The Wizard of Oz rolls off the tongue a lot easier than the man behind the curtain's full name, Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkel Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs.  From Frank Baum's Dorothy And the Wizard in Oz:  "It was a dreadfully long name to weigh down a poor innocent child, and one of the hardest lessons I ever learned was to remember my own name.  When I grew up I just called myself O.Z., because the other initials were P-I-N-H-E-A-D; and that spelled 'pinhead,' which was a reflection on my intelligence."  http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/wayoflife/06/13/mf.real.names.fictional.characters/index.html

List of Oz books with brief descriptions, plus additional books by Frank Baum:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Oz_books

Zardoz is a 1973 science fiction/fantasy film written, produced, and directed by John Boorman.  It stars Sean Connery, Charlotte Rampling, and Sara Kestelman.  In the year AD 2293, a post-apocalyptic Earth is inhabited mostly by the "Brutals", who are ruled by the "Eternals" who use other "Brutals", called "Exterminators", as, "the Chosen", warrior class.  The Exterminators worship the god Zardoz, a huge, flying, hollow stone head.   Zed, an Exterminator played by Sean Connery  is less brutal than the Eternals think him.  Genetic analysis reveals Zed is the ultimate result of long-running eugenics experiments devised by Arthur Frayn — the Zardoz god — who controlled the outlands with the Exterminators, thus coercing the Brutals to supply the Vortices with grain; yet Zardoz's aim was breeding a superman who would penetrate the Vortex and save mankind from its perpetual status quo.  Earlier, the women's analysis of Zed's mind reveals that in the ruins of the old world, Arthur Frayn led Zed to the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, from which Zed understands the origin of the name Zardoz — Wizard of Oz — bringing him to a true awareness of Zardoz as a skillful manipulator rather than an actual deity.   http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Zardoz.html

April 25, 2013  When you see the word "Amazon", what's the first thing that springs to mind – the world's biggest forest, the longest river or the largest internetretailer – and which do you consider most important?  These questions have risen to the fore in an arcane, but hugely important, debate about how to redraw the boundaries of the internet.Brazil and Peru have lodged objections to a bid made by the US e-commerce giant for a prime new piece of cyberspace: ".amazon".  The Seattle-based company has applied for its brand to be a top-level domain name (currently .com), but the South American governments argue this would prevent the use of this internet address for environmental protection, the promotion of indigenous rights and other public interest uses.  Along with dozens of other disputed claims to names including ".patagonia" and ".shangrila", the issue cuts to the heart of debates about the purpose and governance of the internet.  Until now, the differences between commercial, governmental and other types of identity were easily distinguished in every internet address by .com, .gov and 20 other categories.  But these categories – or generic top-level domains (gTLDs) as they are technically known – are about to undergo the biggest expansion since the start of the worldwide web more than 30 years ago.  The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) – a US-based non-profit organisation that plays a key role in cyberspace governance – has received bids (each reportedly worth almost $200,000 [£129,000]) for hundreds of new gTLDs to add to the existing 22.  Amazon has applied for dozens of new domains, including ".shop", ".song", ".book" and ".kindle".  But it's most contentious application is for its own brand.  http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/apr/25/amazon-domain-name-battle-brazil?CMP=twt_fd&CMP=SOCxx2I2 

QUOTE  Books paint pictures in your head. The Last Bookshop, a 20:15 film 

The Last Bookshop imagines a future where physical books have died out.  One day, a small boy’s holographic entertainment fails, so he heads out to explore the streets of abandoned shops outside. Down a forgotten alley he discovers the last ever bookshop.

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2013/04/sunday-short-the-last-bookshop/

Legal publisher Fastcase on April 25, 2013 released an algorithmic enhancement to identify overturned or reversed cases in its Authority Check system – Bad Law Bot.  Bad Law Bot uses algorithms to identify court cases that are cited with negative treatment and to alert researchers of a case’s negative citation history.  The Bluebook manual for legal citation requires that, when courts cite a case that has been overturned or reversed, they say so right in the citation.  Judicial opinions, and particularly their citations, are full of this kind of “big data” about which cases are still good law.  Bad Law Bot scours all of the citations in judicial opinions.  When the opinions cite a case as being overturned, Bad Law Bot flags the case for Fastcase users, identifying negative history as reported by the courts.  “Fastcase’s Authority Check feature is already a very powerful tool for identifying whether your case is still good law,” said Fastcase CEO Ed Walters.  “Authority Check includes data visualization tools to see the later history of cases, citation analytics and filterable lists of later-citing cases.  The addition of Bad Law Bot, to help identify negative history, is a major step forward.  This is the first of many additions to Authority Check that we’ll roll out over the next year.”  The new Bad Law Bot feature helps users identify negative treatment of the cases judicial opinions.  However, because it only reports what cases say in citations, researchers should rely on Bad Law Bot as an aid to identifying negative history, not as a comprehensive guide.  In 2010, Fastcase was the first company to launch an app for legal research, and later, the first company to launch an app for iPad.  The American Association of Law Libraries named Fastcase for iPhone the 2010 New Product of the Year.  In 2011, Rocket Matter named Fastcase’s apps for iPhone and iPad the Legal Productivity App of the Year and the company furthered its mobile market presence by debuting the Fastcase for Android app in 2012.  Fastcase has introduced new opinion summaries, Fastcase Cloud Printing, and has been named to the prestigious EContent 100 list of leading digital publishing and media companies alongside Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook for two years in a row.  For more information on the Bad Law Bot feature, visit the Fastcase Legal Research Blog at www.fastcase.com/blog and watch this video:  http://youtu.be/ZsKu7FoO2Ns. 

Thanks, Julie.

QUOTES by Willie Nelson  Happy Birthday, Willie April 30

Be here.  Be present.  Wherever you are, be there.
When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around.
You'll never get ahead by blaming your problems on other people.
See biography at:  http://www.biography.com/people/willie-nelson-9421488

Twenty years ago today, April 30, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) published a statement that made the World Wide Web freely available to everyone.  To celebrate that moment in history, CERN is bringing the very first website back to life at its original URL.  If you’d like to see the very first webpage Tim Berners-Lee and the WWW team ever put online, point your browser to http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html.  For years now that URL has simply redirected to the root info.cern.ch site. But, because we all know cool URIs don’t change, CERN has brought it back to life.  Well, sort of anyway.  The site has been reconstructed from an archive hosted on the W3C site, so what you’re seeing is a 1992 copy of the first website.  Sadly this is, thus far, the earliest copy anyone can find, though the team at CERN is hoping to turn up an older copy.  http://www.webmonkey.com/2013/04/the-very-first-website-returns-to-the-web/