I ate breakfast an hour ago and I’m hungry. Why don’t I weigh 5000 lbs? It helps that I won’t eat again until I finish writing. I could also make more coffee. Four mugs isn’t too much, right? Do other sensualists focus on coffee and chocolate like I do? I could be a happy hobbit eating six meals a day when I can get it. The films are wrong, Second Breakfast is not the name of a meal in the Shire. After Bilbo cleans up from the unexpected party he sat down not for Second Breakfast but for A second breakfast. It wasn’t a routine meal. The films get many things wrong. They are great cinema but an unfaithful adaptation of the book. I find it analogous to The Natural, I love the film and didn’t like the book it is based on. People that love the book complain that the film was unfaithful. They are right, just like LOTR the entire perspective was different. The LOTR films and novel The Natural are far more cynical in outlook than their counterparts. I prefer the uncynical perspective. I realized that one of the reasons that I love the Expanse is that James Holden acts as a moral center. He reminds me of the literary, not cinematic Faramir, totally incorruptible. He might not always make the right decisions, but his decisions are never based on prejudice or self-interest. He always tries to do what’s right.
I usually write a Martin Luther King Day entry. This year I’m delighted to see that so many of my friends on FB are not just making boilerplate mentions of it but either listening to or reading his words. That’s what I always do. This year I watched and posted the end of the I’ve Been to the Mountain Top speech, his last public words before he was killed. One of my friends read the too often neglected Letter from Birmingham Jail. I’ve posted that in its entirety one year. Another friend watched the entire If I Had a Dream speech. I read that and decided that listening to an excerpt from a speech I’ve heard before was not enough. I just spent the last 48 minutes listening to his The Other America Speech. Do what you have the time for but do something to remember why we are honoring Dr. King, the work he did, and the work that needs to still be done.
Wise Madness 