The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Niall:

The Wonderful Tar Baby was my first thought, too.

Increasingly desperate googling produced this (From "Rhoda Fleming" by George Meredith):

I call him a working soldier in opposition to the parading soldier, the, coxcomb in uniform, the hero by accident, and the martial boys of wealth and station, who are of the army of England. He studied war when the trumpet slumbered, and had no place but in the field when it sounded. To him the honour of England was as a babe in his arms: he hugged it like a mother. He knew the military history of every regiment in the service. Disasters even of old date brought groans from him.

I have my doubts about the Nanofrog picture.

That could be a Megafinger, and if so, kudos to the cattle-farmer's kid who took a slice at the dorsal branch of the Giant's ulnar nerve.

'but fantasy is real to those people'

This reminds me of a thing, an impression I got from _The Lord of the Rings_ on rereading it after reading _The Silmarillion_ when it came out (bearing in mind that I had read Priest's _Inverted World_ by then)

[my apologies to Jo, who has seen this already]

Early in _The Two Towers_, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli track the Orcs who have taken Merry and Pippin, having slain Boromir.

Legolas, being an elf, can see much further and more clearly than the other two, and this blended with a thing I had just read in the Silmarillion.

After the end of the Second age, when the Valar gave up their stewardship of Arda for a time, and Iluvatar remade it as a globe, the Elves were still allowed to sail the straight path to the West, and it came to me:

Legolas can see further than the other two because *his world is still flat*, he can see over the horizon that the others see as a limit.

Re-reading those passages in _The Two Towers_ since, it's clear that my revelation is wrong. Legolas just has supernaturally good vision: everything he sees clearly is seen by the others as a blur.

Damn.

I like the spontaneous gesture from the black guy who pauses to look at the camera, and loses his hat as a result.

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