Beefy's Corner.......For all off Topic threads

As a scene, Helm's Deep is several thousand times better than Pelenor Fields. The only good bit in that battle is the ride of the Rohirrim. Helm's Deep has tension, a great build up, fierce fighting throughout the night - you could tell everyone was fighting with every ounce of strength and determination (just look at the bit when they're fighting at the gate for example). Contrast that with Pelenor Fields. Pelenor Fields had next to no build up, no tension, the fighting was pathetic (seriously, the peasants of Rohan, kids and old men, were far better fighters than the so called soldiers of Gondor and were a damn sight more fiercely determined) and the ending was atrocious. The ride of the Rohirrim was good, but that was about 5 or 10 minutes of the entire scene.

 

The Helm's Deep battle is the best battle by far. From when Saruman sent the troops to war you knew it was going to be an epic battle.

 

Agreed but there is a rumour that the Sauron battle is in the 3rd movie of the new trilogy. If so then that will be by far the best battle.

 

Yawn of the Rings. Or Lord of the boRings, whatever.

 

That would be the battle of the five armies. Does anyone know whether he's referred to as Sauron or The Necromancer, as he is in the original Hobbit book..?

 

Oh, thank god for that. I'm not alone. Never watched an entire film. Bores the nads off of me.

 

The Necromancer as in the books.

 

I enjoyed the first one but didn't really care for the other two. I was going to give The Two Towers another try, but I've decided I'd rather learn about the mysterious disputed territory of Western Sahara.

 

Found anything interesting yet?

 

Good. Worst thing that adaptations can do is screw around too much. I know there was a joke going round as to how many films they could squeeze out of a 300 page book, and I wondered too, but there is an awful lot of background story from the Silmarrilion and the LOTR appendixes, to The Hobbit [written after the original story when Tolkien really got into filling out his world] and it appears they've used a bit of that. In effect, they've changed little.

 

What I've learnt so far:

- Used to be a Spanish colony until the UN asked Spain to relinquish control in 1975.

- Now Morocco reckon it's theirs and they have control over most of the land, but no other UN member state recognises their sovereignty over it. Other Arab countries support them though.

- The Sahrawi people (that's the 500,000-ish people who live there) largely support a national liberation movement called the Polisario Front, who as far as I can tell are a pretty cool bunch. They don't like Morocco because apparently they've been pretty repressed, so they're claiming sovereignty of it as well, by the name of Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. That's also not recognised by the UN, but has the support of about 85 countries. Unfortunately they only control about 25% of the land.

- It's basically just a desert anyway so I'm not sure why Morocco want it so badly. Morocco are chums with the US, which largely explains why the UN are being so useless.

 

I've found myself reading about the Libyan uprising from a couple of years ago, purely because I don't think I have ever been so gripped to any story as I was during that conflict. Having grown up reading about Gadaffi and his regime, I found it so surreal watching his power crumble in the way that it did.

 

Yeah, that was pretty exciting. It's a lot easier to follow wars now that the people fighting in them are constantly putting footage online. Some of it is really brutal though, including Gaddafi's capture, torture and execution. A while ago I stumbled upon a Twitter page of some militant Islamists (I think in Mali but I could be mistaken) and they were posting photos of French soldiers they had captured/killed, along with a bunch of bullshit propaganda. Even the bad guys are using social media.

 

Yeah it was crazy how much social media was being utilized during the Arab Spring. But yeah, some of the images posted up were not pleasant at all.

 

I've caught myself replying to people by saying yeah, no, yeah... All I have to do now is absent-mindedly adopt the Australian Question Intonation at the end of sentences and I shall be the complete berk.

 

[video=youtube;MtaUHMWQpiI]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtaUHMWQpiI[/video]

 

I only said it once. Well, I only caught myself saying it once.

 

I've just read that the Austrian Question Intonation [AQI], otherwise known as High Rising Terminal [HRT - I thought that was a treatment] is part of the Northern Irish accent. Oh yeah, I can just hear the Rev. Ian Paisley doing that.

Ian Paisley - Unforunately, I can't find a short video that doesn't have some controversial speech in it, so here's Stephen Fry instead:
[video=youtube;OluCvL0lRnI]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OluCvL0lRnI[/video]

 

Did anyone see the piece about the oldest season ticket. A family have donated a season ticket from the 1880s to Burnley FC saying it should go home. Nice gesture as it would have fetched a fortune on the open market. Not sure I would have been so altruistic.