearby river to drown.
- 2002 BC: Korean merchant Hwandan is the first person to come up with the idea of “buy one, get one free.”
- 4888 BC: A ditch digger with one leg shorter than the other plies his trade across Central Europe. His handiwork is discovered 6600 years later by “archaeologists.”
- 8306 BC: Dartho upsets Ungot and becomes the best spear-thrower in the clan.
- 721,238 BC: While strolling through the plain, Mumaugue sees storm clouds on the horizon. For a moment he shivers in the cold wind.
The March of Progress: Haduary 2007
Newton got you down? Did Einstein get into your brain like sand in your swim trunks? Are you tired of the same old, day-to-day physics of string theory, M-theory, and the intensely adjectival super-string theory? Throw those theories in the dustbin and look no further! Megastring theory is here to take your physics to the next level.
Megastring theory is not for the faint-of-heart. It’s not for the weak-willed or the past-their-prime. Megastring theory is not on the path to the theory of everything. Oh no. Megastring theory is the theory of everything, the Holy Grail of Physics. Let me tell you how you can tap into the awesome power of Megastring theory. There are no complicated equations here, just eleven easy steps to Universal understanding. Are you ready to dive into the rest of your life? Let me tell you how.
1. Space is not just multi-dimensional, pan-dimensional or other word then dash dimensionals. In fact, it consists of exactly 1,409 spatial dimensions, 13 temporal dimensions, and four dimensions of a consistency with over-cooked spaghetti. These dimensions are not folded up. In fact, they can be found in an old cigare box in Mortimer J. Jacobson’s basement. Most smell of fresh apricots, though at least two could be considered more of a dried plum.
2. Most of these dimensions are inhabited by what looks like, and in fact is, stupid pudding. Also, there are eels there. The eels eat the pudding and then excrete gravity. What holds you to the Earth is hyperspatial eel poop. It’s a fact.
3. The 695th dimension consists entirely of a two-fingered old woman with no name. Two comical gnomes constantly antagonize her: Shortimer and Flango. Shortimer and Flango are always trying to steal the vast cold-cut and sliced-cheese spreads the anonymous woman has put out for her dinner guests who never arrive. These guests do not arrive because they learned early on that there were no cold-cuts or sliced-cheeses when they arrived. Though the old woman attempts to stop them, Shortimer and Flango invariably outsmart her and all the cunningly complicated traps she lays for them. In fact, they are only cunning by comparison to members of her species with one finger because her specie’s brain is located within each of the digits of its hand. The interaction between the woman and the gnomes creates meta-friction which produces the pudding people mentioned in point #2. When Shortimer sneezes, it creates the weak nuclear force. When Flango breaks wind, it creates the strong nuclear force.
4. All pudding people, eels, gnomes, and old women exist because of the interaction of a pot and a kettle in the 501st dimension. As each goes back and forth calling the other black, the other beings are maintained via the interaction of the pot and kettle’s negritons, allowing the gnomes to exist.
5. Made of marble, the 45th dimension is covered in cheese which is often smacked by a hammers wielded by tiny elephants. The cheese, thus stricken, vibrates, producing ventricles, or the particles apparent in lower dimensions such as ours. This is also where Madam No-Name Two-Fingers gets the cheese for her platters. The tiny elephants are not pleased about this, but being so tiny there is very little they can do about it.
6. Electromagnetism is there also.
7. Gravity, electricity, and the strong and weak nuclear forces are all mixed in a bowl and stirred regularly by Isis, who is mayor of the 1000th dimension. They are slowly poured into our dimension, which has already been greased around the edges, but not before mischievous, sentient catamarans decide to inject magnetism into the mix, much to the bedevilment of Isis.
8. The universe came into being because of the above mentioned things.
9. Once Flango and Shortimer eat all the cold-cuts, all the electromagnetic forces in the universe will begin to flow upside down, and the strong nuclear force eventually disappears.
10. Because the cause of Flango’s sneezing was actually a reaction with the extra-dimensional pepper molecules found in Shortimer’s flatulence as a result of his consumption of cold-cuts, the weak nuclear force will also eventually disappear.
11. CAUTION: Should gravity for some reason invert someone should go to Mortimer J. Jacobson’s basement and shake the cigar box. Not too hard, though. That should right everything and help recharge the universe. Do it a bit to the left, too, as I’d like to wake up perpetually to the smell of strawberries.
And that’s it. The universe in a nutshell. Megastring may seem complex or counter-intuitive, but remember that it has ten times more empirical evidence for it than super string does. 10 times zero is still zero.
News of the World: Haduary 2007
With the 2008 Presidential Election only fifteen months away, the American-Freedom Party frontrunners have converged on the new state of Willinois in anticipation of Mega-Marsday when eleven states (roughly 11/6oths of the total number of states) hold their official primary. While recent Gallup polls have given Free-American party incumbent Dick Armstrong an 87% approval rating, the American Freedom party candidates seem ready for the challenge.
Alaska’s junior senator Robert Shoemaker shot out to an early lead when he openly criticized President Dick Armstrong’s handling of the Noodle Incident. But, Shoemaker lost in the polls to Ponderada Governor Mary Tarzan after being killed by the rabid wolverines he routinely carries in a specially contracted backpack.
In Calvert, Accadia last week Governor Tarzan appeared for a meet-and-greet with important members of the beef jerky industry. While stacking flatware in an artful way, Governor Tarzan expounded, via haiku poetry, on the need for real solutions to the growing Oboe Crisis. After taking several photographs of figs, she answered questions from a seamstress and a clerk named Stephen, before repairing a unicycle and dancing the flamenco with several members of the Valve Lobby.
Tarzan gained the American-Party lead by announcing, earlier this week, her four point strategy for her proposed Embettering America Plan. The plan includes increased soup exports to Slovenia, demanding that Europe abandon A4 for letter sized paper, a 15% increase in north-bound Amtrak service and a mandatory national curfew of 9pm, so that people don’t wake up all grumpy. Other candidates, such as Ohio congressman Mitch Damage were quick to attack Tarzan’s soup export strategy. In a series of attack, the Committee to Elect Damage (CED) endlessly repeated their extra catchy slogan “Slovenia has enough soup for now and we do not need to send more at this time.” Later ads set the slogan to a ragtime tune for added political power.
While Tarzan has refrained from name-calling, Katharinetowne mayor G. Thomas Borden has publicly referred to Damage as a milquesop, an act which earned both Borden and Damage a half-point poll increase. At a recent meet and greet in Tarpaulin, CA, Damage and his entourage took time off from a tour of bowling pin factories to stop off for an asparagus brunch at the local Milquesop Café where he posed for a silhouette and demonstrated his finance skills by balancing hardboiled eggs. Not one to be undone by amateur theatrics, Tarzan appeared at the nearby Dutch Omelet House where she demonstrated her knowledge of foreign affairs by wolfing down seven plates of Belgian waffles and nine cups of Irish coffee. Staggering about the café afterwards, Governor Tarzan called her opponents “a bunch of reactionary f***tards with the combined intellectual capacity of a wet hammer.”
Dark horse candidate Lurien Prut disproved this later in the day by organizing a game-show style contest where he, Damage and Borden went head to head against a wet hammer in a test of geography knowledge. While only Borden was able to name the capital of California, the wet hammer failed to score a single point, despite its being redunked in a bucket several times throughout the showdown. Afterward, Borden distributed free “Ponderada Sucks” promotional kites, a move which earned him several points in Ponderada, the Humble State.
Former Vice President Al Page, bedecked in a sequin jumpsuit and special Vice Presidential helmet, visited a convention of yolk-separators early Tuesday morning and followed with an afternoon of miniature golf. After going twelve above par on the difficult Eiffel Tower hole, Page held an impromptu press conference. When asked what he thought of Armstrong’s presidency, Page paused to collect his thoughts and cram several dozen coffee beans into his mouth before launching into a four hour diatribe during which time he explained, in great detail, the inadequacy of the White House soaps and lotions. He explained that, when visiting, he was forced to bring his own soap and proceeded to pass it around for sampling and sniffing before breaking into an impromptu jig. Afterward, Page flapped his arms several times, wrapped himself in a blanket and ran away.
Of course, recent polls have Vice President Page trailing Field Marshal Rupert Olive by as many as two points. The war hero who led the Good Guy armies to victory in the War has yet to officially announce his candidacy, but when asked if he will run has repeatedly responded by winking coyly, smiling, and patting the papers in his breast pocket. Many pundits believe that Olive could lead the American-Freedom Party to the White House, despite Olive’s close connections with the Armstrong administration and rumors of his addiction to spoon collecting.
On Wednesday afternoon, the five American-Freedom party candidates Page, Prut, Tarzan, Damage and Borden met at the Calcium Flats Convention Center on the outskirts of Pinkerton, PA for the first in a series of eight debates. While not officially invited to the debate, Platha State Union candidate Alexandra Hague turned up anyway, but was not allowed to enter after she refused to check her firearms at the door.
Thus far, President Armstrong has been biding his time before beginning his reelection campaign, instead focusing on the escalating situation in Alberta. But for the American-Freedom hopefuls, it’s ready, set, go for the start of what appears to be an exciting race.