Me Vs Elves

The fires are burning once again. The signal has been given to the men of Rohan. The blog is coming to aid them at helm’s deep.

Hello there, I don’t expect that any of you think I would have helped at all in a battle against thousands of orcs and uruk hai, especially when compared to legions of immortal archers with pointy ears and an unhealthy obsession with sailing that goes so far as to convince them to leave Middle Earth altogether, presumably in favor of a life of piracy on the high seas.

It would explain why Orlando Bloom was in Pirates Of The Carribean in any case.

I also doubt that I’d be more useful than a legion of Harry Potter-esque house elves. They’re quite handy with knives and I’m sure most of the infantry wouldn’t see them coming, although they’d have to beware of being crushed, especially if they want to survive to fight the crush-heavy mumakil.

However, I would argue that when it came to fighting against legions of inherently evil soldiers, I would be of better use than the elves from the Santa myth. Certainly they’ve shown ingenuity in the past, but I just can’t see them having it in their little hearts to hurt anyone, no matter how naughty a boy they’ve been in the past year (and in the case of some of these soldiers I think a sack of coal is in order at the very least).

Good News/Bad News: Both Sexes to Live Long and Prosper… also One Direction suck

Welcome to this week’s… sorry, I mean last week’s good news/bad news, where I find news stories that both make me grin like a blissful idiot and make me want to shove my face into a wood chipper until my scowl emerges from the other end, bloody, covered in wood chippings and flung into a million little, fleshy pieces.

First, we’ve got some good news, news which may mean that equality is coming in a completely different way than we usually think of it when we talk like that. Unfortunately this doesn’t mean that women are going to be paid the same as men, it doesn’t mean that gays can now marry anywhere and everywhere and it doesn’t mean that there aren’t still policemen out to capture young, black people.

No, as much as all of those things would be nice we’ve got a different flavour of good news and that is that by 2030, thanks to advantages in medicine and healthcare, men may statistically come to live as long as women.

Yeah, that’s right ladies, now we are one step closer to gaining immortality!

Take a long look people of the republic of internet, because this could be awesome.

One of the proposed reasons for where the graph of life expectancy is heading is a drop in the number of male smokers, something which for some of us may be apparent from the people we know, young and old, and for some a source of confusion, as smoking is still the official activity of the young and tenacious.

The bad news here is incredibly different, and while I apologise wholeheartedly for the disparity, the utter unrelatedness, the nonconnecteditude of these two items…

I really hate One Direction, and apparently I should be a little cynical about some of their fans too.

Take a look here and see what I mean.

So as much as I despise gossip stories, I’m reporting this for the sheer extremity of 1D fans’ reactions to some lady on twitter, who just happened to be lip buddies with the ugliest member of the band.

I suppose if nothing else comes of this, at least after the things she’s been called she might no longer know what makes her beautiful anymore, and as we all know, that is the key to attractiveness in the eyes of the musical monstrosity that is One Direction.

Anyway, for some reason, even though the guy’s still under concerns about possibly having a sexually transmitted disease, fans called the woman a ‘fucking bitch’ and a ‘prostitute’.

Perhaps they should calm down and realise that if they threw a brick at their boyfriends’ faces; they’d probably look like Harry from One Direction as well.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollow Blog Post

So with the last Harry Potter movie finally being released it occurred to me that the crying people at the premier and the thousands of people that were getting very emotional about it finally coming to a close, well…

1. They obviously forgot about Pottermore

2. I didn’t really connect with that.

I don’t know whether it has something to do with how little I felt The Order of The Phoenix and The Half-Blood Prince did justice to the books that shared their names and a large amount of their plot, that’s really neither here nor there, and whereas they did stick the Snape flashback in Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Part Two, (or HPATDHPT for short) they didn’t really go deep enough into the Dumbledore backstory to really get all of the flashback points that I was looking for.

For anyone who didn’t read the seventh book by the way, Dumbledore wasn’t as Mary Poppins as you may have thought, which means although he was about as camp, he wasn’t practically perfect in every way.

And by no means did I think that these last two filmed instalments did a bad job at conveying the plot either, in fact with the inclusion of a second movie there was just enough room for all the material that truly mattered to whomever didn’t want to get involved enough to read the books.

No, I think I’m just confused a little because for me the series had ended when I finished reading the seventh book, however many years ago that was.

After that, the new Harry Potter stories were not coming out, that was when it felt like the end for me, and even then I don’t remember getting anywhere close to as emotional as I got when I finished Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (The Amber Spyglass officially broke twelve year old me).

So it’s not that I’m putting down people that are in mourning over the series getting a conclusion on film, I’m just wondering where they were when the story ended so long ago, and why, with the literary versions having so much more death, was it this that they were waiting for.

Maybe I’m just being naive, and stop me if I am (which admittedly is quite difficult to do within the confines of a monologue) but watching HPATDHPT (pronounced hapatduhput) felt more like a reread than the end of an era.

Especially in the Dumbledore/Harry/Hot Wings scene, which was almost exactly as I had imagined it in my head.

This might have had something to do with J K Rowling’s deeper involvement on the interpretations of the first and seventh interpretations.