Long live Shysterball, where all of my geeky obsessions collide into one giant waste of time- It’s like a cyber-Rivendell.

I have seen that movie (and read the book) many, many times, Craig (and I highly recommend the extended version if you haven’t seen it yet… yes, it’s 45 minutes longer, but, man oh man, those are some great 45 minutes).

It’s an interesting comparison, and I see where you’re coming from. I don’t think the current state of the WBC is quite on par with Osgiliath, though. Osgiliath was like the Alamo or Iwo Jima (minus the ability to dig-in) - hopeless causes that were due to be run over whenever the attackers decided to attack. There’s got to be a more apt comparison. Sarumon at Isengaard during the March of the Ents? How about the March to Helm’s Deep, when the good folk of Rohan were getting picked off by Sarumon’s Uruk-Hai and Warg-Riders (I had to look that last one up)? Yeah, I like that one.

Of course, if you just wanted to make an awesome (and geeky) LOTR reference without regard to perfect accuracy, that’s cool, too. I respect that.

Lar wins.  You should change the name of your blog to Geeken-Ball.  And I mean that as a compliment.

KR:  I’ll own up to the fact that I didn’t make through the enitre book trilogy.  Tried when I was 15 and found it kind of tedious, probably because my geek training came in the form of the highly derivative, watered down, yet immensely enjoyable Dragonlance books.  I was an impatient lad in those days, and I wanted my escapism to come in easily digestable form.

I tried again before the movies came out and couldn’t make it through due to (a) attention span problems; and (b) the fact that I had shaken a lot of geek off my cloak in the intervening years.

How soon does the season start?

You’re not a complete geek, it’s “Faramir,” not “Farimir.”  Though it is quite geeky to get the rest of the names correct without having read the whole trilogy.

@Craig: Thanks. Don’t worry, I didn’t take it in a bad way at all. And, oh, good ol’ Dragonlance. I really enjoyed those books when I was like 13 or so. I haven’t looked at them in 15 years, so I can’t say if they really held up (i’m gonna guess no), but they were definitely a fun read at that time in my life.

I read the Dragonlance books when I was 14-17 or so. Chronicles, Legends, Eleven Nations, and a handful of the Tales. Out of nostalgia I then read the one or two Weiss-Hickman books that came out much later.

I haven’t truly revisited them, but I grab one off the shelf and flip through a few pages once in a while. It’s hard to get much farther, though.  The writing is fairly poor, and that may be charitable given the goodwill I will always have towards those books. As for the stories, I have no idea how TSR wasn’t sued by the Tolkien estate, because there’s barely an original idea in them.  Draconians are Orcs. Kender are Hobbits. Tanis is basically Aragorn with some added angst. The undead army fights for the good guys instead of the bad, but really, it’s the same thing.

The only arguably original and truly interesting thing in the books is the Raistlin-Caramon dynamic, which appeald to me a lot, probably because I have a slightly complicated relationship with my brother. Because of that, I think Legends is way better than Chronicles, and guess that it holds up better than Chronicles does.

By this point I’m sure I’ve lost everyone except Lar.  Which is fine. It’s getting near lunchtime.  Go out and get a sandwich or something.

Don’t worry guys, you can call it a “command center” - to the rest of us, it’s the PC in the basement.

Wait, wut? Who said The Phantom Menace was a bad movie? You get to see Tatooine, like, 20 years before it was in Star Wars and you get to meet Luke’s Grandma. That was hecka cool. And Liam Neeson was in it. He’s not in bad movies.                                                      I’ve always wanted to write baseball into sci-fi/fantasy like, a lazy game in the Shire, Anakin taking Obi-Wan deep in a pickup game on Naboo, or The Enterprise crew @ home vs. the Vulcans. Too bad I’m not a writer.

I can’t believe I wasted 5 minutes of my life here. What are you suggesting—that the US forfeit? In the semifinals? Because a couple players have been injured? Rob Neyer, please don’t link to this clown again.