Brains celebrates the new year a little late!

[elfs]

The Hobbit: The Misty Mountains covered acapella, by one guy. Peter Hollens does a very convincing multi-voiced piece all by himself.

Do you like Leonard Cohen? Of course you do! Do you like pain? Of course you do, you like Leonard Cohen! Therefore, you will love this Christian (or Christianist) re-write, with Youtube recordings, of Cohen's masterpiece, "Hallelujah." (I disagree with Jessica that it's "The Best Song Ever." It's awesome, but nothing will drive me to tears faster than Cohen's "Thousand Kisses Deep.")

Phrase of the day: agnotologic capitalism: a capitalism systematically based on the production and maintenance of ignorance. Unfortunately, I don't think the writer goes deep enough into the willful participation of the ignorant. They really would rather not know how deeply dipped in shit we all are.

Ah, Victor Davis Hanson. I've actually read a few of his histories, and found them bracing and manly. Which is why his descent into a whining wingnut cretin grates so on the nerves. Davis refuses to take the world as it is-- refuses to even try to understand the world as it is-- and instead wishes we went back to a time when naked oil wrestling was the way real men settled disputes. Only, in a purely heterosexual way.

Comments

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

Something I didn't realize, either when I read The Hobbit years ago, or watching the movie, or the trailers of Armitage and the other dwarves singing that song -- it wasn't until I'd dug up the whole poem to memorize it -- was that Tolkien put in a rude bit of contradiction. From the poem, and everything about Thorin and the other dwarves going back to Lonely Mountain just points up the fact that not only is the gold that Smaug drove them away from not "long-forgotten", but that they have been positively obsessing over how to get it back. I suppose that Tolkien felt that it flowed better that way, even if it was false-to-fact.