Am 06. Feb, 2002 schwätzte Jim so: > Geez, guys! I gotta finish reading the fourth Harry Potter before I can go AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRFFGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!! BLASPHEMER!!!! You shall rot in your own fetid effluence! To bring up such drivel when we are speaking of the *great* Tolkien goes beyond the realm of acceptable public behavior. Sit in a corner for the rest of the millenium! :-P I figure if we're gonna have a flamewar it should be about something important ;-). It is funny, though, to see the relationship pop up again and again. Now that I've finished rereading LotR I can pick up a couple of other things, then I'll go back to the HP stuff ( provided Compaq doesn't break them up ). I don't want to associate the two. HP isn't deserving of that :). After rereading Tolkien I find it to be inferior to commonized version we all remember, e.g. what's written and what's remembered by society don't match up exactly. Overall it's still an amazing work. For it's time it's miraculous. It also opened many other venues for authors that have followed Tolkien. I found the movie ( after having read the books over 20 years ago ) to be quite good. Now I'd like to see if it holds up under a refreshed image of the books. In any case I will be there opening day for Two Towers ( I rarely go to movies and avoid opening weeks like the plague ) and will make sure I have all 3 movies on DVD or whatever replaces it. One of the coolest things I've seen was in a book store. There were two kids ( closer to 5 than 10 ) and the boy cried out "Cool. They've got Tolkien." The girl readily agreed that was indeed a good thing and dropped the HP item she had in her hands to pick up her own copy of Tolkien :). The dropping HP wasn't the cool part, but I thought it interesting. ciao, der.hans PS: I think Jim's got a thick enough skin to survive my bad joke at his expense. It was fun to write, though :). -- # http://home.pages.de/~lufthans/ http://www.DevelopOnline.com/ # If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then # you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and # I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have # two ideas. -- George Bernard Shaw