One Blog To Rule Them All

    Resuming our blitz of all things Hobbity, here's Dori. He is mentioned as the strongest of the Dwarves in The Hobbit, and he is the older brother of Nori and Ori. Do you notice a certain theme going on with their names?

     In the book, Dori is also often the one fishing Bilbo out of scrapes, such as helping carry him out of the orc tunnels, help him up a tree to get away from the wargs, and so forth. In the movie, he is also going to be on the lookout for Ori, who is basically the geek of Dwarves. Yes, a Dwarf geek. LOL. It's gonna be great. But we'll see Ori when we get to him.

    Oh, and no, I do not know what is going on in this picture. It appears that Dori is sloshing milk all over the place. It appears the food fight at Bag End has gotten underway. However, why they chose such a scene for a character poster is beyond me.

    In UNA news, today was freezing. Tomorrow, it's supposed to be even colder. Note to self: wear two layers of everything tomorrow. It's times like these when I really wish UNA would build a bus stop for those having to wait on shuttles. If we only had to wait five minutes, it wouldn't be so bad. But today I stood in the wind and the cold for twenty minutes. The Florence Parking Garage has a shelter, and so does Lion's Den Apartments. There is at least one glass bus stop shelter on campus- it's over near Stevens. Why can't they build one near the fountain? It can be tastefully done and put off to one side. But noooooooo.

    While I was standing at said bus stop the other day, I happened to look up and notice that in one of the large oak trees is a big bunch of mistletoe. I am willing to bet that most people cannot recognize mistletoe in any other form than hanging from a doorway during Christmastime, and that they do not know that it is, in fact, a parasitic life form that grows on tree branches, primarily oaks. (Or, at least, I've only ever seen it growing on oak trees.)
    Most people probably also do not know why you're supposed to kiss under it. Granted, I don't understand that part very well, either. But I do know that it ultimately comes from Norse mythology, where Loki (not the Tom Hiddleston version) killed Baldur with a spring of mistletoe. How mistletoe could kill anyone, let alone a god, is a plothole. Mythologies are full of plotholes, you see. They sort of run on plotholes. They're like bad fanfiction, in that respect.

    Oh, and speaking of bad fanfiction (in addition to the fact that there is going to be a lot of that centered around Thorin, Fili, and Kili come December 15th), bad writing isn't a new thing. My literature class has taught me that. Lanval by Marie de France was basically a Mary Sue fanfic with gratuitous Ron the Death-Eater treatment of Arthur and Guenevere. (If you do not understand those terms, please refer to tvtropes.net.)
    Today, I did a reading response on Petrarch. Audrey, Marcela and I have come to the conclusion that Petrarch was a creepy stalker who needed psychological help. C'mon, he wrote 366 poems over the course of about 20 years about some girl he may have seen only once! Certified nutcase.

    Also in UNA news, I had a geography quiz today. Hailey and Emily from the Honors Program probably studied, but other than them I may have been the only person who actually studied for the quiz. While a few of us were waiting for the previous class to vacate the room (that class has a bad habit of lingering), some were discussing about how hard it was to study for this quiz. Apparently, Europe has too many countries and they're all too small, so those kids decided not to study because it was too hard and they'd just bomb the quiz because Dr. Mikey said he'd drop one.
    My thoughts: What if you bomb the map quiz on Southeast Asia or something like that? What do you do then?
    Europe is not a hard continent to study. Dr. Mikey didn't even have Andorra, Cyprus, San Marino, Vatican City, Belarus, Lithuania, etc. on the list. We had three mountain range, a few seas, four rivers, and the major cities, in addition to the major countries. Malta was the hardest thing on the list of things to study, and it wasn't even on the quiz. I was very disappointed. Dr. Mikey had even shown us pictures of Malta. The hardest thing turned out to be Amsterdam, and that still didn't even fluster me.
    I really wanted to scribble a note to Dr. Mikey on the quiz, something along the lines of, "I'm disappointed that Malta wasn't on here," or "Was this supposed to be challenging?" However, that would probably have been impertinent, and the rest of the class would have hated me had they known I sort-of-wanted to petition for harder tests. Well, maybe not necessarily harder tests, but at least tests that are less insulting to my intelligence.
    I'm willing to bet that most of the people in that class are just there for the general ed requirement. 90%, easy.

    Oh, and this is my 200th post. Go me! I am truly the Blog Queen of the Sophomore Honors Program. I have the ONE BLOG TO RULE THEM ALL! MWAHAHAHAHA!

In Pace Christi,

Elyse