This week: We dive into Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Miracle Laurie joins us to talk dolls, acting, Uke Box Heroes, and the return of Dollhouse for its final run. Audra chats lit with the Tolkien Professor. And we run down the week in geek, including Comcast’s NBC purchase, a sad SETI@Home user’s professional peril, the new Star Trek MMO, and the awesome (and regrettably-named) new Firefly-meets-Ocean’s 11 sci-fi show Slingers reel.
Denise Birdwell should try “reading books instead of burning (the ideas in) them!”
Hey, hey, hey now. I wasn’t giving people crap, I was trying to be helpful.
I’m a few minutes in. I head earlier in the week that Comcast had bought NBC, but what I want to know is how the Sheinhardt Wig Company will be affected
Didn’t listen to the podcast yet, but here’s a few random notes.
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Awesome that you got a Tolkien professor to guest. The guests have been great. Can’t say enough good things about GWC Mk. II. Or is this III?
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My late dad read The Hobbit to me when I was just a wee lad, then the LOTR books to me when I was barely old enough to read…
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…and I’ve read them. So I know how they end, namely…
[spoiler]they win.[/spoiler]
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But the movies are so well done, there a couple-few points where I think, “Oh, they’re boned. Everybody’s gonna die. Bad guys are gonna win.” Particularly in LOTR I, in the dungeon, where they’re trapped on the teetering, collapsing starway. And at the battle in II when the gunpowder goes off.
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If I ever hit the lottery, I’m totally getting a living room that looks like the Rohan throne room.
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We seriously considered calling our girls Eowyn, but it didn’t quite fit. A good friend named one of his girls Arwen, and she’s not the only young Arwen we’ve met.
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When I watch Legolas rapid-fire his bow, I think, “Oh, now THAT is what an 18 dexterity looks like!” Maybe 19 or 20; he is an elf.
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Trivia: thru the – I think – 50s-60s-70s, Tolkien’s books were obscure. I don’t know if they formally went out of print, but they were hard to find for a long, long time.
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Here’s my annual plug for Tolkien’s “Letters from Father Christmas” book.
Every year, Tolkien would write (and illustrate) his kids letters from Santa Claus, telling them about Father Xmas’s adventures (and, with elves and mischeivous polar bears in tow, misadventures) for the year. That book collects them, and Amazon has it right-cheap this year, like $10. If it sounds interesting, it won’t disappoint.
If I am remembering correctly Gandalf and Sauraman were not human and were nearly immortal like the elves. Am I correct or am I thinking of something else?
Yeah, Wizard is a race, not a class, in Tolkein.
Haven’t listened to the podcast yet, but I’m really looking forward to it.
What a great 'cast and a great arc…it made a boring day go by quickly.
I rewatched FOTR earlier in the week to prep for this 'cast, and you guys touched on this briefly, but I noticed for the first time that while Sauron is the evilest evil guy ever, the majority of the evil in the series is carried out by weak Earthlings (Saruman, Boromir’s father, Wormtongue), just like real life.
Anyway, just wanted to say that I"m really looking forward to next week’s Two Towers discussion (my favorite of the three).
Some people just have no vision. I cant think of anything more ground breaking and paradigm shifting than discovering signs of sentient life out in the universe. Im not sure we should go knock on their doors, but to paraphrase Mr. Sagan via Ms. Arroway, we should definitely be listening. Id go so far as to say it is humanities most important mission.
Also, Id like to order 2 copies of that Tali Christmas Swimsuit Calendar!
ETA: Budgie Slingers!!
As previously mentioned, Wizards were kind of a race, but of course I feel the desire to elaborate (yeah, I know too much)
The Wizards (all whopping 5 of them) were, in actuality Maiar. The Maiar in Middle Earth are essentially demi-gods, divine spirits who entered the world at its creation and have been there since. They cannot be killed, but they can have their powers stripped, their bodies destroyed, etc. So long as the world exists, they will exist (and beyond the world as well). They have varying levels of power (Sauron is also one of the Maiar, one of the strongest, as are the Balrogs (who are among the weakest); Sauruman is stronger than Gandalf, who were both stronger than the other wizards). Sauruman is corrupted by the desire for the Ring, and the desire for the power embodied in it.
Elves were (in final terms of the Silmarillion) immortal, and would live so long as the earth endures. As an interesting side-note, the elf Glorfindle (who gets the shaft in every LotR movie) actually reincarnates and returns to Middle Earth in his body after being killed in a battle with a Balrog outside of Gondolin. Their bodies could be destroyed, but their spirits would endure while the earth did, and they could be re-embodied in special cases. If their bodies were destroyed their spirits hung out in a place called Mandos off in Valinor (or what Sean calls the North Pole). Elves probably have a small right to their arrogance in comparison to men and the other races. They were the first race, one of two divinely created, and the only immortal species on middle earth (excluding Valar and Maiar, who are really divine spirits). Galadriel, by the time of The movies, is older than all the recorded history of our planet. Older than the Pyramids. Older than Chinese culture. Older than Dirt. Elrond’s almost as old, only about 5-6 thousand years old. I can’t recall Legolas’s age off the top of my head, but he’s easily the second oldest member of the fellowship after Gandalf. So when you are older and lived longer (and presumably learned more/fought more/did more stuff) than the combination of every other member of the fellowship, a little arrogance is understandable.
Men were created directly by ‘god’ or Illuvatar in Tolkien’s mythos.
And while I’m playing the race game, it’s actually Sauron’s boss Morgoth who creates Orcs in the first place, way back in the first age (movies set at end of third age). Sauruman creates the Uruk-hai somehow.
Dwarves were made by one of the Valar in Valinor sometime before the Elves appeared, but were put on the shelf til after the elves came to be.
And nobody knows where the heck hobbits came from.
totally awesome.
on the hobbits… in that case i am going to assume Hobbits were created even before elves, but the god created them didn’t want to admit to creating them.
Loved the LOTR stuff.
As for the IT school guy getting fired, the non-national news stuff reported he was also doing quite a bit of borrowing school property without permission.
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2009/11/30/20091130searchforaliens1202.html
Stole 18 computers and other equipment, and installed SETI on every computer in the school system. They estimated the extra electricity usage cost them $1.5million.
The only problem I have with this story is that the idiot who told people why he was fired concentrated on ‘he put SETI on the computers’ instead of ‘he was stealing school property’.
Caught the ending…well, one of the many endings of LOTR: Return of the King on TNT yesterday. They must have known about the current GWC arc. 
I have to say the most impressive thing to me in all the films is the production design. The graceful architecture of the Elf cities, the vastness of Moria, the costumes and the scenery and even small things on Bilbo’s table. It’s clear that so much thought and care was put into making these things even if they would only be onscreen for a few seconds, if that. I had no prior knowledge before seeing the first film but after that, I consumed all three books in a matter of weeks.
I thought the discussion with the Tolkien professor was fascinating. The way that medieval people looked up to the previous generations versus the way that we look down on those that came before. And Tolkien really only used words that had been around for at least 500 years? Wow.
And that’s so awesomely funny, because I so identify with the Hobbits. In reality, I’d be a human – running about trying to make things good/change them and mucking it up. But I want to be a hobbit.
There is no way on this earth I would be able to handle hairy feet! A friend of mine who played a halfling in Everquest to this day claims they are the superior race. I just can’t get over the hairy feet!
They do have a lot of very sharp blades in that world.
I don’t really look for that kind of thing, but Sam’s wife looks like she’s the type that shaves her feet.
I could be talkin’ outta my butt; not having more-than-skimmed The Silmarillion, I don’t know what the third age’s societal norms are vis-a-vis body hair.
I suppose it comes down to personal preferences.
Depending how the Hobbit guys looked at it, shaved feet could be a quick & easy way to attract/repulse Hobbit doodz.
I recently got to see the LOTR trilogy in the cinema again. It was great, as you can imagine. Unfortunately they didn’t show the extended cuts, but that was probably for the best as I was late enough getting home as it was, especially with work the next morning. I definitely prefer the extended versions, there are some great scenes that for some reason didn’t make it into the theatrical cut. I have on occasion watched the trilogy in one sitting, it gets tough near the end.
Wow, timely podcast. My husband and I had been wanting to re-watch the Extended Editions lately, I’m in the middle of a reread of The Two Towers, and when I woke up yesterday Boromir was getting shot in the chest 
A couple of LotR memories before something I really want to ask opinions on.
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Last year in my week taking shelter at my in-laws’ after Hurricane Ike, we spent a long while watching the Extended Editions. Oddly enough, this hasn’t caused a negative connotation for me. It makes me feel happy and safe
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I dragged a friend in high school to the opening day of Fellowship. She got incredibly into the movie and I didn’t notice until the scene where Boromir gets shot. You guys know how the movie is, the music cuts out and everything gets quiet, and all of a sudden I hear her scream “NOOOO” in her seat next to me. The entire theater burst out laughing.
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I’ve been watching this video about once every two weeks for the past two months:
Okay, discussion time. I think Elijah Wood is a pretty cool guy based on pretty much every time I’ve seen him on Conan O’Brian, but I can’t stand his Frodo. Part of this is that his fingernails and neck freak me out, and part of this is because oh my god angst overload. After about the first third of Fellowship and until the very end of Return, you never see him smile. Ever. He’s always on the verge of tears.
I agree with my husband’s assessment that my annoyance and preference of book!Frodo is probably because it’s hard to portray Frodo’s strengths in a movie-friendly way. His whole thing is that he’s very strong in a very understated way, and the movie portrays this by him making sad eyes at everyone around him.
So am I just being overly sensitive to Elijah Wood’s scary big eyes and freaky neck, or what? What’s your take on Frodo?