Unqualified Offerings

At the time of the 2001 awards, this site had a few dozen readers and the Maryland Terrapins were getting blown out of the Orange Bowl. Things have changed for the better! This year’s format is as follows: New categories will be marked with an asterisk. Repeat categories will have last year’s winner in parentheses. […]

About my item on Tolkien as British mythology, and why the Ring saga is so land-locked, Patrick Nielsen Hayden quickly wrote:

What do you mean, “where are all the boats”? In Tolkien’s mythology, sailing is how you get to Heaven, more or less. Sounds reasonably English to me.
Mariners are a Big Deal in Arda, […]

Eric Mauro e-mails about Know-Nothings, neo-confederates and other disagreeable people:

I’ve been wondering about that as well, after the Lott affair. Lincoln would have got nowhere being a total abolitionist, but then again there were abolitionists at the time. This is a big problem with revisionism. If you believe in the essence of electoral politics, that […]

Say this for the Bush Administration - it has sent a message to potentially hostile regimes that is admirable for its clarity if nothing else: Get nukes as fast as you can, one way or another. If you miss your deadline, like Iraq, you can be toppled with something close to impunity. If you act […]

Bruce Rolston talks about Tolkien’s desire to create a mythology for England. Okay, they talk of nothing else on the bonus DVD disks too. Here’s my question . . .
Where are all the boats? What self-respecting island nation’s mythology is centered in a thoroughly landlocked tale?
(Is this one Seablogger can explain?)

A few goings-on . . .
Duckboyz? - The webfooted lad announces that he too will be taking in strays, like Asymmetrical Information and On the Third Hand before him.
Spleenville - Big ol’ thread on Tolkien and the merits of fantasy. Reading the chief antagonist of the thread may be hazardous to those who have […]

to retiring Washington Redskin Darrell Green. There was a period in the mid-nineties when Mrs. Offering and I managed to get to about one game a year at the stadium. The best thing about being at the game rather than watching it on TV was the chance to watch Darrell Green work an entire play. […]

Judging from this item, Charles Dodgson may not understand the “Being a hawk means never having to say you’re sorry” principle.
Surely, on the other hand, Donald Rumsfeld does.

Jesse Walker informs me, and it’s apparently confirmed, that Michael “Kavalier and Clay” Chabon is writing the script for Spiderman II. I should be embarrassed to admit how thrilling I find this news. Chabon’s unused proposal for the first X-Men movie can be accessed from this page of his website.
Jesse is whiling away the intervening […]

The Peanuts Arcana Tarot Deck. Pretty amusing. (Link via (woolgathering).)

My brief, carping item about liberal bloggers, especially Atrios, brought some mail, which is so far running about 2-1 against me. That is, I heard from three people, one of whom was Atrios, who was very polite, one from a leftist reader who wrote “I read one of his commenters joking about cutting out Lott’s […]

Reading this Airstrip One item a symmetry finally hits me: American WWII revisionists generally accuse Roosevelt of being overly attached to Churchill. At the same time, British WWII revisionists suspect Churchill of being overly attached to Roosevelt. This isn’t one of those cases where “They can’t both be right,” but it’s still interesting.

Electrolite finds - quite the headline.
He’s also got a great Tolkien roundup with links to further reading. And Avedon Carol now has a Sideshow Annex devoted to Issues Mesoterran.

Primarily for fellow MT users . . .
I’ve been meaning to brag about my Movable Type fu. Last month I decided to really learn MT, beyond just the minimum needed to get a blog up and post to it. In the course of doing so I completely redesigned my Nobilis site (dedicated to the […]

There are a handful:
Bill Frist’s pencils. Much has been written about this one, god knows why. Remember when Mencken said “A belly laugh is worth a thousand syllogisms?” It was for occasions like this.
Patty Murray, traitor. Murray is a dumbass and has the liberal Democrat’s inveterate faith in economic intervention anywhere, at home or abroad. […]

Your Talking Dog all but declares that since more violence and terror will benefit both the Likud campaign and the thugs who still control Palestinian strategy and tactics, that there will be more violence and terror in the run-up to the Israeli elections. Why do I say everybody’s a cynic? Because I think he’s right.
TD […]

Strangely, classicist Victor Davis Hanson seems to forget the whole hubris thing when his attention turns to the present day:

Something strange is happening, as if all the old conventional wisdom proves daily insolvent. Each hour Saudi Arabia appears a more untenable ally, panicky as the light of truth shines into its deepest recesses. The Arab […]

Tapped, part of an intra-left blogger brawl about race and the Democratic Party agenda that involves Atrios and Hesiod among others, asks

But then, inevitably, we come to the question of what’s acceptable non-racist policy from a conservative or a Republican. (If you think it’s impossible to be a conservative or a Republican without being racist, […]

Reactions to the good stuff I got for Christmas:
Fellowship of the R - okay, enough Tolkien talk for awhile. Mrs. Offering actually bought the collector gift edition or whatever it’s called, the one with the bigass bookends, because it was the only version of the extended-edition DVD in stock. But I have nothing to add […]

Speaking of Bruce Baugh, his site has an example of what happens when a real writer gets ahold of a real topic - why it’s so much harder to write about happiness than unhappiness.

citing this Aziz Poonawalla essay on Tolkien’s method

The essence of allegory is a homomorphism - a one-to-one mapping. The Ring is nuclear power. Sauron is Hitler. Hobbits are the English. Aragorn is Churchill. The disdain that Tolkien had for this kind of decimation of themes to mere analogy is clear in the Foreword, because it […]

Good to great writing elsewhere about Tolkien, Towers, fantasy and meaning. Diana Moon posts (substantial) “impressions” to Letter from Gotham. Some of them are at serious variance with mine. She brings up interesting questions about the Christianity of Tolkien’s trilogy or lack thereof:

Lastly, I was struck by the utter absence of Christianity in these adaptations […]

Coming Tuesday, Unqualified Successes 2002! - this site’s annual awards presentation. New categories. New winners for old categories. Surprises galore. (I’m assuming . . . ) Last year’s winners are here.

Compare: Samwise Gamgee from LOTR and Iran Deckard, wife of android hunter Rick, in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

Just got back. This is the quickie reaction. More may come later.
No, it’s not as good as the first one. Part of this is Trilogy Middle Syndrome. Part of it is that the script is less surefooted - Sam’s voiceover speech during the twin battles at Helm’s Deep and Isengard falls off the Edge of […]