Tom Brosz said:

>It's irritating in a film to have holes that can be easily plugged.
>You wouldn't have to include the entire sequence. A simple
>off-hand comment by an elf or Gandalf along the lines of
>"Damn nice sword, Merry. I see by the consumer info label that
>it's one of them magic jobs designed to kill witch kings."

Now I have to take off my Tolkien fanatic's hat and put on my aeronautical engineer's hat. Except for Tolkien and a few other well written exceptions, I despise fantasy. The smiths of Middle Earth had a technology that permitted metal swords to be buried in a barrows (an earthen tomb) for centuries but never corrode (a steel sword would turn into a pile of rust in a couple centuries and a bronze sword would have corroded to useless junk). Not only do MIddle Earth swords not corrode but they'll still glow in the dark if an orc is nearby (they must have Pu-238 cores). The Ring of Power was self aware (it had an ultra powerful microcontroller chip in it), could transport its wearer into a parallel universe and was capable of long distance mind control. The power source of the Ring of Power allowed it to sit on a river bottom for centuries but still wake up the moment someone touched it. The Ring's metal had controllable density, almost infinite heat capacity and conductivity (it would have made a fantastic thermal protection material for a spacecraft). In summary, the people of Middle Earth had access to 25th century technology. However they still rode around on horses, used primitive agriculture and weapons, didn't have firearms (Merry would have been better off with an M249 SAWS), electric lighting or telephones, etc. What's with these guys? Why do they have these super-duper technologies that could produce palantirs or a Ring of Power but they don't use it in their everyday lives?

Gary