The Hall of Fire

What an irony that the joint performance happened the same game as the brawl, which I understand was caused by the Michigan players attempting to plant a Michigan flag pm the OSU field after their victory. Do you know what inspired the joint performance? As a result of the brawl, the Big Ten confer...

What an irony that the joint performance happened the same game as the brawl, which I understand was caused by the Michigan players attempting to plant a Michigan flag pm the OSU field after their victory. Do you know what inspired the joint performance? It was apparently suggested to the two bands...

One of the fiercest rivalries in American college football is that between the Ohio State University and the University of Michigan. That was evident again today when Michigan again upset Ohio State in their annual matchup. (Michigan had a middling record, having lost five gives, but Ohio State had ...

...I am considering writing something up about the birds of Arda... I plan on taking yet another adventure through all of the works, inc HoME, and writing something up about the birds I encounter along the way. Thoughts? I think that would be cool. About six months ago I briefly found myself a bunc...

From Randall Munroe:

Just yesterday on the radio I heard Johnny Cash's hit 1970 recording of Kris Kristofferson's "Sunday Morning Coming Down." I suppose it's fitting this news broke on a Sunday: " Kris Kristofferson, Country Music Legend and 'A Star Is Born' Leading Man, Dies at 88 " ( Variety ). (A...

Oh cool! After a seven-year hiatus, Every Frame a Painting is (temporarily) back!



The channel was one great video essay after another on the craft of moviemaking.

As far as I can see from the table of contents, the collection is missing "Monoceros" (the unicorn) and "Reginhardus" (the fox), two bestiary poems reportedly in the spirit of "Iumbo" (the oliphaunt) and "Fastitocalon" (the turtle) -- the latter two reworked f...

Last week Monday, having just returned from Mythcon in Minneapolis, I paid altogether too much money to take my sister and nephew to see his first drum and bugle corps competition, down in Canton, where among the ten contestants we saw was the local corps, the Bluecoats, who won that night's event. ...

Shane (1953 U.S., dir. George Stevens). I've seen that movie at least twice before on TV, but this was the first time at the movies. It was screened to a nearly full house tonight at the Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque, the local foreign and revival theater that was founded in 1986 by John ...

This is moving up the charts and deservedly so. Love me some catchy synth pop with a voice rather in the Kate Bush mode:



Billboard affectionately calls it "an oddball pop song versed in queer theory".

Yes! I directed In the Heights in Ireland in 2018! Is yours an Amateur or Professional production NE? Professional, and the biggest show we've done in decades, maybe ever. We produce musicals infrequently. It was our first time producing something written by Lin Manuel Miranda. It was our second ti...

Wikipedia says this announced 2015 tour was never realized, but last year, a reduced version of this show titled The Lord of the Rings: A Musical Tale performed for three months at the Watermill Theatre in Bagnor (Berkshire, UK), and that production has been picked up by the Chicago Shakespeare Thea...

One of next year's Tolkien at Kalamazoo sessions here at the International Congress on Medieval Studies is likely to be devoted to Tolkien's poetry.

Until the day before yesterday, The Cadets were the oldest continuously operating drum and bugle corps in the U.S., having been founded in 1934 as the Holy Name Cadets in Garfield, New Jersey. But they'd been on uncertain ground for the past six years after an expose in the Philadelphia Inquirer rev...

I've just begun reading, 'The Real Middle Earth: A History of the Dark Ages that Inspired Tolkien' by Brian Bates and, from what I can tell so far, the full title describes it quite well. I like history, but I'm no historian so I can't speak from a scholarly point of view, but it is interesting. Di...

OK, I see that Hammond and Scull have a lot to say about the collection at their blog. A number of factors, namely economies of production, ruled out a Complete Poems by Tolkien. Nevertheless, the Collected Poems will include most of the verses Tolkien is known to have written, and for most of these...

Scull and Hammond included what seemed to be a complete list of just the titles of Tolkien's poems in their 2007 Companion & Guide , but a few years later it became clear that was not so when Sigurd & Gudrun included at least one poem that wasn't in that list. I believe another well-known To...

It occurs to me that a birder might be inspired to join this forum by seeing your regularly rotating avatars.

Thanks to this Youtube channel which compiles song snippets in lists of every record to reach #1, #2, #3, etc. on the U.S. Hot 100 chart from 1958 to 2023, I learned that "C'mon Marianne" and "Carrie Anne" successively peaked at #9 in 1967. (That's The Four Seasons and The Hollie...