Cheap shots and dancing dog fur

Hobbitonomics
Came up while I was en route to New Jersey keeping up with the twittericity by intellectual phone and thus unable to answer the question according to my usual thoroughly documented standards—because I can do a lot of stuff with my new phone but have not yet mastered the art of cutting and pasting URLs.

Anyway I'm now pretty confident, thanks to an essay in the Superversive which touches briefly on the economics of the Shire (it is mostly an extremely detailed account of the [jump]
Looking for a representation of Smaug that would capture his Germanic wormishness, I didn't find anything, but this, by Kihea, is satisfyingly fleshy.

parallels between the early histories of the kingdom of Gondor in the Third Age and the Byzantine empire in our own corrupt world), that the Bagginses were basically members of a local squirearchy, living off the rents of their tenant farmers (alert readers will notice that the author uses "seems to have" three times in a single paragraph and is thus perhaps not quite as confident as we might wish):
The Shire seems to have been somewhat feudal itself at one stage. Not only was it divided into the four Farthings, it was further divided into the ‘folklands’ of the twelve principal Hobbit families, Took, Baggins, Oldbuck, and so forth. (The Oldbucks crossed the Brandywine into Buckland, and became known as the Brandybucks.) Much of the land seems to have belonged to the various branches or septs of those families, and farmed by tenants: Bilbo Baggins, as head of the Baggins family, seems to have got most of his income (pre-Smaug) in this way. The Thain of the Shire was originally an Oldbuck, but the office passed into the Took family; in The Lord of the Rings, Pippin Took was the son of the Thain, and later became Thain himself.
Bilbo was not as well off as the Old Took, but his ownership of the particularly luxurious smial or hobbit-hole of Bag End certainly made him one of the two or three most prominent citizens in his neighborhood, and his being a bachelor, with no family to provide for, made him all the better off—whence the envy of his cousin Otho Sackville-Baggins and Otho's unspeakable wife, the former Lobelia Bracegirdle.

This was of course before Bilbo's adventure made him almost inconceivably rich for a hobbit, with his share of the hoard he and his dwarf companions wrested from the dragon Smaug; one estimate puts it as worth at a minimum $8.6 billion in today's currency, and conceivably as much as a hundred times that. This raises thoughts of a kind of book club question: does Bilbo's fortune, darkly obtained from the east, echo the Victorian themes of imperial corruption in such novels as Vanity Fair (Jos Sedley's lakhs of rupees repatriated from India) and Jane Eyre (Mr. Rochester's slave-made Caribbean riches)? And if so what, if anything, would that mean?
Romeo Rancoco/Reuters.
Words of Wisdom
 Everybody's a critic
What do the Bible, "The Hunger Games" and "Fifty Shades of Grey" have in common? All three are works of fiction, according to the booksellers at Costco.

Pastor Caleb Kaltenbach made that shocking discovery last Friday as he was shopping for a present for his wife at a Costco in Simi Valley, Calif.

“All the Bibles were labeled as fiction,” the pastor told me. “It seemed bizarre to me.”
Photo by Caleb Kaltenbach via AP.
Kaltenbach is the lead pastor at Discovery Church, a non-denominational Christian congregation in southern California.

He thought there must be some sort of mistake so he scoured the shelf for other Bibles. Every copy was plastered with a sticker that read, “$14.99 Fiction.”....

I doubt they would label the Koran as fiction, Pastor Kaltenbach said. Heaven help us if they did. (Butthurt from Townhall)
Kind of illustrating how that imaginary Salafist at the Costco book rack (picking up a copy of Fifty Shades of Gray for the missus, no doubt) would react if he came across that Qur'an edition, Christianists leapt at the story, demanding a boycott of the evil liberal store. Because clearly this Shop of the Big Boxes with its notorious partisan leanings was mounting a covert conspiracy to make people believe that the stories told in the Bible are not literally true:
Steven Smith, of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, said the fiction label identifies the thinking of the labeler more than the content of the book.

“To label the Bible fiction is a practical front for an ideological foundation that assumes things spiritual are unreal,” he told me. “What is odd about this choice is the glut of books in the “religion and spirituality” sections in mainstream book stores. However, as large as “spirituality” sections are, there must not be any room for Christianity. Modern thinking on spirituality is too exclusive to allow for the Bible.” (Via Wonkette)
They refused to classify the Bible under "religion and spirituality" because they assume spiritual things are unreal so they labeled it fiction so...? You need to sit down for a second and breathe deeply, Dr. Smith. My own guess would be that nobody's ideology was involved at all. You need to start by asking whether the Costco classification and that of "mainstream book stores" are the same (I had no idea there was a standard for the latter). Did anybody check as to whether they had a "religion and spirituality" sticker at all, or what the exact repertory was? Could it have been classified under "self-help", for instance, or "business"?

The cream of the jest here is found in a diary by Thom Stark at Daily Kos: It turns out that Pastor Kaltenbach (a college friend of Stark's) is a real person in the fullest sense of the term, who tweeted that picture of the unexpectedly-labeled Bible not to unveil a huge atheist comspiracy but because he thought it was funny, which of course it is. (And who, though he is a theological conservative, is enough of a Christian to express admiration for Costco because of its decent treatment of workers.) But alas, the Daily Mail and Fox News haven't seen any point in reporting that part of the story.

Bad analogies department

Australian conservatives totally understand how it feels to be a lonely, imprisoned struggler for democracy in a vicious military dictatorship:
Department of fancy imagery

Famous novelist Wally Lamb displays the higher stylistics:
When she invited me to dinner at her place, I brought a bottle of the terrible wine a grad student could afford. I petted her hyperactive cocker spaniel, Mandy, who shed so profusely that dog fur danced wraithlike in the air between Christine and me as she cooked.
Houndwraith. By Heather L. Kidd, via cryptozoologist Dr. Karl Shuker. 
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