SteveJamieson.com

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As time marches on, I’m becoming an ever greater “Lord of the Rings”:http://www.lordoftherings.net/ fan. For example, as I’ve already mentioned in a previous entry, I intend to learn Elvish (Sindarin to be exact) this summer. (As a side note, a post on “Elfling”:http://groups.yahoo.com/group/elfling/ this past week alerted me to a collection of Sindarin lessons put together by Gildor-Inglorion at “The Council of Elrond”:http://www.thecouncilofelrond.com/.) However, now my obsession has extended into the realm of movie replicas.

I was talking to “Kyrie”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/kyrie_asini/ on IM a little while ago, and I inquired of her about some references in her blog to doing various things with “Sting”. It turns out that she picked up an unauthorized replica of Frodo’s sword Sting on sale this past summer. Being the curious sort, I popped over to “eBay”:http://www.ebay.com/ to see if there were any Sting replicas on there, and if so, how much they went for. A quick search turned up a ton of them, both authorized and unauthorized, and a wide selection of other LotR(Lord of the Rings) swords as well. The sword that really caught my eye was Narsil, the sword of Elendil, which Isildur took up to cut the One Ring of power from Sauron’s hand, so as a reward for surviving midterms (although how well I survived is yet to be determined), I decided to make use of my entertainment budget to buy myself a Narsil replica. Now, the official authorized replicas made by “United Cutlery”:http://www.unitedcutlery.com/ were going for about $150, which is a bit out of the price range of an unemployed seminary student, even if it is $100 or so off retail. However, the unauthorized replicas (the replicas of the replica, if you will) were considerably cheaper, so I decided to go that route. I ended up paying only $36 plus shipping for my Narsil, which includes a decorative wall plaque to hang it on.
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There was one thing that I truly dreaded when I moved to Saint Louis–that I would be forced to start saying “pop” instead of “soda”. Having an uncle in Illinois who had to convert after moving there from the Philadelphia area, it was my understanding that all midwesterners said “pop”. However, as I have gradually noticed, “soda” seems to go over just fine around here. Was my assumption wrong then? Wouldn’t it be nice if someone would do a scientific study to map out dialect differences in the U.S. like the usage of “soda” vs. “pop”? Well, we’re in luck. The good folks at “Harvard”:http://www.harvard.edu/ have done just such a thing. Geniuses that they are, they have put together a “dialect survey”:http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~golder/dialect/maps.php that includes a question on the “generic term for a sweetened carbonated beverage”:http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~golder/dialect/staticmaps/q_105.html. As the results show, St. Louis happens to be situated in “soda” territory, which explains why I’m so comfortable here with respect to my generic term for a sweetened carbonated beverage. Confirmation of this result can be found by also looking at the independent study performed on “”The Pop vs. Soda Page”:http://www.popvssoda.com/”.

I am currently in the middle of one super busy week. Fortunately, most of the stress is now over. This morning I had my OT History midterm, which involved writing furiously for and hour and fifteen minutes straight. Then, this afternoon, I took my take-home Gospels midterm. Now, all I have left is a session meeting tonight to find out whether or not I have an internship for the summer, and an Acts & Paul midterm on Friday. After all that’s done it will be spring break! Woohoo! Well, that’s my sentiment for the moment, at least. I haven’t formulated my to-do list yet, which will surely be filled with lots of things that I should get started on.

*1. Do you like talking on the phone? Why or why not?*

No! In fact, I hate the phone. It’s evil evil evil!

When it rings, it demands to be answered immediately, so you either have to drop everything to attend to it, or ignore it and hope that it’s not important. Also, when calling someone there are a variety of annoyances. If you don’t know them that well, then you have to hope they will recognize your name. If no one is home, then you have about 3 seconds to decide whether or not you want to leave a message on the answering machine and to figure out what you want to say. If someone else in the house answers the phone, then you have to request the person you want, which is especially interesting when kids are involved, or you know the person who answered but don’t want to talk to them at the moment. In addition, I despise having to take messages for others. Finally, telemarketers… ’nuff said.

Face-to-face, email, and IM are all preferable forms of communication for me. Mainly because they are more individual and controllable. You can only talk to me in person, or IM me at times when I choose to make myself available. Similarly, I can read email at my leisure. When you email or IM me, you contact an account used only by me, so you know that you won’t have to go through a third party, and I can immediately know who it is that is contacting me. I look forward to the day when we can all use voice IM so that we have a communication medium similar to the telephone but with individual accounts, and the ability to control our accessibility. Cell phones actually come close to this standard in that they can be turned off when one doesn’t want to be bothered, and in that many people have their own, individual cell phone number, which allows one to contact them directly, and through caller id, know who is calling.
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While we’re on the topic of _The Lord of the Rings_, what do you get when you mix a boatload of _LotR_ references with gangsta rap? According to a recent post to the “Elfling”:http://groups.yahoo.com/group/elfling/ mailing-list, you get “The Lords of the Rhymes”:http://www.lordsoftherhymes.com/ (caution: explicit lyrics).

And while we’re talking about weird takes on Tolkien, what do you get when you mix _The Hobbit_, Leonard Nimoy, and a bunch of girls with pointy ears? Apparently you get “”The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins”:http://homepage.mac.com/evanbaumgardner/iMovieTheater6.html”. Ummm… yeah… ’nuff said ’bout that.