Content Creation

Ok, time to catch up a little bit.

1. Fellowship of the Ring Extended Version DVD. It’s quite good. But then again, the original wasn’t bad to start with. There are a few scenes that are totally meaningless if you haven’t read the books, such as the “Oh look the elves are leaving and I don’t know why but it makes me sad. Sigh.” bit near the beginning, but all in all I think the extra stuff improves the movie.

I like the additional material on Boromir – I think the theatrical release painted him as very much a “black hat” character, but I felt like the extended version gave him a bit more depth.

I didn’t like the additional scene with Aragorn saying he doesn’t want to claim his birthright. That’s not how I remember him from the books… Revisionism! Ack!

Of course, now I’ve watched the DVD – but will need to go through it four more times to hear all the commentary tracks. And I haven’t even started in on the two discs worth of “extras.” Crikey!

Enough of that. I think I’ve established myself as a major Tolkien geek.

2. I transferred my beer to secondary fermentation today. This batch will be a little smaller than usual, thanks to the half-gallon of unsiphonable sludge at the bottom of the primary fermenter. Very strange. The beer tasted pretty good. The sludge less so. (What can I say? I was curious.)

3. At work, I’ve been going to a lot of meetings lately. One of the current meeting buzzwords is “leverage,” used as a verb. As in, “We’re going to leverage our experience in widget design in our new grinkle manufacturing.”

Can we all agree to use the word “use” instead? Repeat after me, “Leverage = Use.”

Next time we can talk about taking the “pro” out of “proactive.” Redundant, indeed.

4. I mentioned a month or so ago that Claire and Cameron were likely to show up on the television show “The West Wing.” Well, they did, a couple weeks back. Of course, ultrasounds are easy enough to come by, so you’re just going to have to take my word for it. If you ask nicely I might dub you a VHS copy of the scene they were in.