In preperation for today's viewing of The Two Towers, I rented and watched the DVD of the super-extended-holy-shit-that-is-long director's cut of The Fellowship of the Ring. Now, the first time I saw it in theaters, I hadn't read the book (Yes, I can hear your collective gasping at my literary... um.... illiteracy), and I did not understand that the ring had more power to command men than it did hobbits. So, when I first saw the Fellowship, I thought that Gandalf was being kind of insulting in his reasoning in giving the ring to Frodo for keeping. Like, if the ring possesses Gandalf, who is an incredible powerful wizard, Middle Earth would be essentially fucked, because Gandalf would be evil, but if Frodo were to take it and he were to be possessed by the ring it'd be like... oh no, evil hobbit, watch out.

And while I was watching it again last night, I really had to wonder about Mt. Doom. Now, I've never read the Silmarilin (okay, there were less gasps that time), so there may be a story behind it, but I figure there are a couple possible explanations for Sauron's home having such a dumb name:

1. Sauron moved there and named it Mt. Doom himself because he is a great and terrible ruler, but not very good with words, and none of his minions were brave or foolish enoguh to tell him it sounded like Skeletor's summer home.
2. It was named Mt. Doom before Sauron moved there, and it just happened to have the right amount of fire and lava and shit flying out that Sauron liked so much, so he just went with it even though the name was dumb.
3. Everyone outside of Mordor calls it Mt. Doom, but inside Mordor they call it something like Stately Sauron Manor, or something more appropriate.
4. "Doom" just happens to be the the elvish or dwarfese or something for "never stops chucking out fire and lava and shit".

Yes, these are things that bug me when I'm watching Lord of the Rings movies. I had to catch myself complaining about the part where Frodo gets apparently implaed on that troll's big spear, but is okay because he wore mithril armor. I actually said, "Oh come on, even if mithril were totally unpiercable and indestructable, the force of that blow would have crushed him to hobbit jelly. Oh umm... or maybe it's like magic." I really have to work on the whole suspension of disbelief thing.

But I bet some people were livid over the DVD not having dubbed voice-overs for the scenes that were in elvish instead of subtitles. You may think that no one would really be upset by this, but trust me, I worked at Netflix. I know. People would complain about the black bars covering up the top and bottom of the movie. The placeholder DVD case for Fellowship on the shelf at the video store had "THIS IS NOT THE TWO TOWERS!!" emblazoned across the front. I asked the clerk if people really thought they could magically rent The Two Towers while it was stillin theaters. He assured me that yes, people can be really retarded.

You may be thinking taht at least they are not as retarded as those people behind the The Two Towers Protest Organization, but I am almost positive that this is a joke. I mean, no one's that dumb... are they?

Isn't it great how every post recently turns into some rant about how stupid people can be? Well, Winter break is coming up soon. I'm sure that'll improve my mood.