I am rereading The Hobbit by Tolkien. Of course it is because the film by Peter Jackson is coming soon. Stephen Fry has been all over Twitter with his experiences in New Zealand, without giving anything else than a positive feeling. Yes, and the occasional outburst. Very energic he is. I really enjoy watching Stephen Fry on the screen. I have read two novels by him as well - The Liar and The Stars' Tennis Balls. I think I would like to read Moab is my washpot as well. Reasons to avoid reading books with strange titles: none.
Feeling hungry can be good. Mostly bad and possibly your death, but it sharpens the senses supposedly. Which reminds me of the Vipassana meditation course I took last fall. It remains an open question whether a general food situations most gently described as critical resource management sharpened me in any way.
Last night I dreamt a dream full of pillows, carpets, dunes, chairs, cupboards and small doors. It was a very cosy dream which left me unharmed yet intrigued. As dreams go, it is now sudden fragments in a seemingly chronological order. There might have been some hints of travel through time, but as there still is no great idea in me that compels me to build one, they must have been pretty discreet. Harry Potter might have been involved, even if I cannot imagine how his career is now.
I had rented Harry Potters old cupboard for the night. It was the only place I could lie down and sleep in for the night. I must have gone early to bed, because when I crawled out from under my dune, opened the little door and walked bare foot on a thick carpet while draping a woollen blanket everybody but a manic couple in a big bed in the middle of the living room. They t jumped up and down while cheering, but soon enough collapsed with a critical piece of information I needed to get on my way.
There was no other solution than to crawl into a double mattress and watch some television while there was a beautiful woman sleeping next to me, buried under a thick light brown blanket under a earthy, coarsely woven light cover. Her silent breath and safe posture made me feel relaxed and well.
Anyways, the law of diminishing returns is applicable to everything from medical research on the prevention of gender specific cancer to statistics showing how little massive screening projects has helped in reducing the prevalence and mortality rate of these diseases. That's the slightly less emotional side of humanity. Important nonetheless.
In the end, The Hobbit is a moral story. There and back again. They have a mountain of dragon gold and magic armour, untold riches seemingly being the ultimate goal, but then it is not. The fight is much more turned inwards, with inner demons manifested in ones surroundings. A dragon is a pretty scary lizard. 'oh, the humanity'! This is certainly not Ayn Rand.
Similar points between Atlas shrugged and The Hobbit: Great storytelling. Both put up money as a wonderful reward for daring the impossible. Both describes a world where the great and just are far between.
Dissimilar points: everything else basically. Tolkiens book exposes the danger of power vacuums after the glorious façade of too powerful entities dissappear from the land. Rand promotes the active demolition of the national state and a morality of every man for himself (with the occasional woman 'managing' to join the Fortune 500). Hank Rearden is not the goblin king - he seems like a man that have endured much emotional hardship. He might have offered a bed for the night, in his interest of course, as a part of the Dragons lair would then be morally obliged to him. I digress.
The law of diminishing return strikes. This has become so long that it probably made you use more energy reading it than you gained in insight.
