Earlier today we reported that the following images were posters..baffled by the oddity of the images we doubted the authenticity…only to find out from up on high that these arent posters, they’re popcorn bags!
Category: Old Special Reports
LOS ANGELES RINGERS: ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT TORN’S PICNIC FOR BILBO’S BIRTHDAY
Dear Boffins, Tooks and Brandybucks, Grubbs, Chubbs, Hornblowers, Bolgers, Bracegirdles and ProudFEET!!!, Sunday September 22nd is our dear friends Bilbo and Frodo Baggins’ birthday. So please join us at 2pm under our very own party tree in Bag End, The Shire (aka Old Zoo Picnic Area, Griffith Park, Los Angeles) to celebrate!
DIRECTIONS
From the North:
Take I-5 S to Los Feliz Blvd. Take Los Feliz Blvd. West. Stay in the far right lane, and make your first right onto Crystal Springs Dr. Follow Crystal Springs Dr. for about 1.5 miles to Griffith Park Dr. Make a left on Griffith Park Dr. It will curve to the right twice. The parking lot (Old Zoo Picnic Area) is right at the second curve.
From the South:
Take I-5 N to Griffith Park (lucky you, you get an actual exit for the park). Make a right at the first (and only) stop sign onto Crystal Springs Dr. Follow Crystal Springs Dr. for about 1.25 miles to Griffith Park Dr. Make a left on Griffith Park Dr. It will curve to the right twice. The parking lot (Old Zoo Picnic Area) is right at the second curve.
From Hollywood:
Take Western Ave. North. It will become Los Feliz Blvd. Make a left at the intersection with Riverside Dr. Riverside Dr. will become Crystal Springs Dr as you enter Griffith Park. Follow Crystal Springs Dr. for about 1.5 miles to Griffith Park Dr. Make a left on Griffith Park Dr. It will curve to the right twice. The parking lot (Old Zoo Picnic Area) is right at the second curve.
At the back of the parking lot is a gated-off road. You can walk past the gate. Follow the road to a big tree in the center of it and make a left to enter Bag End. For those of you carrying large items, or who cannot make the walk because of physical problems, there will be a Bag End Coach going back and forth to take you up to the picnic area. If it’s not there when you get to the gate, simply wait, and it will be along shortly.
If you get lost or have trouble finding the picnic’site, please call Sarumann at 213-248-4994 who will help you find your way through the darkness when all other lights go out…
FOOD AND DRINKS
Please contact Arwen at labirthday@theonering.net for food/drinks contributions. Most of you have already done that, but if you haven’t please don’t hesitate to do so now, as hobbits are notoriously and constantly hungry and there’s still room for more food at our picnic.
FUN AND GAMES
Besides eating, drinking and enjoying each other’s company, we will also have two contests:
- a Trivia contest, where you can all test your knowledge of the books and win great prices
- a Best Impersonation contest, where Gandalf, Legolas, Aragorn, Frodo or any other character wannabes will be given the opportunity to step into their hero’s shoes and perform any line of their choice from the movie. Prices will be awarded to the most impressive/accurate/funny delivery. So, pick your favorite line, rehearse and get ready to play!
COSTUMES
Costumes are not mandatory, but we encourage every Middle Earth inhabitant to come in their best regalia to honor Bilbo and Frodo.
MISCELLANEOUS
There is plenty of shade in our little corner of The Shire, but if the weather remains as nice and sunny as it has been lately, we recommend wearing hats and sunscreen.
Also, there are some picnic tables and benches available, but they may not be enough to seat such a great company of many excellent and admirable guests. So we encourage you to bring picnic blankets.
Any other questions you may have about the picnic, please contact Arwen at labirthday@theonering.net
HOBBITS PLAN TO CRASH PARTY EVICTED GROUP TO MAKE NOISE AT PARK’S BASH
By David L. Beck
Mercury News
A celebration just wouldn’t be a celebration without a protest. Not in Santa Cruz, at any rate.
This weekend, Big Basin Redwoods State Park, the foundation stone of California’s state park system, completes a 100-day celebration of its 100th year. There will be two days of music, speeches and theater. Bluegrass bands will play. Dancers will dance. Tree-sitter Julia Butterfly Hill will speak.
And a group of human-sized Hobbits will protest their current lack of welcome in the park, the result of a long-running squabble that boils down to fun vs. rules. These Hobbits arose in 1978 not from Middle Earth but from San Jose State University.
What began as a birthday party at Big Basin — it was the birthday boy who named the party after J.R.R. Tolkien’s forest-dwellers — has evolved into an annual gathering. “Just regular folks,” said Hobbit Party organizer Gregor Nelson. “We’re not rabid Tolkienistas,” although he admits they were back in ’78. Nelson added, “It really just became a way for people who are far-flung and having busy lives and families and careers and all that stuff” to know that there’s a time and a place where they can still get together. The parties continued without interruption for more than 20 years, attracting in excess of 80 people, children included, each fall. But in 2001, their run at Big Basin ended.
Liz Burko, supervising ranger, described a series of permit violations involving primarily noise, trash and excessive numbers of cars and people that culminated in her order that they take their Hobbit Party elsewhere. The Hobbits will still have their party — later this month in Mendocino — but some of them also will be at Big Basin today.
“We’ll have signs,” said Janet Swanson of Sunnyvale. “We’ll play our whoopees,” which she describes as “little plastic things” like party favors. Nelson thinks “protest” is too harsh a term. “We might go and make a little noise,” he said.
“They’re welcome to purchase tickets,” Burko said.
“Anybody is. This is a celebration for us, and we want to celebrate it with the public.”
IT looks like Miranda Otto’s role in the next instalment of The Lord Of The Rings film trilogy may be a controversial one.
The Two Towers, which is to be released on Boxing Day, reportedly involves a love triangle between three central characters which does not appear in the book.
Tolkien purists already enraged by the passion between Aragorn and Arwen, played by Viggo Mortensen and Liv Tyler respectively, are likely to be further upset with the introduction of Otto’s Lady Eowyn.
The character will spice up the clandestine relationship by diverting Aragorn’s attention from Tyler’s Elvish princess.
“There’s going to be a romantic triangle in the next one. We sexed it up a bit,” a source told imdb.com
The folks from ALA Booklist Magazine send along a review of Bradley J. Birzer’s latest book ‘J. R. R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth‘ (due out in stores mid-October). Take a look and pre-order your own copy at Amazon.com today!
Birzer, Bradley J. J. R. R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-Earth. Oct. 2002. 156p. index. ISI, $24.95 (1-882926-84-6). 823.
Tolkien said that The Lord of the Rings is a Catholic book, but commentators have shied away from writing about its Catholicism. After all, he also said it wasn’t an allegory, so you don’t need to know the Catholicism to understand it––right? Perhaps, but Tolkien hoped the book would prove a stealth evangelizer, arguing a Catholic worldview in its setting, characterizations, and plot. Birzer reveals The Lord’s Catholicism in five riveting chapters. Middle-earth is a subcreation, he says, resembling real creation so that a salvific myth of heroic virtue triumphing over dire evil may be played out in it. The sapient beings (hobbits, elves, etc.) in it form a hierarchy surmounted by God, and evil in it is, as in classical Christianity, the result of willful separation from God. When evil is finally vanquished, Middle-earth will be paradisiacal, but as God’s handiwork, it is already profoundly good, and its pastoralism rebukes the secularism, centralization, industrialism, and mechanization (only the evil build machines in Middle-earth) that Tolkien despised. Essential reading for all Tolkien enthusiasts. ––Ray Olson
A look back at a 50-year-old edition of the New Zealand magazine The Listener gives an indication of how the book The Fellowship of the Ring was received in New Zealand following its publication – and also uncovers a great coincidence involving Peter Jackson.
(Here is an excerpt from an article in a recent edition of The Listener, which reviewed articles that appeared in its January 14, 1955 edition.)
The lead book review was of ‘English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama’, by CS Lewis. That’s one forbidding title, and you can put money behind the argument that it isn’t the Lewis work that most readers would pick up nearly 50 years on. Within the review, Oxford and Cambridge are discussed as places so familiar that they could be just down the road. Buried deep within the in-brief reviews was a book titled ‘The Lord of the Ring: The Fellowship of the Ring’, by Lewis’s friend JRR Tolkien. There was no inkling that this was a book that would come to have some significance to New Zealanders decades on, although the review was fairer and more open-minded than most notices the book received first time around: “JRR Tolkien, the distinguished Oxford philologist, launches the first novel of a massive trilogy without blare of trumpets,” wrote reviewer David Hall. “This farrago of the imagination running amok, this saga-crooning over the rivalries of friendship[…] of hobbits (halflings), elves, dwarfs and orcs, this homeric clashing of ignorant armies by night, is presented with unflagging and enviable zeal. Indeed we wholly accept his new world, with its arbitrary virtue and badness, its supernatural and fantastic events, though with some surprise at our indulgence.” That’s the review in its entirety. That same week, the Listener’s editorial discussed juvenile delinquency in the wake of the Parker-Hulme murder case, which also had resonances to do with repressive pseudo-Englishness and cultural isolation. Coincidentally, it became a movie (Heavenly Creatures), directed by Peter Jackson, the maker of……
Thanks to Ataahua for that.