Okay, We Are Going To Jump Right In
None of the usual dissimulation, just getting straight to the point of this Intro.
Welllllll perhaps not quite. For this Intro we need a little background. Okay, okay, a lot of background. Art!
Perfect as a theme! For we need to re-visit both "The Hobbit" and "Lord Of The Rings", and that means going waaay back in time, which is what Putinpot did with poor old Tucker Carlson (a gift of a name for NSFW blogs), blathering on about the establishment of Rus in 892 AD. Ha! You could see Tucker's brain glazing over.
ANYWAY in TH, Bilbo Baggins acquires, as loot, a sword that had long been the property of a troll trio. It was a lesser member of the arsenal he and his dwarven companions found along with Glamdring and Orcrist, and being a Hobbit with no knowledge of Sindarin (the Elvish language), he simply named it "Sting". Art!
Enter "In Deep Geek", who acknowledges, a little shame-facedly, that this is indeed a very niche subject.
GOOD! Conrad wholly approves. It is, as a matter of fact, a subject Your Humble Scribe has wondered about in the past. Kudos to IDG for actually going into the source novels and looking up the relevant texts. Art!
This is Bilbo Baggins' first experience of how an Elvish blade will glow blue if orcs are near, because Magic. Sting causes Gollum to keep a respectful distance, and proves to be an excellent spider-impaler both in TH and LOTR.
From the above caption you may jib, as Conrad does, at the lack of precision. There is no scalar measurement for orc-detection, which is probably down to Ol' Tolky being a languages scholar not a physicist. O well. Art!
Here IDG does his analysis; as you can read, Sting is a-glinting when the orcs are within earshot, which gives a more accurate rendering of it's detection range. Say a couple of hundred yards.
Later on, Sam uses Sting in close-quarter combat against orcs at Cirith Ungol, where Sting glows so brightly it hurts their eyes. No mere glinting here, this is full-bore 1,000,000 lumens stuff. Well, it would have been if Ol' Tolky had been a physicist.
Then we come to Aragorn, who seems to have a pretty fair understanding of how Elvish blades work and at what range their 'radar' operates. When the Fellowship is camped before the Falls of Rauros, he asks Frodo to draw Sting from it's scabbard, and to Frodo's muted dismay, the edges gleam. Art!
CAUTION! Orcs are not near but too close anyway
From this indication Aragorn works out that the Fellowship is safe for the moment as the orcs are indeed present, yet not close enough to be an immediate danger. It's presumed this glinting represents the orcs that later mount the ambush. Art!
This is where IDG goes above and beyond, because he pinpoints the Fellowship's location as being at Parth Galen on the western side of the Anduin. Amon Lhaw is on the east side, and IDG gets out the "Atlas Of Middle Earth" - a work worthy of an Intro in itself - and does a bit of calculation, with diagrams. Art!
This map has an approximate scale, which means the distance from Parth Galen to Amon Lhaw is between two to four thousand feet. This is not the limit of Sting's detection range, so it would seem that the answer to this radius is about one mile, or 5,280 feet.
Well done IDG! Except, of course - obviously! - the Commenters also brought up the issue of whether the number of orcs present had any influence, at which point Conrad threw his hands up and resorted to gin.
All The Bros
No! No that kind of gutter lingua, thank you very much. Conrad doesn't need to try and tempt people in by invoking contemporary argot, thanks very much. Art!
Behold the Fredvang bridges, constructed by the Norks to link up the fishing village of Fredvang with the rest of Norway's red-hot social scene. It sits, benighted, on an island, you see, and this pair of cantilever bridges allow the inhabitants to join polite society without needing a helicopter, or ship. Art!
There they are in map view. As for why the title to this item, well, the Nork for "Bridge" is "Bro" and there are two of them, plural, thus. Conrad just thought they looked impressive and graceful, so let's have a bit more of them. Art!
You are far more likely to come across architectural enthusiasts going on about Finnish structures than Nork, so this balances the ledger a little. Bro.
We All Know What A Terrible Person I Am
As if any confirmation was needed. Sorry, I just couldn't resist this. Art!
Call Budanov at: Kyiv 052 55573490 Minimal response time! Results guaranteed!
"City In The Sky"
Back to Australia and the now-battered township of New Eucla.
CHAPTER TWENTY:If It Takes All Night
The aftermath of battle is frequently less glorious than the events preceding it. In New Eucla, this truism was overturned by nothing more or less than the weather.
Taken from an isometric viewpoint, the township looked battered. Parts had fallen inwards or outwards, had
been shattered, burnt down or blown up, been crushed underfoot or blasted into
the heavens. Only a fraction of the
buildings remained intact or undamaged, and the whole township weltered under
an overlay of water deposited from the clouds or left behind by the
mini-tsunami. Since the liquid left
behind was seawater, salt pattens and traceries began to evolve on every level
surface in fans and rills of dusty white.
Winds from the sea brought clear patches to the skies above. Sunlight, raw, bright, unapologetic
Australian sunlight, shone on the gloomy vista of New Eucla, and the
Mike, hard-boiled, practical and matter-of-fact as he was, without an ounce (or twenty five grams) of reflective sentiment within him, stared at the fantastic array of rainbows that shimmered from New Eucla to the horizon. A single rainbow, okay, he’d seen that before. A couple in the sky together, yes, he’d seen that once or twice. Fifty thousand rainbows in the sky all at once – this was – and he felt at a loss to find a curse that fit adequately -
Ooooh, get the author, being a right poseur.
You What?
Well, allow me to add in another Mystery Macguffin from "The Daily Beast"'s advertising sidebars, which bears closer analysis. Art!
How is it powered? Is that holder plus wick for containing methylated spirits? What does it DO? And who on earth would be happy paying £61.36 for, O I dunno, a Swordfishtrombone player?
I'm going to cheat and click on the link, for I must know -
Still unenlightened. I'm going to have to go away and research Stirling engines, aren't I? We'll get back to you on this.
More Mocking Mackenna
Allow me to let fly with both barrels, because I come to criticise both the technical quality and the plotting of "Mackenna's Gold", because being a pedantic hair-splitter is both a joy and a burden.
Let me set the scene. Colorado and his scummy crew - bar Hesh-Ke, who is quite yummy - and their reluctant partners in crime from Hadleyburg, are in a box canyon with only one route out. By coincidence, the US Cavalry is camped in force not far from the exit. Art!
Their laughable 'plan' is to send a diversionary party into the cavalry camp - that being a squaw drunk off her bottom tied to a horse - whilst another party pretend to be an Apache raiding party, whooping and hollering and loosing off guns. During this endeavour the others will make a break for it. Art!
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| Drunk squaw and escorts |
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| Apache 'raiding party' |
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| Colorado et al sneaking off |
My point is that it was pretty dark, the cavalry weren't expecting trouble, and the whole lot could have snuck off quietly without all that hoo-ha. But no! where would the fun be in that. A burden, I tell you. Art!
What nice blue skies! Conrad is pretty certain this scene was filmed in daylight and then run through an optical printer to simulate darkness. Art!
If it's night-time, why are there shadows?
A burden, I tell you, a burden.
Finally -
Thank heavens the weekend has arrived! Now for GIN
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