Friday, December 5, 2008

Fort Awesome


Even the most genuinely remarkable things can become commonplace, and only when you get a moment to reflect on them do you realize how incredible they really are.

Example: Every single time I'm in an airplane, sitting as it taxi's onto the runway, I think to myself: "In a few seconds, this machine is going to suddenly fire itself along the ground at 180mph or so, and then it's going to lift off of the ground and fly!"

And I know that I'm not the only one having this sort of experience:



So it's a little weird to me that I've never seen anyone else mention what, to me, seems like a very obvious revelation:

"Mount DOOM . . . really? That's what Tolkien called the big evil guy's home? Mount DOOM! That's the name he came up with. J.R.R. Tolkien, who worked out all this elaborate backstory of wars, magical objects, and songs about this thing some elves built one time, this man who essentially wrote his OWN fanfiction, he got up to the plate to pen his masterpiece and went "Eh, I'll just call it Mount Doom. That's a pretty sweet name. Cause, you know, it's a real bad place. And this way people will be able to tell."

Am I the only one who's a little thrown that Sauron, the big evil demon-overlord-whatever-the-hell-he-is-anyway, lives in a place that sounds like it was named by a Bond villian?

Quick test: Which one of these things seems out of place:

The Shire
Dimrill Dale
Ford of Bruinen
Isengard
Mount Doom

Yeah, that's what he actually went with. And they had to say it in the opening lines of the movie, and no one even snickered.

*The Onion provides the most recent example.

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