Participants in the rally for the independence during the National Day of Catalonia on September 11, 2012 in Barcelona, Spain. (PHOTO: nito / SHUTTERSTOCK)
2. Sell reasonably priced copies of your new flag.
Read 10 Steps to a Breakaway State: A Secessionist’s Guide
We must add: Think of a badass acronym for your independence movement, not something that makes people giggle and nudge each other.
The various factions of the Catholic Church in the Philippines are battling each other…on our phones. How did they get our numbers, did the angels cough them up? All last week we woke up to messages from the “silent clergy” urging the House of Representatives to pass the Reproductive Health bill. Today we got a text from the un-silent side promising eternal damnation to the 114 congressmen who said yes to the RH bill. Thunderbolts and lighting, very very frightening!
But we are dealing with an institution whose chief weapon is fear. Fear and ignorance. Whose two chief weapons are fear, ignorance, and credulity. Whose three chief weapons are fear, ignorance, credulity…How do you reason with something built on unreason? With Monty Python’s Meaning of Life.
Given Twilight-level lack of irony, expect to hear this song at an anti-RH protest.
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is delightful, precious! Yesss it is too long—there’s a 20-minute history of the dwarves of Erebor, and that’s even before we hear “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” There are many flashbacks. There are musical numbers. There is plenty of eating. There is more facial hair than is present in the entire Rings trilogy.
With The Lord of the Rings the problem was how to compress so much into ten hours of movies, so the songs were dropped and entire scenes and characters removed (We can live without barrow wights). The problem here is how to stretch a fairly short children’s book into three movies, so every sequence is padded with information from Tolkien’s many chronicles, histories and appendices. For instance when Thorin Oakenshield is introduced, we get a flashback battle scene explaining where he got his name. Too much information—not a problem for Tolkien fans.
Bilbo Baggins had gotten too attached to his mother’s doilies.
And yet The Hobbit has not a whiff of the cynicism and marketing tie-in prostitution that corroded the soul of that other fantasy series we once loved. It helps that Peter Jackson and his veteran LOTR team could turn to Professor Tolkien’s vast body of work for everything they needed.
Each scene is crafted with so much care, detail and Tolkien geek love, we forgive its excesses. Martin Freeman is brilliant as Bilbo Baggins, Ian McKellen renders it impossible to imagine anyone else as Gandalf, and Richard Armitage’s Thorin may be the second dwarf sex symbol of our time (Peter Dinklage’s Tyrion Lannister is the first, and he was written by a Tolkien devotee). Upon hearing Christopher Lee’s unmistakable voice we cried, “He’s alive! He’s aliiiive!” Once again Andy Serkis makes us wonder why we feel bad for that malign creature Gollum.
Mission leader Thorin Oakenshield
The Hobbit is long, but it is not slow: there is so much to take in, you may not notice the hours go by. (Middle Earth is so gorgeous we want to book passage to New Zealand.) The rollicking dwarf comedy may remind you of Time Bandits, the woodland scenes of Legend (No!), but the battle scenes are pure Peter Jackson. There’s no one we’d rather go on a dangerous adventure with.
Note: We watched The Hobbit in 2D because we hate wearing 3D glasses over our own spectacles. Much has been written about the movie being shot at 48 frames per second. All we can say is: It’s clear.
We lovesss you, Peter Jackson. The only way we could love you more is if you cast the New Zealand All Blacksses as human warriors in the final battle. Ooh there’s an idea.
– Do you have the ticketssses?
– Yes, precious, we gots them yesterday.
– Then let’ss go now.
– Ooh we’re ssso excited to see The Hobbit.
– I don’t know.
– What do you mean, preciousss?
– Why does it have to be a trilogy?
– So we can have more moviesss!
– The Lord of the Ringss is three long bookssses so a trilogy makes senssse. The Hobbit is a short book. It’s one movie at most.
– It’s all right, preciousss. Peter Jackson knowssses his Tolkien.
– What if the precious has changed him? What if this is the start of a prequel trilogy like…The Phantom Menace?
– No! Peter Jackson is our friend. Peter Jackson wouldn’t hurtsss us.
– Like the other one?
– Cruel Smeagol, take that back!
– Mustn’t get our hopes up so high.
– But Watssson is Bilbo and Sssherlock is Smaug.
– We saw the Rankin Bass cartoon movie. It was too long.
– We loved King Kong! Everybody hated it but we still loved it.
– What about…The Lovely Bones?
– Stop! Stop it, precious! I’m not listening!
– We shall see.
At a quarter to two this afternoon we were sitting in traffic in the Guadalupe interchange en route to Rockwell when a group of kids surrounded the taxi. There were about six of them, pre-teen, early teen, in T-shirts and shorts. One of them hopped onto the back of the van in front of us then somersaulted onto the roof of the taxi. The other kids stuck their faces in the windows and pounded on the doors. It was like being in Mad Mad: Beyond Thunderdome, or getting stuck in open auditions for a Glee remake of Fame, which is scarier. Then the kids started rattling the door handles and trying to open the doors, which were locked.
The driver looked straight ahead and refused to notice the rumpus. We have heard of thieves lurking in intersections, opening car doors and grabbing whatever they can (It’s Xmas). The kids may have been high on solvent. We were listening to Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants (50th anniversary edition). It is hard to be fazed while listening to hard bop. Then the traffic started moving and the wild ones went off to harass another car. They could still be down in Guadalupe, freaking out random motorists.
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