How my mind works

So I go to Boing Boing and see a picture from Reddit: a kid has invented a device for not dropping your books in the bathtub. (I’ve invented one too: it’s called not reading books in the bath — but I digress.) The device is a suction cup high on the bathroom wall, a self-retracting dog leash on it, and the book on the end of the leash, near water level.

Now.

My first thought, seeing this contraption, was: “That clip can’t possibly hold a book. It’ll tear it. And you need to joggle and shift the book; it’s come undone and the book’s done then, the leash’ll whip up and take your nose off.”

My second thought was: “Wait, no. Your grip weakens for a moment, and the leash whips the book from your hands. The book ascends, boinks against the case of the leash, and detaches from the clip. The impact breaks the suction cup from the wall as well. The book falls into the bath, which you won’t be concentrating on as the leash-cup combination crashes on your head, and you drown in the tub.”

My third thought was: “It’s stupid to put a book on the end of that leash. Why not a cat? It’s much more fun to play with a cat that dangles inches above water — wait, no, I mistook ‘yowling ball of clawing pain’ for ‘fun’. This is a blind spot I really should try to get rid of.”

My fourth thought was: “Is it because I’ve never had a bath… er, wait, a bath-tub… that the idea of reading a book in the tub seems so bizarre and sacrilegious to me? Or is it because I’m the sort of a person that gasps in shock if I knock a book on the floor?”

My fifth thought was: “Wait, I’m a retracting-dog-leash ignoramus as well; never had dogs; never cared much for dogs. Maybe I’m overestimating the pull such a device has. But wait, are there leashes with different, er, levels of pull? If not, wouldn’t chihuahuas spend all their time dangling from the leash handle? And with big dogs, and strong-springed leashes, wouldn’t it be you that gets yoinked to the dog? Wait, no, maybe the mechanism is not intended for dog-yoinking.”

My sixth thought was of a female voice calling: “Honey, have you seen Jimbo’s leash? And the suction cup I bought for the fridge?”, and a male voice answering from the direction of the bathroom-toilet: “I’m using them right now, dear. Come and see, it’s clever and not a sex thing.”

My seventh thought was: “My, I’m having a lot of thoughts today.”

Observations on a pink shop

Because I’m easily bored, I happened to go through the catalog of a sex toy shop. This was interesting, because my personal approach to these things is roughly as in a George Carlin quote —

Jerking off is all I need. You know what I mean, folks? I ain’t gonna double my money; fuck that shit. I just jerk off, wipe off my chest, get up and go to work.

— so I wrote down some random observations:

• Isn’t “girl pussy” redundant?
• There can be no context where “sand” is a word you should want in the name of your product.
• Maybe this is my bias, but to me “Vulcan” means (a) Greek god of volcanism and other burning ejaculations, and (b) the Star Trek race of Spocks. Neither screams “pinch that at my genitals!”
• Some of these… things… must be gag gifts. Or something you buy, wave around uncertainly, and then leave in the kitchen drawer when you move out. Or something you hollow out, sure in the certainty that if somebody finds your monstrous latex thingumbob, they won’t be first thinking, “I wonder if it has something hidden inside?”
• There’s something called a “vibrator tuning kit”. Not tuning as in music and good vibrations, but apparently as in adding all kinds of side-wangs to it. The whole idea fills me with horror; I don’t want to know if there are glue or screws involved.
• Most of the products are easy to understand; but about one in ten makes me go “Where do you put that thing? What… do… what, ‘place your penis between the rollers’?”
• I’m not sure how to feel about the bolded claim of “200 thrusts per minute!” I’m not sure if this is how you should market these things.
• Also, glass dildoes. (Dildos? Dilda?) If I was a woman, I would not put one in myself in a million years. Nothing whose failure mode is “sharp glass slivers everywhere” would be going in my hypothetical ladyparts.

I feel like I could make a crack about the price of some of those things, but I’ve bought stupidly expensive books and lots of frivolous electronics; I’m not in a position to crow about what others buy to make themselves feel good. It’s just a whisper-thin difference of culture that you occasionally see a sneering news item about love doll owners rather than about hard-core bibliophiles. And, really, book lovers collect such greedy, overlarge harems that they go beyond any excess of sex toys. (“Books? Can’t find anyone to talk to, right? And that many books… overcompensating for something, am I right?”)

Plus, since I hate the kind of people who think life should be austere, harsh and PG-rated, I really rather like the idea of there coming, eventually, a day when the tittering has faded away and a mixed group can gab around the watercooler, not about their phones, but about the sex toys they’ve recently bought.

Apologetical innovation

Quoting Cardinal Keith O’Brien, whose resignation became public today (also, BBC live) after the “inappropriate conduct” thing:

“Looking back over my years of ministry: For any good I have been able to do, I thank God. For any failures, I apologise to all whom I have offended.”

I think this is a nice innovation, a meeting of two sophistries — the “God did all the good, for all the bad you must blame me” one, and the “I apologize at people without specifying what I might apologize about; probably just offending people and it would be kind of silly of them to not forgive me right now, right?” one.

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Edit: But to be a bit less facetious, this is a strange case. As I understand it, O’Brien had come out saying the next Pope might consider doing away with priestly celibacy (almost mistyped that as “celibaby” — which is what may happen when celibacy doesn’t), and there’s this theory that these accusers came out because they were horrified by such a radical, 16th-century view. Which, if true, would be doing the right thing for a very wrong reason.

Then, as I understand things, O’Brien is accused of leaning on adult males with his power and authority, trying to get sex — and here the only part to be disapproved of is the power imbalance, not who he was trying to get sex from. But since he himself is publicly a very coarsely anti-gay guy, his supporters are likely to be upset and horrified by exactly the wrong part of the accusations. (Well, assuming they ever get above the exceptional logic of “But he did a good thing! He can’t do bad things!”)

Gay marriage in the UK

So news fly out of England that the non-inbred half of the UK Parliament voted on gay marriage and saw it good. Good news; but the facts portion of the BBC article on the thing was a bit puzzling. There are parts of the bill that are probably concessions to the bone deep stupid factions of the Parliament; bits like

Making it unlawful for religious organisations or their ministers to marry same-sex couples unless their organisation’s governing body has expressly opted in to provisions for doing so

and

The legislation explicitly stating that it will be illegal for the Church of England and the Church in Wales to marry same-sex couples.

Now, those could be bones tossed to the, er, zombies of churches and parties; but I have an alternative idea. They are a brilliant ploy of the pro-gay side, and the anti-gays totally fell for it.

If I understand things correctly, the Church of England has the same problem as the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church has with its relations with reality: their positions, including the one on gay marriage, are lagging behind mostly because of a loud, hateful minority of priests and parishioners. The Church also has a minority (majority?) which disagrees: people of conscience, courage and commitment. (Which is what the previous people are, too; but these aren’t people applying good qualities to bad causes.) Occasionally they’re religious too; but what matters is they are good people. Then when one group says march on to progress and the other says hold still in the mire, well, if you start this holding still you’re going to stay in that status quo.

Now, suppose a vicar of this latter sort is outraged by this law, and decides to go rogue and church-marry a gay couple, and then take whatever punishment falls on him/her. It’s the law now, not a church canon but an actual secular law. Crime, police, courts, punishment. What do you think the law would dole out? A fine? Prison time? Or the Church’s most horrible media disaster of the decade?

Do even the anti-gay people want to see a clergyman sent into the slammer over a theological disagreement?

As for the pro-gay people, well, I think this would be a glorious cause, whatsit, a cause celery, and I’m waiting with anticipation for it.

(Celeb-ree?)

Just a theory, mind you. Not a likely one, but it tastes better than the alternative.

(Freefloating footnote: With the CoE and with the Finnish Church I’d just like to see the progressives get themselves together and go on an intolerant rampage of punishment and dis-employment against the hate speech and hateful stupidity brigade. I’m not a big fan of big-tent leadership when that tent is spread wide enough to cover snakes and trolls.)

(Also, somewhere in the reportage the Hon. MP for Dickweed-upon-Asshole expressed fears this bill might lead to stomping on the freedoms of the bigotedly religious. Oh, if only! — it’s the part of the very liberal one to say, “I like your scare scenario! Do you have any more good ideas?”)

Romancing the sauna gnome

Zombies and vampires have been the subject of survival guides and romance manuals, overdosings of popular fiction and supersaturations of geekery.

This is not a problem; the problem is only vampires and zombies have received this treatment.

Here, then, is a guide to romancing and/or surviving the sauna gnome.

1 : What is it?

Gnomes, you know, gnomes are everywhere. Everything has a spirit, every river, tree and outhouse, and those spirits are called elves, fairies, gnomes or gorrambastids. Most aren’t as photogenic as the sauna gnome: plump, red-cheeked, mostly naked and flashing-eyed. A sauna gnome is about five inches tall and lives in a sauna — well duh — and looks after it. If the humans bathing in the sauna are too loud, disrespectful or annoying, the sauna gnome punishes them.

As this punishment happens in a sauna, a dark and hot room with a pile of red-hot stones in one corner, plenty of basins and bowls of water of varying temperatures in another, and the humans nude on raised benches closer to these than to the door, their privates against the slatted benches and darkness below, the revenge of the gnome can be terrible, surprising and memorable indeed.

Sauna gnomes dress, when they do, in sober gray wool, usually with a pointed hat, a vest, thick felt booties and cat-leather mittens. Because they are not Anglophone, they never call these “kittens”; instead, they are of leather because not even a sauna gnome touches hot stove-stones with bare hands. The stone-touching is required for three main purposes: dragging the stones to the gnome’s room, where they are dropped in a bowl of water to warm it for the gnome’s soup; flinging the stones at disrespectful sauna-bathers; and burial.

2 : How do you survive it?

Sauna gnomes are not malicious by nature, and are not opposed to you taking a good, long, leisurely bath in their sauna. As long as you do your bathing properly, the gnome will honor you and keep your bottles and cans of beer safe from the birch demons while you bathe.

The key to properness is moderation. Throw enough water on the stove, but not too much.

Too little water means the sauna will be cold, and both you and the gnome might get a cold. For you this is a botherance; for the gnome, it will be a botherance to you too.

Too much water means the sauna will become unbearably hot and steam-filled; the gnome will become reddened and angered, and as you stumble out, unable to take the heat, the gnome will stick out a leg and you will crash head-first against the door. Half the sounds you’ll hear in your ears will be the gnome’s harsh laughter; the rest will be you, screaming. Then when you’ve had a break and return to the benches, the gnome will have had time to place hand-made thumbtacks on them; and when you take the next break, a birch demon has drunk your beers and urinated them full, while the gnome has been on the opposite edge of the roof, loudly saying to itself: “Gee! I’m not guarding the beers! Sure hope nobody will drink them and urinate them full because I’m so old and decrepit I know I wouldn’t notice!” — birch demons are not the sharpest twigs in the forest, but eventually they take a hint.

Also: when you throw water on the stove, do not do it unexpectedly. That would be a very bad idea. And for the love of the Old Gods, if your throw elicits a cracking sound from the stove’s darkness, don’t cry “Nailed another one!” The gnomes really hate that, even if it was just a stone.

Reach around for the ladle, bump it against the basin, slosh the water, just to be sure say “More water! Not feelin’ anything yet!”, and then throw the water. Whatever motions you do, do them so that the gnome has time to get out of the way. Gnomes react to being suddenly enveloped in a cloud of boiling steam pretty much the way you would expect.

That is, with a barrage of red-hot stones, and your towels being fed to a moose. (And once a moose in your neighborhood get the taste of cloth, your washing line isn’t safe — and neither are your children. It’s many a child that has ran home, naked and tousled, crying about how a moose ate their clothes and their skis too.)

3 : Why should you romance it?

To repeat: “plump, red-cheeked, mostly naked and flashing-eyed”. Traditionally sauna gnomes have been represented as solely male and rather old, likely to smell more of old socks than of musk, but with these more liberated times both the children’s literature circles and the gnomes themselves have gotten over this neutered patriarchal fixation. These days there’s no saying which sex your sauna gnome is, or which age; if you find the benches littered with the sex toys of a five-inch humanoid, you can rest assured your gnome is one of the happily liberated ones.

Now, five inches: that’s a number that could cause anxiety even when not describing the toes-to-brows height of a potential romance partner. But consider this. Sauna gnomes don’t roam; most hardly even leave the sauna. They wash regularly, and work out — throwing stones and ladles and buckets around is a workout when you’re five inches tall — and, as a consequence of rarely leaving the sauna, they are usually bored out of their skulls and ready for anything that would break the tedium. A sauna warmed to room temperature and a coyly calling nude human on the benches is very intriguing to them, no matter the sex or the appearance of the human: the sauna is dark, and when the size of one partner is measured in inches and that of the other in feet, it would be silly to get caught up in questions of orientation.

It would be indelicate to comment on the actual details of the consummation of such affairs; let us just note that you can get a gnome in a condom and tie it off, and leave it at that.

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And now I’m off to write a major urban fantasy… er, rural fantasy bestseller where a lonely teenage girl falls in love with a hundred-year-old sauna gnome who is really small and not heavy, being five inches tall. I’m calling it Twee Light.

What I have been doing

Christmas holidays — sauna, too much food (half of it Christmas ham and Karelian pastries), relatives, utter laziness. Got a few volumes of Bleach, and volumes of Questionable Content and Amazing Super Powers (Brother #3 also got a volume of Oglaf for Brother #2, which is, uh… Christmas spirit?), two pairs of gloves, and the slowly dawning mutual realization that, uh, dad, when I told you you can e-mail that shop to order that coat I forgot that address is the bloody unintuitively hidden one, and not the feedback form. (Also, bad shop! They should still answer inquiries.)

New Year’s — shooting rockets, sauna, shooting some more rockets on a sauna break. (How? Like this. You tromp out, nude. Important caveat! This works only out in the countryside. You put on boots, a towel-loincloth, safety goggles, and no other clothes — then you go to the forest’s edge so you don’t disturb the neigh-bor’s horses or mom — you place an upended pail in the snow, and then light all the whizzlers and fire-coughers you have left. Interestingly, this wasn’t us boys but me and dad.)

Today — Dentist’s, with talk of probabilities (viz. car accidents and baseball), the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the man on the cover of the set of the Finnish radio version of it, dark matter and dark energy, thesis defense etiquette and the theses he has on his bookshelf, and other matters. My dentist is a man of many interests though for the middle part of our conversations I mostly go “Gnnngh? Gngngn.”

That’s what I have been doing; now it’s time to get back on the horse of blatherations and blog.

USB trollin’

Was cleaning; found an old two gigabyte flash drive.

Said to myself, “Two gigs seems so little now. I have so many USB sticks, so many bigger than this. I wonder if I could find some better use…”

Cut to: Me ejecting the flash drive off my laptop. It’s now named TRANSMISS, and has these files inside:

1. a copy of the Conet Project recordings of numbers stations — lots of creepy mp3:s, in other words — with the file names and all file details filed away, leaving no clue as to what these sounds are,
2. four grainy photos of what possibly is tree branches against a glowing sky in night-time, and
3. a plain text file with a letter salad name and contents listing four random numbers stations mp3 files and drawing an equals sign between each and one of the night-tree pictures.

Plus, using the Linux “touch” command the mp3:s were re-dated to one-month intervals over the past 150 months; and the pictures for a day in November. (Originally for midnight tomorrow, but then I got lazy.)

The letter-salad file name was 11 letters, no order or rhyme to them; but also, not incidentally, they were the video ID for a Youtube copy of Rick Astley’s famous feel-good hit Never Gonna Give You Up.

Next I painted the drive black — just to make it seem a little bit more unusual — and now today I, oh woe, kind of set it down at the betting stand of the local supermarket while putting my gloves on, and totally forgot to pick it back up.

Who knows who will find it.

Maybe I need a new hobby.

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Also: It would be relatively simple to register a domain and make it look like the login page for some subscription service, then drop a flash drive somewhere with a small “sampling” of the supposed contents (“October update”?), watermarked to mention the site.

The site would let you see an index of all the updates, indicating that the sampling was but a minute fraction; but ah, to see more you would need a password, which is not included. In truth the sampling would be all there was; and it would be unsettling enough.

Or if you weren’t going for the creeps, then “Daily Pictures of Left Foot”, and an implied archive of years.

(If registering a whole domain seems too much, just make up a blog, a tumblr, a Youtube channel, or something like. Sneakier still, leave one mysterious identifying, easily googlable bit in the drive contents — “property of the Ykkshaaskh Foundation”, “Project t566vk9c” — and then put up a blog post indicating you found a similar drive (maybe in a far-away place!), asking if anyone else has found one too, and promising to post an update soon. With any luck the drive-finder googles, finds your post, writes you an e-mail, and then there’s no limit to the messing with his or her head that you can do, and incidentally, I would be a horrible evil person if I wasn’t so lazy.)

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Also: surreptitiously drop a USB drive that contains a treasure map in the form of a sequence of photos, starting from a well-known local spot and proceeding so that each photo shows the location the next one was taken from. The final photo shows some non-obvious hidden spot, and either implies or outright show a “treasure”. (Since I’m Finnish, I’m thinking of trees: a few dozen paces into the forest and something you hang on a tree won’t be discovered accidentally.)

If the mapmaker is malicious, a bunch of money is implied and a mocking note left; otherwise, a mystery box with candy and knick-knacks and stuff: a quest, if one chooses to accept it, should have a reward.

Also, there should be treasure so you know if somebody has bothered to look inside the drive. Or maybe scrawled on the inside of the lid of the treasure box is a Gmail address, and a request to “report which cache has been found, by using which clue-stick or rhyme, and when; any report can win a prize!”

The Hobbit: a second look

Saw the film again, this time in 2D. Some additional thoughts to complement the first ones.

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Some lines grate. (“I cannot guarantee his blablabla.” “Understood!”)

Some scenes grate. (Gandalf and Galadriel talking. Then poof! she’s disappeared. Because apparently that’s how elves do an exit, or Gandalf had a senior moment.)

A bit too much battling and chaotic hack-and-slash escaping, especially since there are so many dwarves, and yet we’re fairly sure this is the kind of a film where the name of the game isn’t “dwarf attrition”. I’m not interested in lengthy scenes of dwarves vs. trolls or dwarves vs. orcs when there’s no chance of dead or even mutilated dwarves. (Thus, when the whole dwarven lot charged the trolls, I sighed and cursed inwardly — now how are you going to get all of them captured without a few severed limbs? And the solution was classic stupid threaten-the-captive drama and the leadership fail of the century.)

Also, rubber dwarves! Bouncing down any number of stony cliffs without a single broken limb.

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Here’s an alternate subtitle: “The Hobbit: The Home Invasion”. Both by Smaug and by the unexpected company of dwarves.

If you took Detroit instead of Hobbiton, and replaced the dwarves with some not-everyday group of people a bit more rugged and muscled than your everyday mousy homeowner-Hobbit — say gang members, bodybuilders or paramilitaries — then Bilbo’s panic would start to seem a lot less funny. All these muscled, menacing men showing up uninvited and treating themselves to your food! Who knows what they’ll demand next! (“Dwalin at your service, which is not a gang hello if the pig-men ask. Now give me food or I’ll cut you, little man.”)

(Fanfic idea: the dwarves show up, but Thorin and Gandalf don’t. Since they don’t want to discuss business without their leader being present, they don’t tell Bilbo anything — they just settle in and make Bilbo’s life very interesting. “That dwarf kicked Lobelia in the head!” “She kicked me first!” “In the shins! You don’t go from shin-kicking into kicking someone in the head! Hide her in a closet and stop kicking her!“)

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The riddles in the dark are so very well done; I don’t remember ever getting such an air of tight menace from the book — then again, the book is much lighter, an elegant entertainment for a more civilized age… wait, no quoting Star Wars in a Tolkien review, and no calling twee Thirties children’s fiction “more civilized”. Though I wouldn’t want to be stuck defending a Peter Jackson movie as “more civilized” than a book by an Oxford professor — but overall I’d argue that modern fiction tends to be more civilized than that of (say) eighty years ago. Less sexism and heteronormative whatsit and racism and hard-destiny past-worship and the like. (Much depends on your personal definition of civilization: do you think tweed, tea and tsk-tsk is more civilized than a screaming parade of gay rights protesters in all the colors of the rainbow? Is the heyday tomorrow, or was it yesterday?)

Also, Gollum’s facial expressions will end up in a million Youtube parodies, gifs and piecemeal works. I predict “Gollum reacts to X”, where X is anything.

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Still unbothered by Radagast, the White Council, and the Bilbo-not-involved additions; still pretty sure what they’re doing with Azog is pretty smart because the original book is basically a bunch of unconnected small adventures until they get to the Mountain.

Also, Radagast? Played by Sylvester McCoy, who played the Doctor in Doctor Who, a long time ago.* And in forthcoming films we’ll see Stephen “the” Fry, and Gregor Clegane (Conan Stevens), and Benedict Cumberbatch (that smug modern Holmes) as the dragon itself. With a cast of this size, even I’m getting the feeling of familiar people.

*

Can’t recall if “Azog the Defiler” or “The Pale Orc” are canon titles; I think not. Can’t say if this is “the evil albino” or “contrary to the norm, the Caucasian parallel is evil!” or just a design choice.

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The film was a bit flabbier on the second watching; partly because of too much liquid intake before the film, and a half-hour spent lying to myself about my ability to hold everything in until the end of the film.

(A half-hour because the riddles in the dark were not something to be missed, and I didn’t exactly recall their place in the whole Misty Mountain hop and hoopla.)

One day there will be movie theaters with catheters built into the seats. That will be a gross day, a day of great ickiness and disapproval, but that day I will not fear the consumption of liquids beforehand. (If you think popcorn and gum on the floor is icky, consider some hyperactive kid kicking half a dozen urine cans open.)

Since this portion of this review has ran off the rails, what about movie showings for pets? Somebody probably does this, but imagine fifty cats strapped down to plush red seats, watching Pulp Fiction, with automated arms offering nibbles on a stick, and little saucers of milk. Then a cell phone rings (“Who Let the Dogs Out?”), and one hundred eyes turn, glowing in the screen’s wan vibrating light.

These are the sort of things I think about.

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There were no humans with speaking roles in the film. (Gandalf’s not human, he’s a heavenly creature. The people of Dale had just screaming parts.) I’m actually really pleased by this.

There were no women with speaking roles either, except Galadriel. (Wait a minute, let me think; no, no other women that I can recall. A few at Dale and Rivendell, but nobody that spoke.) I’m actually okay with this; we’ll do the genderflip Hobbit by computer in 2025.

And in both cases, you could cut a minute or two and drop the “speaking roles” to “no humans, no women except Galadriel”. (Except with the orcs, where you can’t really tell. But orcs are a special case, exempt from gender and “true courage is knowing when to spare a life” and a lot of other things.)

(Also, true whatever is knowing when to not kill? This is the sort of a film where that means “don’t kill the gimp, er, Gollum”, and nothing more; certainly not pacifism, given how cartoonishly evil and undifferentiated the mass of onrushing enemies is. A better Gandalf quote would be “Take up your arms and fight! FIII—IIGHT!” — an actual film quote.)

Also, the Bechdel test? A resounding failure here, but might I propose a ra— wait, a fantasy species Bechdel-equivalent test? Are there two named non-human characters who talk about something other than a human? A bullshit test, but this film passes with flying colors!

(My memory of Ainulindale/Valaquenta is a bit hazy, but theoretically speaking you could argue that Gandalf is not male, being a genderless spirit, so taking the Bechdel test in the more inclusive, less canonical form of “two named non-males talking etc.” you could say the Galadriel-Gandalf scene makes this film pass the, um, quasi-Bechdel.)

(How would you judge the Bechdel if you had a female spirit possessing a male body?)

Finally, Thorin Oakenshield appeals to those parts of me that like a good-looking man. I don’t particularly care for Legolas but Thorin and Frodo, rowr.

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Questions:

1) GALADRIEL. Galadriel mouthed something about coming to Gandalf’s aid no matter what. Foreshadowing for some flashy magical rescue?

2) DOL GULDUR. The Dol Guldur subplot (I loved the “kill in the spirit world” scene!) — we are probably going to see Sauron the Necromancer driven out as in canon; but what are the portions of magic and steel involved in that going to be? I can’t imagine the White Council marching in blazing might and magic, hands waving. (Maybe there’ll be drama and then Sauron flees without a fight.)

3) BOLG. I was pretty sure we wouldn’t be seeing Bolg son of Azog when the third film comes around but oh, uh, wait, what, Conan Stevens has been cast as Bolg? How will they handle that, given Azog’s death plus greed is the canonical Bolg-motivator? Will Azog buy it in the second or the early third film?

4) SECOND SPLIT POINT. So the first films ends at Carrock. Where does the second one end? Will Beorn, Mirkwood, spiders, elves be enough to end with the barrel escape? (And will a barrel escape be “enough” to end with?) After that the next obvious endpoint would be leaving Esgaroth, but that would be even less action and drama at the end. Will there be a new scene that ends Azog, with the film then ending with Bolg receiving the news and chewing some scenery?

5) THRAIN. All we know of Thrain, Thorin’s father, at the moment is that he was captured or killed at the Battle of Azanulbizar** (dwarves, orcs, lots of dead) — and since Gandalf had Thrain’s map and key, that was probably “captured”. How did Gandalf get the map and the key? Did the orcs give Thrain to the Necromancer, and did Gandalf find him in the dungeons there? Or did Thrain wander off the battlefield and get captured by a Nazgul? In the film continuity, has Gandalf even gone to Dol Guldur? (In the book continuity, Thrain survived the battle and was caught by the Necromancer much later.)

6) THE OTHER RING. Also about Thrain: he had the last of the Seven Rings of the Dwarves with him when the Necromancer, the original Ring-Maker, the Lord of the Rings Sauron caught him. The films haven’t said a peep about the ring. Will they? (Oh, it would be nice to see a tangent about the partnership of elven Hollin and dwarven Moria, and the coming of Annatar the Giver of Gifts, the betrayal of Celebrimbor and the making of the Rings of Power. Come on, Peter, you did paint an Annatar for Morannon, give us some more! That’ll reverberate nicely against the dwarf-elf feud of the second movie!)

7) GOLLUM. Canonically speaking we’re done with Gollum now, and I don’t think there will be any more Bilbo-Gollum interaction coming. But will the following films hint at Big G leaving the mountains in search of Shire, and getting captured by Sauron’s orcs, tortured for ring-information? (How did that work, anyway? “Hey Orc Boss, this little git keeps screaming about a ring. Do you reckon the Big Big Boss would be interested? He’s into rings, right? Has full nine fingers full of them.”) I don’t think a scene like that is likely, unless Peter Jackson wants a really heavy-handed, depressing after-credits scene for the third film.

8) POP QUIZ. There’s at least one character that will be in all six films. Who? There are three others who almost certainly will be. Who are they?*** I’ve named a Led Zeppelin song and a Black Sabbath song in this review; did you notice this pointless trickery?

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Also, in the next film: Mikael Persbrandt as Beorn. Mikael “Gunvald ‘Police brutality!’ Larsson” Persbrandt as Beorn “Werebear Beekeeper” Beorn!

This excitement does not make sense unless you’re both a Tolkien and a Martin Beck fan. This is probably, outside Sweden, a very limited set, but my parents are great fans of not too gory police procedurals.

*

*, “the Doctor” : At this point I spent a few minutes wondering who David Tennant could have played. Couldn’t come up with anything better than “a nude dancing elf”.

**, “Azanulbizar” : In canon, Thror wasn’t killed in the battle, and his earlier death in the hands of Azog inspired the war and the battle (“Hey boss, this orc beheaded your father. He burned his name on the face in big runes though, so we know who he is. Whaddaya wanna do?”); and in canon Azog died at Azanulbizar, killed by Dain Ironfoot — but it’s still the bloody battle outside Moria where Thorin got the name Oakenshield.

(One of my favorite parts of the battle description was young Dain Ironfoot looking in the East Gate of Moria, seeing a familiar balrog-y being of shadow and flame, Durin’s Bane, and stumbling back to tell the surviving dwarves that they probably didn’t want to go to Moria after all. But though I think we saw Dain in the battle scenes, and have heard Thorin referring to him as unwilling to help, we haven’t met him yet — so maybe that scene’s still to come.)

(And, finally, I wonder if they’ll hint at Balin and his tragic mistake between the trilogies: in Hobbit-canon the last we see of him is a prosperous dwarf of Erebor, and in the Lord of the Rings we see him as cold bones entombed in Moria, a would-be king in an already occupied kingdom, his grave decorated by scarcely younger dwarf and orc bones and rusted blades. Gimli reacts to that quite strongly; Frodo doesn’t, not having the same connection as Bilbo would have had.)

(Fanfic idea: Take the Lord of the Rings from Elrond’s Council and suppose that Frodo didn’t volunteer, but Bilbo did. How does an elderly, ring-besotted Hobbit survive the journey south?)

(“By the power invested in me by this One Ring of Power, I call thee forth, Balin son of Fundin, my friend of old! Rise! Rise like the Nosferatu! Also, fuck off Balrog you git, I don’t have time for small fries.”)

***, “POP QUIZ” : Gandalf. It’s impossible for Gandalf to not be in the remaining Hobbit films. Saruman, Elrond and Galadriel were in all of the Rings films (I think we see Galadriel in The Two Towers), but though it’s very likely it’s not yet Gandalf-level certain that they will be in both of the Hobbit sequels. Frodo is likely not in the middle Hobbit; and Bilbo wasn’t (if I recall correctly) in The Two Towers.

The Hobbit: first impressions

Overall reaction: This movie is a glorious, overindulgent, geeky hot mess and I love it.

It’s a third of the book at two hours and fifty minutes, but there’s no flab. The movie more leaps and runs from one scene to the other, not resting. (Then again, you shouldn’t trust this unless you trust me, and I am heavily biased: a Tolkien geek with little movie-analytical gifts or interests.)

*

This whole movie feels like they took the Lord of the Rings team, fed everybody lots of drugs, and told them to get to work. (“No no, I can see it! Rabbit pulled sleigh!“)

This-all feels like Peter Jackson read the Hobbit and said, “Thunder giants? Not quite over-the-top enough.” Everything is more extreme, more grotesque, more outlandish; and in this movie, it works well.

*

Peter Jackson is better suited for this than he was for the Lord of the Rings. The latter is a book of great solemnity and stern humorlessness, with occasional professor-of-language nerd jokes, of momentous occasions and great anguish. The Hobbit has talking spiders and bone dead stupid comedy trolls. The Lord of the Rings as done by Jackson was a touch… a touch crass, maybe? The additions didn’t always fit the spirit of the movie. The Hobbit is perfect for Jackson’s phantasmagoria. If you add slapstick to the Lord of the Rings, or over-the-top action stunts, they don’t quite fit. They fit in the Hobbit.

*

The movie is not true to the spirit of the book; but it has found a spirit of its own. The movie is the book, grown up and crooked.

The book-Rivendell is a place of enchantment and elvishness. The movie-Rivendell is a place of tenseness and wariness. I think I like the movie-Rivendell better; it shows more than what Bilbo saw, and since we “know” the Lord of the Rings trilogy is going to happen, we need to see more than just what the clueless Hobbit saw.

Overall, the most outlandish and childish bits have been pruned away. The trolls don’t have a talking purse. The eagles don’t speak — I suppose that would have been hard to pull off convincingly.

*

Just one “For fuck’s sake!” plot moment that stuck with me. Thorin has all his dwarves up in arms, and the trolls have Bilbo. Trolls say, either we rip Bilbo apart, or you-all surrender and (by implication) we eat all of you and Bilbo. It does not seem anyone could be so fecking stupid as to choose the second alternative: what, throw thirteen dwarves away to buy the Hobbit a few hours of life? Madness even in the context of the whole stupid surrender-or-the-friend-gets-it meme.

*

The addition of Azog works nicely, I think. Adds more structure to the episodic, unconnected book-plot.

*

Two hours and fifty minutes is a long time and a lot happens. You could break this movie into two or three pieces like a miniseries and make it a bit easier to watch.

*

The mythology additions and extrapolations fit (on the first look) really well, though I’m pretty certain a lot of them are not even History of Middle-Earth canon. Overall I remember counting just three points where I felt the urge to leap up and scream “Fuck you, Peter Jackson!” — and all were during the first half-hour. (First and second were over the narrative overglorification of the Dale-Erebor realm; what, they were better than Gondor? Preposterous! But the narrator was Bilbo, who really is not an impartial observer. The third was a mention of prophecies and this being the time of prophecy; I really don’t remember that from the original, and I think it takes away from the danger and uncertainty of Thorin et al’s undertaking.)

I never even considered what would happen to Sting’s glow if the only orc present died. Does the glow result from live orcs, or will a dead orc-body do? Very nice, movie!

The Dol Guldur addition — the Witch-King out of the statue — was neatly done. The White Council’s talk of the Witch-King’s body buried in the hills of Rhudaur seems like a break with canon, but one that works very well for mood and plot. In real canon, Angmar (Sauron’s catspaw of centuries ago, set up to destroy the northern Dunedain kingdom of Arnor, from the Shire to Rivendell, the kingdom of Aragorn’s fathers) was defeated at the Battle of Fornost and it is explicitly stated that the Witch-King fled; no capture, death or burial for him. He was long since a shade, a Ringwraith at the time, and there’s no canon source that I can recall that would describe him at all; certainly not as a possessing spirit, capable of leaving some corpse behind or being trapped in one. So, probably a total invention; but it works well.

*

Will probably go and re-see the movie next week; may write something more analytical then.

A switch

And now, a quote from Bash.org:

[#86444]

<Dynamo> Do that again, and I will switch your testicles with your eyes.

This, to me and probably only to me, screams like an idea for a comic book superhero. Probably one of those black-and-white comic books with really expressive art, lots of drugs, and really small publishers.

Or then a novel of personal tragedy and coping with it.

*

“Ew, look at that guy.”

“The one with those boxed-in sunglasses? Sitting with his legs spread like he’s the God King of Sex?”

“That’s the one. The one who keep touching his crotch all the time.”

“Eeuw.”

“It’s not just that, there’s something glinting there. I think he has a camera hidden there.”

“A camera in his crotch?”

“What else could it be? A monocle?”

*

“Hey, braveheart, you scram. You ain’t got the balls to stand up to me.”

I grinned as wide as I could, and raised a hand to my shades. From my lowly vantage point I could see the bully shifting uneasily, not knowing why I wasn’t running already. “I ain’t got the balls?” I grated, then swiped the glasses off, feeling a pair flop out onto my cheeks. “I got more balls than you know.”

After that there was only screaming and running on their part, and more mad grinning from me.

*

“Ma’am, did you get a look at his face?”

“I… Officer, I don’t know if I—”

“Anything you can say is of help. Hair color, eye color—”

“Aaaaa—”

“Ma’am? Ma’am, why are you— Did I say something?”

*

“The hell…? Are they painted on or what? Seriously, man, who paints their nuts to look like eyes?”

“That’s not all.”

“Yikes! They blinked! How did you do that?”

“Years of practice.”

“Don’t tell me this is a passed-down-in-the-family thing.”

*

It’s a well-known bit of advice that you should never anger a wizard, for they are cackling mad and quick to anger.

They also don’t do figurative speech. You’d think they would, being all John Dee and alchemy-mumbo-jumbo and astral spirits sloshing all over the place, but they don’t.

They mean exactly what they say. No more, and no less.

Trust me, I know this from experience.

I’ve talked to several surgeons. They’ve mostly just screamed back at me. Then gibbered that even if they tried, I’d end up impotent and blind. That they’ve never seen anything like me. That they were never taught anything like this. That their school would like me to become an exhibit.

No. I have too much dignity for that.

Plus I don’t think there’s going to be a second case of me. The wizard added insult to injury: he laughed so hard he died of it. Then his ghost saw me crying “Help! I see my underpants!” and it died of laughter too.

*

It’s not the loneliness of my condition that gets to me.

No, it’s the sex life.

All I see is a fist, always almost punching me in the eyes. That’s a major turn-off.

On the other hand, I can infinitely delay ejaculation just by tensing my throat a bit. Then I swallow and, boom, here I come. The joys of unorthodox tubing.

As for partners, well, I would be the most attentive of lovers, eyes open for all details, but for obvious reasons I mostly make love in the dark. And, in reality, slapping your squeezed-shut eyes against someone’s butt gets old really fast.

Not to mention that one lady who decided she wanted to see my eyes before we finished. She screamed, kneed me in the eyes, and ran away. I was cross-eyed for a week.

*

I switched jobs pretty quickly. When you see through your crotch, you don’t look good when using your computer. Or reading a book. Plus when you sit down at your desk you’re practically blind. You hear someone coming, you push back, push your crotch up at them, shake it to align your eyes with the discreet slits, and yell “Hello Helen!” — doesn’t get you any friends in the company.

I tried acting like I was actually really medically blind — hey, I was wearing the shades already — but there are lots of blind people and those guide dogs, they were always going for the crotch, nose wet and curious. And they got really angry when I tried to stare them down.

“I’m so sorry, I don’t know what’s gotten to Fifi-Arnold now. He’s been staring at your… your no-nos for a while now, and I’ve never seen him growling like this!”

“Gee. I never noticed. Been… been watching the skyline or a wall the whole time.”

Does a cloth-covered crotch with eyes look like a dog’s face to a dog or something? I’ve been trying to find an answer to this question, but seems nobody has ever asked it before.

*

I am a rare hero. I’m the only one that can get a broken nose when punched in the balls. I’m the only one whose farts are literally eye-watering. I’m the only one who needs shades and also fiber optics from the crotch to the collar to function in normal society. I’m a loner. An avenger. Wherever there is evil, I will be watching for it. Watching… from below.

I call myself… the Eyeball.