In L. Frank Baum's series of fourteen books (and several by other authors after he died) a squarish country bounded on most sides by uncrossable desert. Divided into four major areas: the land of the Munchkins, the land of the Gillikins, the land of the Winkies, and the land of the Quadlings, with the capital, the Emerald City in the center. Ruled by Ozma after the end of the second book.

In the context of anime (Gundam), Oz is a semi-secret society of aristocratic military elite who overthrow the earthsphere alliance from the inside in one day.

See: Colonel Trieze, Zechs Marquis, The Romafeller Foundation

Also a nickname for Australia.

Also the name of a distributed concurrent constraint logic programming language.

"Don't pay any attention to the man behind the curtain!"


The cable television program is from the same people who produced Homicide: Life on the Street, and uses some of the same actors.

Set in the fictitious Oswald Maximum Security Prison (hence Oz) the majority of its actors are men. However a guard, and a doctor, are women.

There is certainly some violence--what television program today isn't. But I have found, even as Homicide, I am held to the machinations enmeshing prisoners, guards, administration, and the outside--in the form of the state governor (played by the good district attorney Danvers of Homicide, though here very bad)--and the lack of pretense, its pure nakedness.

And the theme music is about the best I have ever heard. (I hate it when they overdub the promo for the next program over it.)

Not for the faint of heart, to be sure, or those easily offended, but for the rest of us, an experience so often missing from drama.

It is an HBO--Home Box Office--production, and often touted as an example of what such entities can produce. The Sopranos is also an HBO production.

Oz was also a 1960's/70's underground magazine published in London by some no-good radical hippies. (This was what the sitcom Hippies was attempting to lampoon with the magazine 'Mouth'.)

Oz was faced with an obscenity trial following the inspired decision to hand over editorial duties to a bunch of schoolkids. (Although whether the schoolkids wrote the articles is a moot point - simply the idea of relating their risque content to children was seen as being beyond the pale.) The resulting issue was so spectacularly offensive* (by 1971 standards) that it landed the magazine's founders (Jim Anderson, Felix Dennis and Richard Neville) in deep water. They were in fact jailed for "conspiracy to corrupt public morals".

The greatest irony of the Oz trial was that one of the three founders, Felix Dennis, received a shorter prison sentence than the other two, due to, as the judge put it, him being "very much less intelligent than his fellow defendants." Dennis went on to found a publishing empire.

Initial ventures included the incredibly successful Kung Fu magazine, before Dennis Publishing moved towards computer-related mags such as (chronologically) Your Sinclair, Zero, Computer Shopper, PC Zone and PC Pro. Dennis also publishes the US and UK editions of Maxim, and has recently purchased CVG.

*It included a cartoon of Rupert the Bear ... ahem ... well, you can imagine.

In the sense of Australia, 'Oz' is (probably) a backformation of Aussie (which goes to show how it's to be pronounced—OZ-ee (or /"Qzi/ in sampa)), using the logic that -y transforms words into adjectives, so therefore the unadjectivised form of 'Aussie' must be 'Oz'.

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