confusion
The conclusion to The Lord of the Rings, the Return of the King might be short but a lot happens and the appendices are invaluable to anyone who wants to dive deeper into Middle Earth. The final book digs deep into the psyche of each character revealing their true self. The appendices open many parts of Middle Earth developing the languages, cultures and histories beyond the scope of the stories and are as interesting to read as the trilogy itself.
The Nobel Foundation had awarded all of this years Nobel Prizes:
Physics: Raymond Davis Jr., Masatoshi Koshiba and Riccardo Giacconi
Chemistry: John B. Fenn, Koichi Tanaka and Kurt Wüthrich
Medicine: Sydney Brenner, H. Robert Horvitz and John E. Sulston
Literature: Imre Kertész
Economics: Daniel Kahneman, Vernon L. Smith
Peace: Jimmy Carter Jr.
Head over to the Nobel e-Museum to read more about each and past winners. It’s a great site just to browse and learn something.
The wording of that award very clearly stabed at Bush’s warhawking saying;
“In a situation currently marked by threats of the use of power, Carter has stood by the principles that conflicts must as far as possible be resolved through mediation and international co-operation based on international law, and respect for human rights.”
I should also point out that one of the winners of the Economics prize is a George Mason professor. This is the second person in the GMU Economics department to win a Nobel Prize. I went to Mason for three years and never met any Economics students…. Now I know why, all the professors where doing research rather than teaching!
Why do radio stations play thier ads in big 15 minute long marathons? That’s how they lose people to other stations. I know a lot of people don’t bother changing the station when the ads come on but a lot of people (especially those in cars) do change it. You’d think the advertisers would know this and tell the radio stations not to do it. I think it makes much more sense to play a song then an ad or two and then another song or two. Mix it up, so that listeners know that if an ad comes on they only have to listen to it for a minute or two. That would make me less likely to change the channel, which I do now when the first add comes on.
Just a note: most of the time when I am in C’ville I listen to the greatest radio station on Earth 91.9 wnrn! And you can even listen over the net…
The second installment of The Lord of the Rings trilogy picks up where the first left off, and follows the broken fellowship as they take separate paths to their goal of saving the world from the darkness of Mordor. This book is filled with more classic sword and sorcery fantasy, but continues the vivid creation of Middle Earth. New lands and new histories open up as the trilogy continues.
A readers pole a few years ago voted the Lord of the Rings trilogy the best books published in the past 100 years (meanwhile the editors picked James Joyce’s Ulysses, which having read I just don’t understand, but that’s another story.) This is the first installment of the Lord of the Rings, and my personal favorite of the series. The Fellowship is filled with the history of Middle Earth: it’s hero’s, it’s legends, it’s lands. It is all the stuff that is not important to the plot of the book that makes Middle Earth so memorable. Every little detail that Tolkien writes brings the land alive. You can read this one over and over again and find something new every time.