Just Stuff

I likes my cheese 'burgers. Burger King, McDonald's, Wendy's — excepting the occasional Big Macs, double cheeseburgers are the only thing I get anymore from fast-food places. Diner-y places, it's the patty melt (and if they don't have a patty melt, it's worthless). But there is a part of me that's a 'burger purist. To wit: if you eat your freshly home-grilled burgers with anything but plain ol' ketchup (and bun, of course), you are a hopeless, incorrigible, irredeemable philistine for whom I have the deepest pity.

I also likes my video puzzle games, which, for better or worse, are not all that common. But I found a new one yesterday, Flea Circus. It has multiple levels that quickly become terrifying on first glance. I'm up to level "Brush".

Just wondering about this one. As per Wikipedia, Tolkien's Middle-earth is "...implicitly corresponding to modern-day Europe." There's been a great deal of published consideration of the First World War's psychic influence on Tolkien recently. I expect he developed, as an English veteran of the War, strong feelings about the Germans (or "Huns," as the propaganda put it); plus he was a Roman Catholic, while many of the "Huns" were Protestant and Germany, after all, is Luther-Land. And yet, in those pre-Vatican II days, there were even worse people to be found in Central Europe; in part, surely, because of T. E. Lawrence and others' liaisons with the Arabs in anti-Ottoman operations during the War, the British army was unabashedly pro-Arab throughout the British Mandate in Palestine. [Ironic, isn't it, that Richard I Cœur de Lion of England had one of the few Crusadorial successes agains the Muslims 700 years previously?] Again from Wikipedia, the real-world etymology of the name "Mordor" can be derived suggestively from the old Germanic languanges in which Tolkien specialized (read the rest of this first, then click on that link). The evillest bit of Mordorian "Black Speech" that we are given is the verse about the Rings of Power, with this lovely couplet near the end:

Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul,
ash nazg thrakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

Since we are also told that the Ringwraiths were called "nazgûl" in the Black Speech, a little scanning lets us gloss things fairly easily: "ash" means 'one', and "nazg" means 'ring'. So I am left wondering if Tolkien didn't have a bit of latent hostility towards the Ashkenazim, those Germano-Slavic, Yiddish-speaking, Christ-killing, pre-Vatican II Jews of Central Europe. I mean, the Huns might've been Protestant, but at least they were [para-]Christian, eh? (Now look at the Wikipedia discussion of the etymology of "Mordor"; and remember: Tolkien was an expert in Old English.) I'm not saying Tolkien thought [Ashkenazi] Jews were as bad as Sauron and his Orcs. I am saying that he probably didn't like them (at least in principle) and he probably thought they were rightfully damned, and so he saw in them some suitable source material with which to build, in part, the minions of Mordor.