Day: December 17, 2002

Under the auspices of a lesser director, watching the film could be like watching a freight train go by. This happens, then this happens, then this happens, then this happens — as our characters are tossed from action scene to action scene. Tolkien got away with this in the books because his writing was extraordinarily boring. You could never really tell you were being overstimulated.

I admit, I’ve never been especially impressed with Tolkien as a writer. The story itself is interesting, but there are long, boring stretches where characters are introduced and reintroduced to one another. Rarely have I come across a passage I could enjoy simply as a piece of writing, simply for the way the words were put together. Tonight, though, I did:

A strong place and wonderful was Isengard, and long had it been beautiful; and there great lords had dwelt, the wardens of Gondor upon the West, and wise men that watched the stars. But Saruman had slowly shaped it to his shifting purposes, and made it better, as he thought, being deceived — for all those arts and subtle devices, for which he forsook his former wisdom, and which fondly he imagined were his own, came but from Mordor; so that what he made was naught, only a little copy, a child’s model or a slave’s flattery, of that vast fortress, armoury, prison, furnace of great power, Barad-dûr, the Dark Tower, which suffered no rival, and laughed at flattery, biding its time, secure in its pride and its immeasurable strength.

Remi Treuer writes: “Why do I get the feeling that this whole Kissinger thing was just an elaborate ruse to make Oliver North a more palatable candidate for the job?”

I think if we ever discover alien life existing on the outer edges of our galaxy — and if television has taught me anything, it’s that we will — then we should seriously consider naming it Bob. That’s right. Bob. Bob’s a good name, a strong name, and it fits pretty easily on those “Hello, my name is” tags you can buy at most any local store. There’s not a bug-eyed extraterrestrial in the cosmos who wouldn’t be proud to have it, that’s for sure.

In my life, I have known many Bobs — not least of all Bob Thomerson, my freshman college roommate, who changed my life one night when he introduced me to a mixed drink he liked to call the “Flaming Drano”. Basically, it was just drain cleaner set on fire with a twist of lemon, but at the time it seemed exotic, almost magical, and if the subsequent trip to the hospital to have the entire contents of my stomach pumped was the price of that magic…well, then so be it, I thought. So be it.

I met other Bobs in college and after that, but what I’m really interested in now is meeting Bobs from other planets. I think that when our extraterrestrial brothers and sisters — and may I just say, hellooo, ladies! — finally arrive, we should have at least one or two piles of nametags ready to go. I think the aliens will appreciate the effort and they’ll be less likely to enslave the human race aboard their intergalactic mothership. And, if worst comes to worst, we can still always bargain by giving them Canada. After millions of light-years of travel, they’d probably be easily distracted by maple syrup and some flapjacks. Flapjacks, I predict, will become the new intergalactic currency of the stars.

But getting back to my original point — the imminent Bobification of weird-ass space invaders through the use of conveniently purchased nametags. Or rather, calling aliens Bob. I realize now that I pretty much exhausted everything I had to say about this in my first paragraph, and that I’ve really just been rambling since then, for which I blame both the stupidity of my original topic and that second Flaming Drano, which I should have known better than to drink and which has shot my short-term memory straight to hell ever since.

Did somebody mention flapjacks?