xkcd, if you wanted a link that badly, you could have just asked.

"Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceased": Tolkien as Wagner's shadow.

Wednesday afternoon links 1!

* More bad news for Barack Obama as Stephen Colbert signs on to the birther movement.

* Meanwhile, Jon Stewart fights for our shared glorious homeland in a new Daily Show segment, "Hey, C'Mon That's Not ... Why Would You ...Whoa!"

* Kottke on flarf.

* New Line, fresh from screwing over Peter Jackson, is still trying to screw Tolkien's heirs. More at School Library Journal.

* The Big Picture presents: lightning!

* And Offworld has your post-apocalyptic Disneyland.

Thursday night links.

* Artists and the recession.

* Tough day for celebrity: Farrah Fawcett has died, and Michael Jackson has been rushed to the hospital with cardiac arrest.

* Superhero roast from 1979, starring Adam West and Ed McMahon. Surreal. Via @filmjunk. (No Superman?)

* Towards the personhood of whales: 'Whales Might Be as Much Like People as Apes.'

* 'Twitter Creator On Iran: "I Never Intended For Twitter To Be Useful." '

* In Tehran, state television's Channel Two is putting on a "Lord of the Rings" marathon, part of a bigger push to keep us busy. Movie mad and immunized from international copyright laws, Iranians are normally treated to one or two Hollywood or European movie nights a week. Now it's two or three films a day. The message is "Don't Worry, Be Happy." Let's watch, forget about what's happened, never mind. Stop dwelling in the past. Look ahead.

One of the better discussions of the failed Battlestar Galactica finale (at Tor.com) included a link to a decades-old piece from Ansible, "The Well-Tempered Plot Device," which gets at what went wrong with the show as well as any other commentary I've seen.

Sometimes, however, even the Universal Plot Generator breaks down. You may find, in the course of hacking forth your masterpiece from the living pulp, that none of the plot devices hitherto catalogued, none of these little enemas to the Muse, will keep the story flowing; that you can think of no earthly reason why the characters should have to go through with this absurd sequence of actions save that you want them to, and no earthly reason why they should succeed save that it's in the plot. Despair not. If you follow the handbook, you'll find there's a plot device even for this -- when the author has no choice but to intervene in person.

Obviously, this requires a disguise, unless you're terribly postmodernist. The disguise favoured by most writers, not unnaturally, tends to be God, since you get the omnipotence while reserving the right to move in mysterious ways and to remain invisible to mortal eyes. There aren't all that many deus ex machina scenes where the Deity actually rolls up in person to explain the plot to the bewildered characters, though Stephen Donaldson permits an extended interview at the end of The Power That Preserves. What tends to happen instead is the kind of coy allusiveness coupled with total transparency of motive you meet, for example, in The Black Star, where our heroes most improbably find a light aircraft in which to escape the overrun city:

It was by the most incredible stroke of fortune that Diodric and the Lady Niane should have stumbled upon so rare and priceless a memento of the eons. Or perhaps it was not Blind Fortune, but the inscrutable Will of the Gods.

One thinks irresistibly of Gandalf's famous words to Frodo when explaining the logic of The Lord of the Plot Devices: "I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker." Frodo, unfortunately, fails to respond with the obvious question, to which the answer is "by the author".

But actually, it's not always necessary for the author to put in an appearance himself, if only he can smuggle the Plot itself into the story disguised as one of the characters. Naturally, it tends not to look like most of the other characters, chiefly on account of its omnipresence and lack of physical body. It'll call itself something like the Visualization of the Cosmic All, or Seldon's Plan, or The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or the Law, or the Light, or the Will of the Gods; or, in perhaps its most famous avatar, the Force. Credit for this justly celebrated interpretation of Star Wars belongs to Phil Palmer; I'd only like to point out the way it makes sudden and perfect sense of everything that happens in the film. "The time has come, young man, for you to learn about the Plot." "Darth Vader is a servant of the dark side of the Plot." When Ben Kenobi gets written out, he becomes one with the Plot and can speak inside the hero's head. When a whole planet of good guys gets blown up, Ben senses "a great disturbance in the Plot."

The Daily Show on the bailout. I say "this is the best thing The Daily Show has ever done" a little too regularly for comfort, but the montage work they do here is really top-notch—not just the John McCain section, which is classic, but also the Senate and the senatorial self-congratulation sections, which are also classic.

Bruce is coming to Greensboro tonight, and I've got tickets, so all is right with the world. It's my first Springsteen concert since Summer 2000, which is much too long to take the sacrament.

* The New York Times goes inside the world's last pinball factory.

* The British science fiction series I've always wanted to see, Blake's 7, is going to be remade a la Battlestar Galactica.

* Who is Tom Bombadil?

* Elizabeth Edwards takes on the media for its shoddy coverage of the presidential primaries thus far.

* Few people are writing more cogently about George Romero's zombie movies than this post at The Pinocchio Theory.

* And I'm trying hard to think of a movie I've seen this year that was more fun than Air Guitar Nation.

"I was never into heroic fantasy. At all. I don't like little guys and dragons, hairy feet, hobbits—I've never been into that at all. I don't like sword and sorcery, I hate all that stuff." Those are the words of Guillermo del Toro, who has now been officially tapped to direct of the upcoming Peter-Jackson-produced Hobbit duology. Sounds promising! I'm very nervous.

I don't like showing up this late on the blog, but due to factors including

* class;
* getting what must be my fourth cold in two months;
* what can only be described as the Unfortunate Incident of the Apple Juice in the Nighttime, which has rendered my space bar completely inoperable;

I'm only getting around to blogging now.

Sorry.

Here's some stuff to look at it:

* Lord of the Rings as Property Law.

* Alternate universe baseball.

* Alan Kirby on the death of postmodernism and the birth of pseudomodernism.

Postmodernism conceived of contemporary culture as a spectacle before which the individual sat powerless, and within which questions of the real were problematised. It therefore emphasised the television or the cinema screen. Its successor, which I will call pseudo-modernism, makes the individual’s action the necessary condition of the cultural product. Pseudo-modernism includes all television or radio programmes or parts of programmes, all ‘texts’, whose content and dynamics are invented or directed by the participating viewer or listener (although these latter terms, with their passivity and emphasis on reception, are obsolete: whatever a telephoning Big Brother voter or a telephoning 6-0-6 football fan are doing, they are not simply viewing or listening).

* The Valve, re: Deadwood, The Wire, and The Sopranos: What interests me is that, whatever their differences, all three of these shows elicit our sympathy and concern for brutal and violent people, mostly male, operating outside the law. What’s that about?

* Infinite Thought announces a new competition: "Down with Existing Society!" These are the terms:

Each and every one should express in a succinct manner his or her rationally hostile feeling about the current state of affairs.

I'm not sure I have the wherewithal to put together an entry right now, but if I did I'm certain it would probably have a lot to do with our sympathy for brutal and violent people, mostly male, operating outside the law.

Or else, you know, this:

The Hobbit has a director: Guillermo del Toro, director of Pan's Labyrinth. If they couldn't get Jackson, he may be the next best thing—though longtime readers already know how I feel about the decision to split the movie into What Tolkien Wrote and Other Stuff.

The news is all over the Internet: Peter Jackson and New Line have reached a deal for two more Lord of the Rings films—though right now Jackson is slated only to produce, not direct, and they're going forward with the absolutely terrible idea of a filler movie based on original, non-Tolkien material.

I am looking skeptically askance.

moreintelligentlife.com has a mildly slavish interview with fantasist-of-the-moment (and notorious atheist!) Philip Pullman that's worth reading if you're interested in either children's literature or religious controversy. Here's a bit where he rags on Lewis and Tolkien:

Several times Pullman reminds me that a work of fiction is not an argument. Perhaps it's safest to say that in "His Dark Materials" he has constructed his own imaginative world so as not to submit to anyone else's. He likes to quote William Blake's line: "I must create a system, or be enslav'd by another man's." His story is a rival to the narratives put forward by two earlier Oxford writers, J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" and C.S. Lewis's "The Chronicles of Narnia". Pullman loathes the way the children in Narnia are killed in a car-crash. "I dislike his Narnia books because of the solution he offers to the great questions of human life: is there a God, what is the purpose, all that stuff, which he really does engage with pretty deeply, unlike Tolkien who doesn't touch it at all. ‘The Lord of the Rings' is essentially trivial. Narnia is essentially serious, though I don't like the answer Lewis comes up with. If I was doing it at all, I was arguing with Narnia. Tolkien is not worth arguing with."

1) It's a train wreck, not a car crash, though this was probably the interviewer's error and not Pullman's. (The Problem of Susan is worth footnoting here as well.)

2) This is a strange thing that seems to happen to a lot of atheists and agnostics, and I say that certainly having recognized the impulse in myself at times as well. Rather than exiling religious and metaphysical questions to the margins, as you might expect, the recognition of the non-existence of God has the exact opposite effect: the question of God becomes the only one worth asking and the only thing worth talking about. Hence the ludicrous claim that Tolkien is "essentially trivial" because Lord of the Rings is neither a theistic nor atheistic polemic.

I don't quite know what to make of this, but it's very interesting. Clearly, Pullmanistic atheism has mastered the negation, but just as clearly it needs to find some way to move forward into the negation of the negation. I think that's what actually existing atheism would have to be, rather than the cancerous anti-theism that so thoroughly dominates the category today.

Gary Kamiya has a nice comparative look at the film adaptations of Beowulf and Lord of the Rings, including some interesting words from the man himself:

In a famous allegory, Tolkien compared the author of "Beowulf" to a man who, inheriting a field full of ancient stones, used them to build a tower. His friends, recognizing that the stones had belonged to a more ancient building, tore down the tower "in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions." What they did not realize, Tolkien ends, was that "from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea."

Tolkien's point is that the fantastic elements in "Beowulf" are ancient archetypes that have deep roots in human beliefs, fears and wishes -- myths, in other words. And in "Beowulf," he argues, these myths are an essential part of a tragic tale whose theme is "man at war with the hostile world, and his inevitable overthrow in Time." The greatness of Beowulf derives from the fact that it is a poem created in "a pregnant moment of poise": It is balanced between a Christian worldview, in which death and defeat are ultimately themselves defeated by Christ, and a Germanic, pagan one, in which fate rules all and man's courage alone confers nobility. It is, Tolkien writes, not a primitive poem, but a late one. The pagan world is already past, but the poet still celebrates its vanished power. The fact that a poem written more than a thousand years ago was itself looking back at a lost world gives the poem an uncanny double resonance to the modern reader: "If the funeral of Beowulf moved once like the echo of an ancient dirge, far-off and hopeless, it is to us as a memory brought over the hills, an echo of an echo."

Meanwhile, elsewhere at Salon, Andrew Leonard is concerned about inconsistency and arbitrariness in wizarding law.

Even when it's good news it's bad news: Entertainment Weekly reports that New Line Cinema and Peter Jackson may have begun to reconcile (fantastic news) and that Jackson hopes to make two movies (no worries there), one The Hobbit in its entirety (wait, what?) and the other "filling in the story arc between the end of The Hobbit and the beginning of Rings" (WTFJackson?).

This is pretty close to sacrilege. If Jackson wants to retroactively ruin his first three movies, why not film a sequel with the original cast—Return of the Return of the King—and be done with it?

Has no one learned what George Lucas has to teach us? Via Slashdot.