I Have No Real Desire To Be Rich Or Famous, All I've Ever Wanted Was To Wake Up Every Morning And Not

Spent the weekend at our friends Joel & Erica's farm "Emancipation Acres". It was so much fun getting away from the city and spending some time in the wide open fields playing with their three dogs while eating great food and drinking great beer.

Plus we left with two pounds of their homegrown ground pork, a pack of bacon, two dozen freshly laid eggs (we collected them ourselves), some purple cabbage, as well as a jar of honey from their bees and twelve bars of Erica's homemade bars of soap.

I have some very cute and funny neighbors.

This is ridiculous.

Yo! @staff

Why do all the black hash tags no longer exist?

And yet we still have all of these…

You have some explaining to do staff

It's been a rough winter. Fingers crossed it's almost over.

Beorn the skin changer

I have long been a fan of the LOTR books with the Hobbit being my favorite. I think it's because I read it at a young age and t was able to make a nice impact on my imagination. Anyways I was excited when I heard about the Hobbit movies and couldn't wait to see one of my favorite minor characters, Beorn, on the big screen.

Needless to say I was disappointed.

Not only did they skip over the chance to lead nicely into the film with some down time at Beorn's house which would have allowed them to reestablish the plot prepare everyone for the events that would later happen in the movie, but they also cut down the content from the book drastically. Why go into the appendices and pull out extra information to help extend film time and then cut short scenes that are actually in the book  itself.

I don't want to be totally negative about the movie, it did have some great parts and as always the people at Weta did a fantastic job with the set, props and design work. However, I recently got a chance to look through the "Desolation of Smaug" design book that is out on the market (available on amazon below).

http://amzn.com/0062265695

All I can say after looking at all the designs made for the Beorn character is that they picked the wrong one. There were some truely fantastic concept ideas that were much more closely related to the book's description. Understandably you want the dwarves to look distinctly different so that you can tell the 13 of them apart, but there is no way anyone could mistake the giant Beorn for a tiny dwarf, so why try to make him look like one? Luckily the got all 30 seconds of screen time for his bear form right at least.

One year down, a lifetime to go.