'Bred Crumbs

09:49 AM Some hard-hitting global economic analysis, courtesy the Domino's "news" department: "Europe May Share Currency, but Not Favorite Pizza Toppings."

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05 PM A delightful Web surprise today. Being dragged unwillingly by my job into the world of development for hated Flash, I went to Google and typed Flash sniffer. The first result was for zorro.com. I thought, oh, must be some software company. But no; it's that Zorro -- "the official website of Zorro, the legendary masked hero of Spanish California." Who knew the masked one was so tech-savvy? His site covers everything, from the new Zorro videogame to the Wal-Mart slash-prices campaign. Meanwhile, that slacker The Lone Ranger hasn't even bought his own domain.

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The day after, I am dealing better still with my new workspace. As cube farms go, it's not so bad. The new carpet is nice with a subtle pattern of big tiles, and the white walls are broken up occasionally with small sections of colored ones. There's a dark blue near me that's nice, and my cube shields me from an ugly dark olive that would work far better dressing people than rooms.

But the talk of the office is the two short, tall hallways near me that are devoted to the corporate color, red. Each corridor is about 12 feet tall, 8 feet wide and 27 feet long, and except for the empty blackness of the grated ceiling far above, it's all red, red, red. (Oh, for a digital camera.) Opinions are divided. At first these airport-like red tunnels made no impression on me -- for all I knew, the walls in this building were always these colors -- but now I've decided I sort of like them (though I wouldn't if they were any longer). Others are less pleased. The name "the Inferno" seems to be catching on. Other comments: "Everyone looks good in this light. People will wind up falling in love here!" And: "I can't go through here without doing a Soul Train dance."

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08:47 PM America Online bounces back e-mail sent by Harvard to applicants. Huh, you'd think using AOL would be grounds for automatic rejection anyway.

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05:20 PM Another reason to have skipped a New Year's meditation is that, in fact, the calendar change did bring big real-life change to a few people I know, and to me. Today, I arrived at my new (smaller) cube in my new (smaller) workplace. I approached it with an attitude of coping and optimism and making the best of things.

That lasted about five minutes.

Companies these days pretend to make a big deal about "exceeding your expectations." Well, I entered with much lowered expectations, and my company still exceeded them.

Despite everything that wasn't right and complete and employee-friendly (ergonomics? Sorry, only for executives!), my mood backed away from blackened as the day wore on. Perspective returned; coping resumed (At least I still have a job, etc.) But the it-could-be-worse game is growing tiresome. A day will come again when companies have to go back to valueing employees. I look forward to it.

Meanwhile, I realize that my mood is colored by the Bay Area's biennial Winter of Unending Rain. But again: it could be worse. It could be Buffalo.

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I don't do resolutions because I just break or forget them. A couple of recent years, I jotted down some off-hand goals/wishes that proved surprisingly prophetic, but I suspect that the more I think about such things the less likely they are to happen. This year, however, I am aware that I have developed, without really trying, a New Year's Philosophy -- a thought to hold hope for and test the truth of throughout the coming year.

It is this: in the past, I have oft bemoaned that I always find myself in the middle. But lately I'm thinking that the middle ground may in many respects be the most advantageous.

The postulate is hazy, but let the research begin.

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01:42 AM As another New Year's neared, I was going to write a meditation on its meaning this time around -- how to regard a grim year past, whether to dare hope for better, what meaning an arbitrary calendar turn has in a time that has given us a day of real change, blah blah blah. But no one probably wants to read such a thing (though that never stopped me before), and I'm all shagged out from my LotR essay. Besides, it all really still boils down to that time-honored greeting, a sincere wish for me and you:

Happy new year.

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A couple days after Christmas, I got a gift even more delightful and unexpected than anything I had already received: a surprise check for more than a hundred bucks, from the state of California. Seems Sacramento shouldn't have taken disability insurance out of the one paycheck I got in this state in 1996, so I got it back. This is the second time California has refunded me money the courts said it shouldn't have taken in the first place; the first was the very welcome return of the multi-hundred-dollar fee I was charged for daring to bring a car not made in California into the state, also in 1996. Let this be a lesson to you, California; get your greedy paws off the newcomers.

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08:44 PM (Here begins the inevitable review of the film version of The Lord of the Rings, a review that's probably too long. But if it helps you get through it, know that it contains an incongruous reference to a baseball movie.)

Finally saw The Movie, and it's a wondrous, wondrous thing.

Its achievement goes beyond the loving detail of every set and shot, and beyond its incredible spectacle. As jaded as CGI has made me, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring still bowled me over visually early on, with the vast images of the first defeat of the vile Sauron during the opening background narration. This fluid beginning, which related the essential prologue accurately and fully without burdening the newcomer with too many Elvish names or thick theology, also immediately showed that director Peter Jackson would honor, capture, and draw wisely from the richness of Middle Earth in spirit without making the mistake of trying to spell it all out to the tengwa.

J.R.R. Tolkien's books were an accomplishment of language. The Lord of the Rings grew out of his playfully scholarly development of realistic fictional tongues. Smart though its linguistic circuitry is, the saga has succeeded because Tolkien understood how languages shaped and were shaped by cultures and events; to make a convincing, enchanting language, he had to spin a convincing, enchanting story. But reviewing the books after seeing the movie was a reminder that, as Tolkien said himself, "The tale grew in the telling" -- and telling, and telling. Showing wasn't a strength of Tolkien's writing; he gave his stories the force of legend via grand themes and exposition, often glossing over the actual action.

For example, the climactic battle of the The Fellowship of the Ring movie is part of the books' plot, but it never really happens in them. The first book ends before it occurs; the second book begins with one character telling another that it happened. And Roger Ebert, giving the film a strangely half-hearted thumb up, points out that the wizard Gandalf's dark confrontation with the monstrous balrog, a centerpiece of the film, "requires less than 500 words" in Tolkien's text. Such brevity in action may be part of the books' charm, but it would not have worked in a movie; it would have come off as My Dinners with Gandalf.

So Jackson beefed up what action sequences the first book did have, invented a couple more, combined plot strands to speed things along, and dipped slightly into the second book to finish the first film strongly. He turned Gandalf's while-you-were-out stories about rival Saruman into integral sequences, which not only make the first movie bigger and better but should help things out come Part 3, whose big finish Tolkien rushed to make room for massive epilogue. The movie excises superfluous elves and transfers the role of one of them to Liv Tyler's Arwen, thus giving one of the story's few women something more to do than stand around gleaming like Glenn Close in The Natural. Tolkien lingered in the dull comfort of the hobbits' Shire to a nearly (pardon the One Ring pun) precious extreme; Jackson moves quickly beyond them. Above all, Peter Jackson did the one thing I hoped against hope he would -- he completely removed Tom Bombadil, the Jar-Jar Binks of The Lord of the Rings.

But Tolkien's creation is far from diminished; its essense is all there on screen, from the detailed maps strewn about in the Baggins' hobbit-hole to the meaningful invoking of key figures from the tale's extensive backstory to the precision with which the clearly delineated geography of Middle Earth is obeyed -- the mountains are in the right places; the rivers flow the direction they should; characters point to where the landmarks they mention would really be.

In the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien wrote at greater-than-balrog length on the "translation" of his made-up languages. Translation is exactly what the moviemakers of The Fellowship of the Ring have accomplished, and nothing has really been lost.

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