Back to work! I spared everybody a Monday rant'n'rave -- Happy New Year 2004!

Weather: Sub-Zero -- snow like styrofoam -- and still falling, or blowing around.

Wildlife: The suet feeders are depleting faster with the cold. I'm putting out more seeds and some cracked corn for the Doves, and other ground-feeding birds. Our little trio of deer poke around daily, and they're welcome to some of what's left.

Charity Alert: The Child Health Site : Help a Child in Need Lead a Healthy, Active Life

Media: Yeah, I'm enjoying the shape of the NFL playoffs -- the Green Bay Packers are one of the best injury-riddled teams I've ever seen, and they've earned their good luck. The better, even slightly-better, teams all won during Wildcard Weekend. Pregame Sillies -- The Mad TV impersonator has been very funny, Jillian Barberie's outfits have been good, but her comedy's been indifferent -- she should work at scoring at least ONE one-liner per show.
Got notes for my mini-project about influential books (see below), but I'm reading Lord Of The Rings now -- my wife bought me a copy because my Tolkien collection is in storage. We saw Return of the King together over the holidays, and she made an important point -- Peter Jackson turned it into a war movie with special effects as it's focus.
The best parts of the book are NOT the battle scenes. In my opinion, they tend to weaken the spell that Tolkien's fantasy world weaves over the reader, because the "bad guys" are too strong, and too many miracles are required for the "good guys" to prevail.
In the movies, I think the battle sequences are both interminable, and laughable, in the way they over-strain their credibility. From the start, those big, fast black riders should have caught those slow, stupid little guys very easily.
In the book, the riders had vague, but real, limitations on their powers that permitted Frodo and his companions to evade and escape them. As their enemies became more and more formidable, my "willing suspension of disbelief" suffered as well, so I favored the beginning chapters over the ending chapters.
HOWEVER there's passages of fantastic beauty throughout the book that bring me back again and again as a reader.
I'm putting it on my list of influential books for the 2nd half of the 20th Century -- it's popular success envigorated a whole sub-genre within the world of SF.