I'm back in Belleville. The trip home wasn't too bad, especially considering the nice stop-over at John's place in
Toronto. The family had gone out to dinner before I got back, though, so I felt a tiny bit left out. Oh well.
BBC Kids has cut back the number of hours they play Doctor Who, and they only play it late at night now. Does crap like
Degrassi High reruns and Top of the Pops really score better ratings? Stupid question. I'm assuming Degrassi's on for
CanCon requirements. You'd think third tier digital channels whose mandate is to show stuff from other places (thus
broadening the horizons of Canadians) would manage to get some sort of exception. Guess not. This is why we're never
going to see an anime channel up here. Stupid CRTC.
I still need to do some Christmas shopping. I suppose I should be out doing that nowish, but I dread going to the mall.
I think I'll stop downtown first, but I doubt I'd find anything there that would be suitable for the people I'm shopping
for. (For me, yes).
My old fantasy prof has issues with the new
Lord of the Rings movie.
I haven't seen it yet, so I can't really comment. I haven't read the book, either. I got maybe 20 pages in, but that's
about it.
I took Randall's fantasy literature course at least in part because I figured I needed a reason to slog through 1500
pages of Tolkien's weighty prose—something I honestly wanted to do, but never had enough motivation to carry out.
Randall gave me two weeks to do it. I managed to get through Fellowship in the allotted time. That, for me, is pretty
good, actually. I had to write an essay on the nature of Good and Evil in the book. He seemed to be of the opinion that
Good and Evil in LotR were polar absolutes, and there wasn't any blurring of the lines. I deftly managed to pull
examples from parts of the books I didn't read to prove that that wasn't the case. To me, it just seems obvious. What
about Gandalf the Grey? What about Smeagol? I think that paper did pretty well. I got an A in the course (much better
than the C I got in the sci-fi course, even though I thought I got more out of that).
I think I came out of that course with the conclusion that fantasy wasn't really my thing. I haven't been tempted to
pick up Tolkien since.