Over and over and over again...

The lowly groundhog, often called a woodchuck in America, is the only mammal to have a day named in his honor. The groundhog's day is February 2. How did the groundhog come by this honor? It stems from the ancient belief that hibernating creatures were able to predict the arrival of springtime by their emergence.The German immigrants known as Pennsylvania Dutch brought the tradition to America in the 18th century. They had once regarded the badger as the winter-spring barometer. But the job was reassigned to the groundhog after importing their Candlemas traditions to the U.S. Candlemas commemorates the ritual purification of Mary, 40 days after the birth of Jesus.Candlemas is one of the four "cross-quarters" of the year, occurring half way between the first day of winter and the first day of spring. Traditionally, it was believed that if Candlemas was sunny, the remaining six weeks of winter would be stormy and cold. But if it rained or snowed on Candlemas, the rest of the winter would be mild. If an animal "sees its shadow," it must be sunny, so more wintry weather is predicted:

If Candlemas be fair and bright,

Winter has another flight.

If Candlemas brings clouds and rain,

Winter will not come again.

The groundhog and badger were not the only animals that have been used to predict spring. Other Europeans used the bear or hedgehog--but in any case the honor belonged to a creature that hibernated. Its emergence symbolized the imminent arrival of spring.Traditionally, the groundhog is supposed to awaken on February 2, Groundhog Day, and come up out of his burrow. If he sees his shadow, he will return to the burrow for six more weeks of winter. If he doesn’t see his shadow, he remains outside and starts his year, because he knows that spring has arrived early.In the U.S., the “official” groundhog is kept in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. Every February 2, amid a raucous celebration early in the morning, “Punxsutawney Phil” as the groundhog is called, is pulled from his den by his keepers, who are dressed in tuxedos. Phil then whispers his weather prediction into the ear of his keeper, who then announces it to the anxiously-awaiting crowd.Residents contend that the groundhog has never been wrong.The ceremony in Punxsutawney was held in secret until 1966, and only Phil's prediction was revealed to the public. Since then, Phil's fearless forecast has been a national media event.The groundhog comes out of his electrically heated burrow, looks for his shadow and utters his prediction to a Groundhog Club representative in "groundhogese." The representative then translates the prediction for the general public.If Punxsutawney Phil sees his shadow, it means six more weeks of winter. If he does not see his shadow, it means spring is just around the corner.Approximately 90% of the time, Phil sees his shadow.Phil started making predictions in 1887 and has become an American institution.
Which brings me to the reason why i wrote this post.Groundhog day has been one of my all time favourite movies.A ''romantic comedy'' with a brilliant plot, and some tight performances by Bill Murray and Andie Macdowell. On Groundhog day, Phil(Bill Murray), a TV weatherman with an ego bigger than a wide screen TV could hold, is forced against his will to report on location the prognostications of Punxatawney Phil. He kind of likes his producer, Rita (Andie MacDowell) but is too superficial to even acknowledge his feeling other than to throw crass pick-up lines at her. She is sophisticated confident and compassionate. He is everything she hates in a man.
He suffers through the day not even trying to hide his contempt for having to do such a menial task. Then, contrary to his prediction, a snow storm moves in and he and the crew are stuck in Punxatawney overnight, cut off from the world.
When his room alarm goes off at 6:00am the next morning, he is surprised to hear the D.J. doing the exact same routine they did the day before. Then he sees 100's of people heading for the center of town and asks what's going on. He soon realizes it's Groundhog day again. Everything that happened happens again. People speak the same sentences word for word. And when they get snowed in again, he starts to panic.
6:00am the next day, same thing. But this time he is expecting what will happen and he reacts differently. It seems he can change things if he wants to. As the days go on, he decides to have some fun. He foils an obnoxious old school mate, he seduces a pretty young girl, he robs an armored truck, all by just knowing ahead of time what people will say or do.
How long can you do this kind of thing without getting tired of it? There is no sign telling what to do to get out of this endless loop. There is no indication that he even CAN get out. His mood turns to despair. He goes drinking and meets a few perpetual drunks who accidentally impart some wisdom. "What" Phil asks "if there was no tomorrow?". Ralph (Rick Overton) says that then nothing would matter. Phil takes that as a sign and goes on a wild car ride on a railroad track, towards an oncoming train! He kills himself!
6:00am. Not a mark on him. He kills himself over and over. He can't even escape in death!
It finally dawns on him that maybe whatever caused this wants him to be a better person. He has all the time in the world so, he learns to play piano. He makes sure each day that he is there to catch a boy falling from a tree. He meets a man with a back problem and learns enough medicine to help him. He becomes, in what seems to the town to be a single day, a good, kind, helpful, talented and popular person.
How much time has passed isn't revealed but it could be years for him. And he's still stuck. But now that he's a better person, he realizes how much he likes Rita and he realizes that now he may actually have a shot.
He asks her out and fails. But again he has forever. Every time he makes a mistake, he learns what to say or not say the next time. He learns a few lines of her favorite poem and what foods she likes. He gets to a point where he has manipulated her to the point that she is finally willing to go to bed with him. This then is his test.
Watching Bill Murray and his trademark brand of goofy lines and silly witticisms stumble through all these situations gives a great deal of expected humor. Murray rarely disappoints, but now it's time for the romance. This is Andie MacDowell's strong suit and she was a perfect choice for this role. You feel for her more than for him. You want HIM to do the right thing because you want HER to be happy.
Taken as a light comedy, this movie would rate perhaps eight stars out of ten. But it's much, much more than just a light comedy. It is, in fact, utterly unique. The character of Phil Connors, played by Bill Murray, is, quite literally, a man without a future.
What do we gain from watching this movie? Different people will take away different things from it. I discovered two insights in Groundhog Day.
One was the importance of concentrating on the things that last. Phil Connors must live the same day over and over again, and is forced to realize that the only real change that will ever be possible must happen within himself. (From this it is a short leap to the realization that this is the only kind of change that really matters; for in his case, it is literally true.) It is at this point that he takes up piano, begins reading, learns to ice-sculpt. But if it weren't for his unique predicament, he never would have realized this; in his routine at the TV studio back in Pittsburgh, we surmise, there was always something changing...and not changing. (It is interesting that Phil is a weatherman: the weather is a perfect metaphor for something that changes constantly...without, in the long term, changing at all.) We can be distracted by the superficial changes in the world around us, and forget that real change in our lives must come from within. This was the great gift of Groundhog Day for Phil Connors: the chance to discover this truth for himself.
The other thing I noticed, while reflecting on this movie, is how uncertainty can keep us from charitable acts. We use our ignorance like a crutch: we don't give to charity because it may be a scam, we don't offer to help someone because they may not need help anyway, and so on. But Phil doesn't have the luxury of ignorance. He knows...he knows with absolute certainty that if he doesn't buy the old man a bowl of soup, that man will die in the streets within a few hours. He knows that if he isn't on hand at the right time, a boy will fall from a tree and break his neck. Faced with such knowledge, even Phil, self-absorbed as he is, cannot stand by idly. Nor could we, in his position. This is a powerful argument for knowledge as the most reliable foundation for altruistic behavior. What other movie can offer an insight half as profound?
Many more truths can be mined from this movie. As others have said, this is a thought experiment that went very well indeed--better than most flicks I've seen on the Big Screen. As such, I'd vote for it as one of the most underrated movies ever made.

Spaceman Spiff and the case of the mutant snowmen...

"Calvin and Hobbes" was such an exuberant, strange and metaphysical realm you wonder how it ever got shoveled into a comic strip.
I remember this when i look at "The Complete Calvin and Hobbes," a 1,456-page art-book epic of every panel ever published, in my neighbourhood landmark bookstore. It was original by sheer force of personality. Calvin sounded like a 6-year-old psychotic on steroids one day and a Yale lit grad the next. He was mad off the leash. He wondered what was worthwhile in life if death was inevitable. ("Seafood," answered Hobbes, his imaginary tiger friend. Wait -- was Hobbes real or not? Debatable.)
Calvin battled blobs of oatmeal and the bathtub suds monster. He and Hobbes hurtled downhill in their wagon and set out for the Yukon. He turned himself into a Tyrannosaurus rex , Calvin the Human Insect, Calvin the Bug, Captain Napalm,Tracer Bullet, Stupendous Man and Spaceman Spiff.
In the middle of class, Calvin's teacher suddenly turns into a pig-snouted monster! The drooling blob demands attention and homework!
"Chew electric death, snarling cur!" Spiff howls, blasting her face off with his Atomic Napalm Neutralizer!
He was known to wear little rocket ship underpants. He feared nothing but the babysitter. Also the dark.And monsters under his bed(did metallica dedicate the ''sandman'' to calvin??maybe.)
The strip ran from 1985 to 1995. Thirty million people have bought earlier collections of the strip, but as of today you can buy it all in one pop. It will set you back by a cool 5 grand, but the three-volume, glossy-papered tome finally gives proper appreciation and display to creator Bill Watterson's efforts, the kind of size and color quality that he waged such epic battles for with newspapers and syndicates before retiring into silence at age 37, tired of the fray, wary of drifting into the bankrolls of mediocrity.
Flip open a page here:
"I want a grenade launcher, Mom. When's Christmas?" Calvin pipes in one panel.
"What do you think is the meaning of true happiness?" he asks Hobbes in another. "Is it money, cars and women? Or is it just money and cars?"
Here comes that cute girl from class! Calvin: "Hey, Susie Derkins, is that your face or is a possum stuck in your collar?"
All 10 years gone now.
People still remember because it was never worse than good, and was often simply brilliant. It parodied the issues of the day, the materialism, the greed-is-good cynicism, the pointlessness of television, the rampaging egos, the growing crassness of public intercourse, the bad behavior, our infinitesimal place in the universe. There was also time for snacks and a bedtime story.

"Calvin and Hobbes," worked on the concept that Hobbes was a stuffed animal to everyone in the world but Calvin, an only child. Only when he and Calvin are alone in the panel does Hobbes spring to life -- a tiger who walks on two feet, makes cheesecake grins at girls and appears to be more mature than Calvin by oh, about an hour and a half.
They wrestle, pull the covers back and forth at bedtime and make goofy faces at one another while sitting in the back seat of the family car -- best friends of the type boys no longer have after age 12. The only other kids in the strip were Susie, who lived around the block, and Moe, the school bully. Calvin's parents did not have names. They lived in a house that had a sort of American foursquare sensibility to it, in a nameless town that seemed lost on the Midwestern prairie. It all bespoke a certain Sunday-afternoon loneliness. (Hobbes was Calvin's imagination, right? His alter ego? Which means the whole thing is just Calvin talking to himself? Nobody knows; Watterson never made it clear.)

"I'd always resisted the idea of doing a 'kid strip,' partly because of the long shadow that Peanuts cast over the whole genre," Watterson writes in the introduction to The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. In Watterson's first strips Calvin and Hobbes is practically an homage to Peanuts. Calvin tilts his head back, screaming, and his mouth fills his entire face, so all we see is his tongue. Calvin and Hobbes converse about a girl atop a brick wall, just like Charlie Brown and Linus (although Calvin's desire for Susie Derkins is, shall we say, more sublimated than Charlie Brown's unrequited love for the little red-headed girl). When Calvin falls off his bike, he flips upside down and looks as if Lucy had just pulled the football away from him. Calvin sits behind an overturned cardboard box with a sign that reads, "Insurance, 50¢." You half-expect it to also say, "The insurance salesman is IN."
Schulz's biggest influence on Watterson, however, is evident not in his brush stroke but in his sensibility. Watterson's Calvin talks with the wit and intelligence of an adult about a child's fears and dreams. "I've never understood people who remember childhood as an idyllic time," Watterson wrote in The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book, published in 1995. Like Charlie Brown, Calvin is a perpetual loser. He's terrible at school. His baseball teammates make so much fun of him that he quits the team. He's repeatedly bullied. He doesn't appear to have any real friends, other than his tiger Hobbes. Yet unlike Charlie Brown, Calvin doesn't seem to mind his fate. His main quality, other than imagination, is enthusiasm. Calvin, as befits his name, is a carefree fatalist.
Calvin's imaginative play is the central element of Watterson's strip, and the reality of his friendship with Hobbes is never resolved. The tiger's true nature is left ambiguous. Perhaps Calvin's parents just can't see Hobbes as he really is, or worse, their presence turns him into a plush toy. In a 1989 interview published in Comics Journal, the questioner mentioned to Watterson that Hobbes was a figment of Calvin's imagination. "But the strip doesn't assert that," Watterson said. "That's the assumption that adults make because nobody else sees him, sees Hobbes, in the way that Calvin does. … It would seem to me, though, that when you make up a friend for yourself, you would have somebody to agree with you, not to argue with you. So Hobbes is more real than I suspect any kid would dream up."
Calvin, too, is more real than the typical comic-strip character. He's a recognizably modern boy, a lazy TV-watcher who would rather play inside than outside. In some strips, he's astonishingly mean, while in others he's sickeningly cute—almost Family Circus-ish. Doonesbury's Garry Trudeau called Bill Watterson "the reporter who got it right" about boyhood, a statement Watterson disputed because he has no children. But Calvin is strikingly familiar, and like any friend or family member, his hold on readers grew with time.
Watterson refused to license a single Calvin and Hobbes product: no dolls, no greeting cards, no boxer shorts, no TV shows. Without specifically naming, say, Jim Davis of Garfield, Watterson scorned the cartoonists who enlist teams of assistants to draw their strips while they dream up new products for their corporate empires.

Watterson's first job after graduating from Kenyon College was as a political cartoonist at the Cincinnati Post, which fired him after only a few months. Unlike political cartoons, most Calvin and Hobbes strips exist in a timeless setting, so much so that Watterson's rare references to dated popular culture (at one point, Hobbes calls himself "New Wave") are jarring. Calvin and Hobbes discuss the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the nature of free will, not the merits of the Reagan administration. This strip, however, was published in February 1991, on the eve of the first Gulf War. "It's an incredibly rare privilege to have your work read by people every day, year after year," Watterson writes in the Complete introduction. "If you're inclined to go beyond jokes and say something heartfelt, honest, or thoughtful, you have a tremendous opportunity. And best of all, because the comics are generally regarded as frivolous, disposable entertainment, readers rarely have their guard up."
Beginning in May 1991, Watterson took a nine-month sabbatical from Calvin and Hobbes, the first of two such leaves of absence during the strip's 10-year run. When he returned, he demanded that newspapers run his Sunday strips full size—one-half of a newspaper broadsheet—which allowed him to experiment with unusual panel sizes and shapes. (Typically, comic-strip artists must use the top panels of their Sunday strips for a throwaway gag, in case newspaper editors choose to save space by running only the lower two-thirds of the strip.) Beginning in 1992, sometimes he would draw a single panel on Sundays. On other occasions, his Sunday strip would be filled with 20 small squares. In this strip, the third Sunday after Watterson's return in 1992, the "assembly line" snowballs are a clear metaphor for the comics, even as Watterson pokes mild fun at his own ambitions.
In the last years of Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson used his characters more and more to complain about the state of the newspaper comic strip. The economic power of the syndicates, he felt, encouraged cautious, committee-approved comics and market-tested strips for niche demographics. Calvin and Hobbes never became cautious, but the late Sunday strips, despite the visual inventiveness, occasionally felt formulaic: Calvin starts out in his imagination as a spaceman, or a dinosaur, or an insect, only to return to the dreary reality of the classroom or his parents' car in the final frame. Watterson says the post-sabbatical strips are his favorites, but you can also see him struggling, wondering what is left for his characters to do.
When Watterson returned from his second sabbatical, the first words of his Jan. 1, 1995, strip were, "The end of the Mesozoic Era …" At the end of that year, the last new Calvin and Hobbes strip would run. At the end of the Mesozoic Era, the dinosaurs went extinct. It's difficult not to think that Watterson knew at this point that soon his strip would be, too. He tried to reinvent the comic strip, to bring back the bold and colorful illustrations that filled newspapers before Schulz and Peanuts. But today, it is graphic novels that are filled with lively experiments, and the comic strip feels more moribund than ever.
On the last day of 1995, Watterson published his final Calvin and Hobbes strip. His two characters toboggan away to forever "go exploring." At the same time, Watterson seems glad to be liberated from the burdens of daily cartooning. In the Complete introduction, Watterson writes of the collected Calvin and Hobbes strips, "Together, they're pretty much a transcript of my mental diary … I meant to disguise that better." On his last day, Watterson didn't disguise much of his delight in abandoning the "familiar" for "a fresh, clean start." Or his desire to start painting full-time: "It's like a big white sheet of paper to draw on." With this strip, the last great newspaper comic strip ended after only a decade in print. "There will always be mediocre comic strips," Watterson said in a 1989 speech titled "The Cheapening of the Comics," "but we have lost much of the potential for anything else."

Requiem for a productive day at work...

Office Work, the ceaseless toil in darkened rooms which has kept workers occupied from nine-to-five each weekday(7 to 4 in my case!!) has finally been chucked into the "out" tray of life, after being crushed by the pressure of the many other vital office activities such as gossiping, playing minesweeper,sleeping, social-networking and staring out of the window.Office Work began - in recorded history at least - in Ancient Rome, whose rulers were among the first to decide that the task of sorting facts and figures, keeping records and preparing accounts was far too onerous for the priests who had been carrying it out (a strain perhaps evidenced by the fact that - whatever had actually happened - the facts, figures and records always showed the rulers were wrong and the priests were right and the accounts always showed the rulers owed the priests another 400 goat sacrifices and half the contents of the treasury).From the time of its birth, Office Work thrived, with Roman office workers throwing themselves eagerly into the tasks of gathering data on everything from the latest building works at Ostia to fluctuations in the lark's-tongue market and the rise and fall (and rise and fall) of the orgy sector, their enthusiasm reinforced by the head of human resources frequently being also the chief recruiting officer for the gladiatorial arena.

Over the following millennia, Office Work did well in the Near and Middle East, where it was supported by the extensive bureaucracies of Byzantium and the Islamic Caliphate, ensuring that there would always be a suitable workplace for hard-working scribes, accountants and a good place to keep middle-managers away from the rest of humanity. Things did not go so well in Europe, however, where Office Work proved less popular than having wars and dying of plague. It was not until the arrival of the mediaeval chancery that Office Work could find a place to go about its business in Europe and even after the Renaissance there was still confusion about the office's role, with the inhabitants of Florence foolishly deciding to fill their offices with paintings by Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael(as well as other artists who were not also members of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles..) and charge people to see them.Nonetheless, by the nineteenth century, Office Work was as popular in Britain as anywhere else, with clerks happily quitting their meagre beds, bidding fond farewells to their consumptive wives and crippled children and dashing into work at 5am in order to spend the next 14 hours perched before high desks on high stools, warming themselves in the glow from their candle as they toiled away for enlightened masters such as Mr E Scrooge to keep themselves out of the workhouse.

Meanwhile across the Atlantic, Adam Smith's capitalistic theories were beginning to be implemented in the creation of American megacorporations, one of which was memorable for making a car of any colour as long as it was black.After a couple of debilitating wars which put Europe back by a century but created the booming American economy and the american dream,Office work became the ideal for any self respecting republican.Steadily the lot of the office worker improved and Office Work became far more popular, reaching its height in the late 1980s and 1990s thanks to better working practices and employers .True, there were distractions - lists of "50 Best Sardar Jokes" had to be passed secretly from desk to desk, clandestine affairs had to be conducted, groups of secretaries had to gather with their coffees to ogle surprisingly well-toned male colleagues- but yet Office Work got done.

It was the rise of the office computer during the 1990s that was to prove Office Work's undoing. At first it seemed a boon - doing away at a stroke with a scores of trips to the stationery cupboard for a new pen and countless hours spent struggling to insert a new typewriter ribbon - but its effects were insidious. No sooner had Office Work found a vital job to be done than the computers would fail, condemning office workers to hours spent twiddling their thumbs and having paperball fights while the heroic forces of the IT department did battle with recalcitrant servers. Even when the computers functioned, matters were no easier for Office Work: with the advent of email, workers were forced to tear themselves away from their spreadsheets to catch up with the latest round-robins from their mates about hilarious new videos on YouTube or forward urgent requests from parents of dying children, and with the advent of Microsoft Windows untold ages simply had to be spent playing minesweeper and solitaire.

With the arrival of Web 2.0 and social networking software it was all over for Office Work: there was simply no time for completing spreadsheets, drafting documents or sending out request sheets and invoices when office workers had to spend all their time scrapping their friends on Orkut, listing their cats' favourite pasta shapes on MySpace and trying to fend off enquiries from middle-aged men pretending to be teenagers on facebook.Of course, the more priveledged amongst us were already benched, enjoying all of the above services without guilt So it was that Office Work passed out of existence, unnoticed and unmourned.

The last rites of Office Work will be performed at the municipal crematorium.No one will attend as they would all be exchanging the juicy gossip of other people's love lives on googletalk..

the video actually demonstrates how productive we managers are....

Chimes of freedom..

For over 40 years, Bob Dylan has remained the most influential American musician rock has ever produced and unquestionably the most important of the 1960s. Inscrutable and unpredictable, Bob Dylan has been both deified and denounced for every shift of interest, while whole schools of musicians took up his ideas. His lyrics - the first in rock to be seriously regarded as literature - became so well known that politicians from Jimmy Carter to Václav Havel have cited them as an influence. By personalizing folk songs, Dylan reinvented the singer/songwriter genre; by performing his allusive, poetic songs in his nasal, spontaneous vocal style with an electric band, he enlarged pop’s range and vocabulary while creating a widely imitated sound. By recording with Nashville veterans, he reconnected rock and country, hinting at the country rock of the ’70s. In the ’80s and ’90s, although he has at times seemed to flounder, he still has the ability to challenge, infuriate, and surprise listeners.I wont go on much about the man because his bio would not fit into this post.However, today i'll post some interesting trivia about some of his most famous songs, songs which have inspired countless millions across the globe; songs which certainly would figure amongst my favourites...

In April 1962, at Gerde's Folk City in New York's Greenwich Village, Bob Dylan gave a quick speech before playing one of his new songs: "This here ain't no protest song or anything like that, 'cause I don't write no protest songs," he said. He then sang the first and third verses of the still- unfinished "Blowin' in the Wind." Published in full a month later in the folk journal Broadside and recorded on July 9th, 1962, for his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, "Blowin' in the Wind" was Dylan's first important composition. It is also the most famous protest song ever written. As a songwriter, Dylan was still emerging from his Woody Guthrie fixation. But in a decisive break with the rhetorical, current-events conventions of topical folk, Dylan framed the crises around him in a series of fierce, poetic questions that addressed what Dylan believed was man's greatest inhumanity to man: indifference. "Some of the biggest criminals are those that turn their heads away when they see wrong and they know it's wrong," he declared in the Freewheelin' liner notes. Much later, Dylan revealed more about the mechanics of writing the song to the Los Angeles Times: "I wrote 'Blowin' in the Wind' in ten minutes, just put words to an old spiritual, probably something I learned from Carter Family records. That's the folk tradition. You use what's been handed down" -- and, of course, pass it on.

Knockin' on heaven's door :Three years had passed since his last studio album, and Dylan seemed at a loss. So he accepted an invitation to go to Mexico for Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, for which he shot a bit part and did the soundtrack. For a death scene, Dylan delivered this tale of a dying sheriff, who wants only to lay his "guns in the ground."This song is a personal favourite and has been covered by eric clapton, gun n roses and avril lavigne amongst others.

"I wrote it. I didn't fail. It was straight," Bob Dylan said of his greatest song shortly after he wrote and recorded it in June 1965. There is no better description of "Like a Rolling Stone" -- of its revolutionary design and execution -- or of the young man, just turned twenty-four, who created it.Al Kooper, who played organ on the session, remembers today, "There was no sheet music, it was totally by ear. And it was totally disorganized, totally punk. It just happened."
To this day, the most stunning thing about "Like a Rolling Stone" is the abundance of precedent: the impressionist voltage of Dylan's language, the intensely personal accusation in his voice ("Ho-o-o-ow does it fe-e-e-el?"), the apocalyptic charge of Kooper's garage-gospel organ and Mike Bloomfield's stiletto-sharp spirals of Telecaster guitar, the defiant six-minute length of the June 16th master take. No other pop song has so thoroughly challenged and transformed the commercial laws and artistic conventions of its time, for all time.During his British tour in May 1965, immortalized in D.A. Pennebaker's documentary Don't Look Back, Dylan began writing an extended piece of verse -- twenty pages long by one account, six in another -- that was, he said, "just a rhythm thing on paper all about my steady hatred, directed at some point that was honest." Back home in Woodstock, New York, over three days in early June, Dylan sharpened the sprawl down to that confrontational chorus and four taut verses bursting with piercing metaphor and concise truth. "The first two lines, which rhymed 'kiddin' you' and 'didn't you,' just about knocked me out," he confessed to rolling stone magazine in 1988, "and later on, when I got to the jugglers and the chrome horse and the princess on the steeple, it all just about got to be too much."The beginnings of "Like a Rolling Stone" -- and its roots in Dylan's earliest musical loves -- can be seen in a pair of offstage moments in Don't Look Back. In the first, sidekick Bob Neuwirth gets Dylan to sing a verse of Hank Williams' "Lost Highway," which begins, "I'm a rolling stone, I'm alone and lost/For a life of sin I've paid the cost." Later, Dylan sits at a piano, playing a set of chords that would become the melodic basis for "Like a Rolling Stone," connecting it to the fundamental architecture of rock & roll. Dylan later identified that progression as a chip off of Ritchie Valens' "La Bamba."Yet Dylan obsessed over the forward march in "Like a Rolling Stone." Before going into Columbia Records' New York studios to cut it, he summoned Bloomfield, the guitarist in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, to Woodstock to learn the song. "He said, 'I don't want you to play any of that B.B. King shit, none of that fucking blues,' " recalled Bloomfield (who died in 1981). "I want you to play something else." Dylan later said much the same thing to the rest of the studio band, which included pianist Paul Griffin, bassist Russ Savakus and drummer Bobby Gregg: "I told them how to play on it, and if they didn't want to play it like that, well, they couldn't play with me."Just as Dylan bent folk music's roots and forms to his own will, he transformed popular song with the content and ambition of "Like a Rolling Stone." And in his electrifying vocal performance, his best on record, Dylan proved that everything he did was, first and always, rock & roll. " 'Rolling Stone' 's the best song I wrote," he said flatly at the end of 1965. It still is

Inspired by Bruce Langhorne -- a session guitarist who played on several Dylan records -- "Tambourine Man" is the tune that elevated Dylan from folk hero to bona fide star. "[Bruce] was one of those characters. . . . He had this gigantic tambourine as big as a wagon wheel," Dylan said. "The vision of him playing just stuck in my mind." Written partly during a drug-fueled cross-country trek in 1964, the song was recorded on January 15th, 1965; five days later, based on a demo they'd heard, the Byrds recorded their own version. "Wow, man," said Dylan, "you can even dance to that!"

The times..they are a changin':"I wanted to write a big song, some kind of theme song, with short, concise verses that piled up on each other in a hypnotic way," said Dylan. "This is definitely a song with a purpose." Inspired by Scottish and Irish folk ballads and released less than two months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the song became an immediate anthem and was covered by artists from the Byrds to Cher. Said Dylan, "I knew exactly what I wanted to say and who I wanted to say it to."

Comfortably Numb..

Pink Floyd's the Wall is arguably one of the most intriguing and imaginative albums in the history of rock music. Since its release in 1979, and the subsequent movie of 1982, the Wall has become synonymous with, if not the very definition of, the term "concept album." Aureally explosive on record and visually explosive on the screen, the Wall traces the life of the fictional protagoinst, Pink Floyd, from his boyhood days in war-torn England to his self-imposed isolation as a world-renownedrock star, leading to a climax that is as questionably cathartic as it is destructive.
From the outset, Pink's life revolves around an abyss of loss and isolation. Born to a war-ravaged nation that takes his father's life in the name of "duty," and an overprotective mother who lavishes equal measures of her love and phobias onto her son, Pink chooses to build a mental wall between himself and the rest of the world so that he can live in a constant, alienated equilibrium free from life's physical and emotional troubles. Every incident that causes Pink pain is yet another brick in his ever-growing wall: a fatherless childhood, a domineering mother, a country whose king signs his father's death certificate with a rubber stamp, the superficiality of stardom, an estranged marriage, even the very drugs he turns to in order to find release. As his wall nears completion, each brick further closing him off from the rest of the world, Pink spirals into a void of insanity, cementing in place the final brick in the wall. Yet the minute it is complete, Pink begins to realize the adverse effects of total mental isolation, helplessly watching as his fragmented psyche coalesces into the very dictatorial persona that antagonized the world during World War II, scarred his nation, killed his father, and thereby defiled his own life from birth. Culminating in a mental trial as theatrically rich as the greatest stage shows, the story ends with a message that is as enigmatic and circular as the rest of Pink's life. Whether it is ultimately viewed as a cynical story about the futility of life, or a hopeful journey of metaphorical death and rebirth, the Wall is certainly a musical milestone worthy of the title "art."

the Wall is about the golden mean and realizing that what you do affects others just as much as the things that are done to you; it's about being an individual but not to the point of personal and social alienation; it's about how a person can be so consumed with hatred that he becomes the very thing he hates; it's about the danger of making gods of men; it's about the importance of communication, the void of excess, the fullness of the little moments; and above all, it's about personal, communal and social responsibility.The metaphor of "the wall" is not entirely difficult to parse, especially after having been lead up to it by the previous songs on the album. The album is so grand and intricate that many people are intimidated by the thought of interpreting the main symbol of the piece, thinking that there is more to the simple image than meets the eye. While some might argue that the metaphor is incredibly tricky, I believe that it's the very opposite. If anything, the main idea of the "wall" is quite simple. In the physical world, a wall is simply a collection of material that is used as a partition to separate two or more things. The metaphor of the wall in the album and in life holds to this definition. Because life is so daunting at times, we all have a tendency to distance ourselves from it. Television takes our minds off it, alcohol dulls it, drugs alter the reality of it; in each example, we use everything at our disposal to prevent us from truly connecting with our feelings, from fully experiencing life as both good and bad. As a society, and equally as humans, we have been conditioned to distance ourselves from pain, even if that pain helps us in the long run. As a result, we create metaphorical bricks in our minds for every disturbing situation in an attempt to distance ourselves from being hurt again, from feeling raw and vulnerable. Over time, our personal walls in our minds grow higher and we become more cynical, more jaded towards life and our connections with it. In a sense, every brick is another defense mechanism, something that dulls the pain of a bad situation and disconnects us from ever having to feel that way again. Simply put, the metaphorical wall is nothing more than its real counterpart: a collection of bricks that separate us from something else. Just as the walls of your house protect you from the environment (both rain and sunshine, the good and bad), the mental walls we erect protect us from being completely vulnerable to Life (once again, both the good and bad).

There are a lot of recurrent images and themes throughout the album and movie: bricks / the wall; hammers;white / red color scheme; faceless masks; worms;etc.

As with most art, Pink Floyd's concept album is a combination of imagination and the author's personal life. The album's germinated during the band's 1977 "Animals" tour when frontman Roger Waters, growing disillusioned with stardom and the godlike status that fans grant to simple rock stars, became disenchanted with the seemingly mindless audience and spit in the face of a concert-goer. Drawing on these feelings of adult alienation as well as the those springing from the loss of his own father during World War II, Waters began to flesh out the fictional character of Pink. The band's first frontman, Syd Barret, and the wild stories surrounding his drugged-out escapades and subsequent withdrawal from the world provided Waters with further inspiration for the moody rock-star Pink. The contributions of bandmates David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright, provided the final brush strokes for Pink, a contemporary anti-hero, a modern everyman struggling to find, or arguably lose, self and meaning in a century fragmented by war.

Make way for the Spider Pig!!!!!

Does something get better over time? Will the years age it or will it become better with time? With The Simpsons Movie time only made it more rewarding. 18 years in the making The Simpsons Movie is easily one of the best and funniest movies I’ve ever seen. The plot is compelling and honestly emotional while the story still carries jokes. For those nay sayers who think that The Simpsons has lost it’s comedic edge, well you just have to see The Simpsons Movie. This movie definitely did not disappoint. The diehard Simpsons fans as well as the casual movie goers will all be incredibly impressed with this big screen animated comedy. Matt Groening and company went all out for this one, creating a film that is FAR more than “just an hour-and-a-half version of the TV show.” The comedy is really top-notch.
The writers were at the top of their game when creating the classic satirical humor that the Simpsons has become famous for. There is a great mix of satire and low-brow humor – just enough to appease the Beavis’s of the world, as well as the Frasier’s. As with the television show, the movie does get fairly political at times, but keeps it funny and never gets preachy.
The creators kept a tight lid on the plot of the movie throughout, which really help to add to the excitement of the experience. As usual, Homer creates a monumental problem that threatens life in Springfield as we know it. It is then up to…well, Homer… to solve the problem. The plot centers around Homer and his newly acquired pet pig(this one's incredibly funny, spider pig!!!), as well as the Environmental Protection Agency and their attempts to solve the pollution problem of Springfield. After a series of events (including a giant dome over the city, a sink hole, and a near lynching by the townsfolk), the Simpsons end up in Alaska only to realize,( some more quickly than others!!), that Springfield is their home and is worth saving.Family values upheld again, God save America!!!

Matt Groening, the creator of the simpsons has managed to come up yet again with a movie which manages to entertain while bringing into focus the burning issues of our times and then making a satirical, wickedly humorous parody out of it all. The movie sticks to the the general stand taken by the simpsons over the years, taking digs at republican politicians and violation of civil rights( they managed to actually bush-bash without bringing bush into it!!!wicked!!!), devout church-goers ( It's not that the Simpsons is about atheist propaganda; its main target is not belief in God or the supernatural, but the arrogance of particular organised religions that they, amazingly, know the will of the creator!!), the whole brouhaha over the environment( somehow the movie manages to mock both sides, the rabid environmentalists as well as ignorant,polluting americans!!!),america's infatuation with superheroes(spider pig hahaha!!), as well as a host of other things and actually manages to make the viewer reflect on the sorry state of affairs even as he's rolling in the aisles with laughter.

A special mention of the quality of animation in the movie.Evidently the style is much richer and deeper. You can notice a lot more objects in the background, more detail on houses, more color in peoples hair and wordrobes, and other things that make the film just stand out. It’s a great example of 2D animation that is as good, if not better, than all of the 3D movies out there these days.
The greatest voice-over actors in the history of the universe came together to form this ensemble cast and their talents were really on display. From Dan Castellaneta and Nancy Cartwright to (my personal favorites) Hank Azaria and Harry Shearer, this cast is awesome. These are the standard Simpson’s voice-overs, but I think that they deserve TONS of respect for the work they’ve been doing over the years.
Tom Hanks and Green Day have hilarious cameos in the film, and Tony Mantegna and Albert Brooks are also cast.
This movie was really everything that I was hoping for. Hardly surprising,since the television show itself is, quite simply, one of the greatest cultural artefacts of our generation.And the movie brought together all of the great things that i love about the Simpsons and really left me wanting some more. The humor continues throughout, even after the credits roll. I loved it, and I highly recommend that you go see it.

The pursuit of excellence...

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:

Bring me my Arrows of desire:

Bring me my Spear:

O clouds unfold!Bring me my Chariot of fire!

- William Blake

Although I recognize that the word amateur often has pejorative connotations, I am personally drawn to the idea and ideal of the amateur. I generally prefer amateur to professional athletics and deplore the intrusion of a professional ethic into lower levels of athletics—until even youth sports are deadly serious, drained of the joy of the game by the relentless pursuit of quasi-professional athletic excellence. I am likewise suspicious of advertisers' attempts to convince me to hire professionals because as an amateur I would surely botch the job. We live in the age of the professional. I long for the age of the amateur, when a da Vinci could excel in science and art and a Newton and a Leibniz could not only each independently invent calculus but explore moral philosophy and theology as well.The word amateur derives from the Latin for "love." An amateur is at root a lover—a lover of sport, science, art, and so forth. It is this sense of amateur that I believe we must preserve if we are to achieve a more excellent way. There is much to recommend the professional ethic, including rigor, methodology, high standards of review, and so forth. Yet I hope we never cease to be amateurs in our professions—that is, passionate devotees of our disciplines.

The film Chariots of Fire is organized around the contrast between the professional and the amateur. The movie tells the true story of Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell—both gifted sprinters and both, eventually, gold medalists in the 1924 Olympics. Abrahams exemplifies the spirit of the professional: he is driven, highly coached, obsessed with winning and personal glory. Liddell, by contrast, embodies the spirit of the amateur: he is joyous, heartfelt, animated by the love of running and the glory of God. Abrahams runs on his nerves; when asked why he runs, he says winning is a weapon against pervasive anti-Semitism. Liddell runs from his heart; he says he runs for God.We see this contrast in their respective running styles. Abrahams' running is technically sophisticated and fierce; he scowls his way across the finish line. By contrast, Liddell runs like a wild animal across the hillsides. At a certain point in each race, Liddell leans back his head, opens his mouth, and turns on the jets—abandoning himself to the pure expression of his divine gift. This accurate portrayal of Liddell's running style symbolizes that his running is inspired. Inspire literally means "breathed into" by God. Liddell's inspired passion for his sport is captured by a famous line from the movie spoken to his sister Jenny, who is worried that he is forgetting his higher commitment to God and to an eventual mission to China:"I believe that God made me for a purpose. For China. But He also made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure. To give it up would be to hold Him in contempt. You were right. It's not just fun. To win is to honor Him."Liddell is required to choose between God and a possible Olympic gold medal. His qualifying heat for the 100-meter dash is scheduled for Sunday. Against great pressure, including from the Prince of Wales, he refuses to violate the Sabbath. Fortunately, he is given a chance to run the 400-meter dash instead and wins the gold.As an amateur runner, Eric Liddell exemplified a more excellent way to greatness—a way rooted in love for his discipline and the divine. I see Liddell as a model for the kind of excellence we should seek in our lives. Most of you will agree that we need to be committed not just to winning but to the larger purposes of existence. By the same token, we need not only to run like the wind, figuratively speaking, but to run for God; delight in the intellectual gifts that make us strong of judgment and quick of wit, yet exercise them in the context of our covenants; pursue our careers with vigor, not for laud but for love. Which is to say that we need to be professionally excellent but still retain the spirit of the amateur.

Ours should be a more excellent way to personal excellence.I am constantly reminded of my childhood whenever i think of excellence. I grew up in a town called Jamshedpur, which is home to the Tatas. Tatas exemplify everything about excellence in the ways which they operate their conglomerate. JRD Tata, the doyen of indian industry, was the driving force behind the Tatas' philosophy, where excellence is a way of life. In fact, every new manager in any Tata group company is required to understand two things during his induction : the Tata code of ehtics and the Tata model of excellence. Hence i refute my own argument and prove that professionalism and excellence can flourish symbiotically, albeit under extremely unique conditions.

But I have a deeper concern about the uncritical pursuit of excellence. Excellence was originally a pagan concept. It comes from the Greek areté, which means being the best, whether as an athlete or warrior, sculptor or shoemaker, poet or prostitute.Christianity has traditionally been ambivalent about this ideal of excellence. The desire to excel is generally wrapped up with pride, vanity, selfishness, and other attitudes opposed to Christian humility, meekness, and cooperation. Our contemporary ears may be tone deaf to the divine dissonance regarding the word excel here. We might say, "I thought God wants us to excel." Well, He wants us to be good. And He expects us to do our very best but not to lust for excellence as the world does.

A Hellenized Jew, Paul daily negotiated the tension between the Greek culture of excellence and the Christian culture of humility. He knew about the problematic pagan connotations of areté; he also knew its power. The phrase "a more excellent way" derives from Paul's first epistle to the Corinthian Saints. Corinth was the site of the Isthmian Games, whose fame rivaled that of the Olympics. Paul alludes to these games, encouraging the Saints to devote themselves to righteousness with the same dedication athletes bring to the pursuit of victory:Do you not know that in a race all the runners compete, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. Paul co-opts the Greek ideal of athletic excellence to describe the Christian quest for perfection. Christians must strive for excellence in the race of life—not for a fading crown of laurel leaves but for an immortal crown. Paul later describes his own life in such terms:I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that Day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing. For Paul, Christian excellence entails the same striving and effort as does Greek excellence. The Christian, however, doesn't look sideways at his competitors but upward to a "righteous judge" who passes out victor's crowns to all who love Him. This is a more excellent way to professional excellence. It is the way of pure love. Areté is grounded on agape—that is, excellence on charity. In fact, the phrase "a more excellent way" serves as a bridge to Paul's great discourse on charity. Charity is the more excellent way.My school ,Loyola, has a motto: In caritate et justitia, in charity and in justice. This summarizes the Jesuit way of life, where the pursuit of excellence is only superseeded by the pursuit of love towards humanity. May we bring this pure love to our professions and qualify for crowns that never fade.

The Travelling Wilbury's

The Traveling Wilburys were a folk rock supergroup consisting of George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty and Bob Dylan. During the short time they were together they recorded two albums, the first of which was nominated for a Grammy Award for Album of the Year.









Initially starting at a meal between Roy Orbison, George Harrison and Jeff Lynne, they got together at Bob Dylan's studio (Santa Monica, California) to record an additional track as a B-side for the single release of Harrison's "This Is Love". Tom Petty's involvement was by chance as Harrison had left his guitar at Petty's house. The song they came up with was "Handle with Care". However, the record company immediately realized it was too good to be released as a single "filler".
They enjoyed working together so much that they decided to create an album together. Written by all its members, the album was recorded over a ten-day period because Dylan was due to go on tour. Released in October 1988 (under various pseudonyms as half-brothers, supposed sons of Charles Truscott Wilbury, Sr.), the album Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 was in 1989 ranked #70 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 100 greatest albums of the 1980s.It was later nominated for a Grammy under the category Album of the Year. The death of band member Roy Orbison (on December 6, 1988) prevented further full collaborations; however, the band continued without him. The band even finished the video for "End of the Line". In the scene where the verse is sung by Orbison, the viewer is shown Orbison's guitar in a rocking chair followed by a photo of the late artist.
"Wilburys" was a slang term coined by Harrison and Lynne during the recording of Cloud Nine as a reference to recorded "flubs" that could be eliminated during the mixing stage (i.e. "'We'll bury' them in the mix"). The term was used again when the entire group was together. Harrison suggested "The Trembling Wilburys" as the group's name, but they decided to use "Traveling" instead.
After Orbison's death, there was undocumented speculation in the news media that Del Shannon might join the band, but his 1990 suicide precluded any possible involvement.
A charity single entitled "Nobody's Child", aimed at drawing attention to the orphaned children of Romania, followed in early 1990, also with an album with others. A second album titled Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3 was released in October 1990. However, the album met with less success. Some possible reasons for the skip from Vol. 1 to Vol. 3 include the fact that some consider Tom Petty's Full Moon Fever as Vol. 2 (Jeff Lynne, George Harrison, and Roy Orbison perform on the album), a nod to the many bootlegs titled "Volume 2" containing early studio mixes/alternative takes, to honor the death of Roy Orbison by not releasing the project started with Orbison, or as a simple joke. Harrison once claimed in an MTV interview that the band had written material for a Vol. 2, but the material was stolen before completion. In the book in The Traveling Wilburys CD/DVD, the name is credited to 'George being George'.

The 2007 revival



In the late 90s and early 2000s, the two Traveling Wilburys albums had limited availability and were out of print in most territories. Harrison, as primary holder of the rights, did not reissue them prior to his death. In June 2007, the two albums were reissued as a two CD and one DVD set, originally announced by Tom Petty on his XM radio show and in the February 2007 edition of Q Magazine in an interview with Jeff Lynne.
The Traveling Wilburys reissue resulted in two editions of the The Traveling Wilburys Collection release. Firstly, a standard edition (in a double Digipak packaging) which features both CD albums and a DVD with a documentary and music videos, along with a 16-page booklet, and secondly a deluxe boxed edition with the same CDs and DVD, plus extensive 40-page booklet and artist postcards and photographs. On the iTunes Store, a digital version of The Traveling Wilburys- The Collection contains both albums with bonus tracks, the twenty four minute documentary, and five music videos.
The release surprised everyone when it debuted straight at number one in the UK Album Charts . The collection entered the charts at 9 in the U.S.(Billboard Magazine, for the week ending June 30, 2007). The group also hit number one on the Australian album charts , Amazon's pre-order and sales list, and Apple's iTunes. The Traveling Wilburys Collection also debuted at #1 in the United World Chart. The album has apparnetly sold 500,000 copies worldwide during the first 3 weeks.



Members


The Traveling Wilburys of Volume 1 were:
Nelson Wilbury - George Harrison
Otis Wilbury - Jeff Lynne
Lefty Wilbury - Roy Orbison
Charlie T. Wilbury Jr. - Tom Petty
Lucky Wilbury - Bob Dylan
The Traveling Wilburys of Volume 3 were:
Spike Wilbury - George Harrison
Clayton Wilbury - Jeff Lynne
Muddy Wilbury - Tom Petty
Boo Wilbury - Bob Dylan
Jim Keltner, the session drummer and percussionist, was not listed as a Wilbury; however he is in some of the music videos. In the DVD released in 2007, he is given the Wilbury nickname 'Buster Sidebury'. Furthermore, overdubs to the unreleased tracks "Maxine" and "Like A Ship" credit Ayrton Wilbury, a pseudonym for Dhani Harrison

Literary influences and popular culture...

When John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973) was a child he heard the other kids in his neighborhood speaking a made-up language called Animalic.1 Tolkien contributed to the neighborhood's next imaginary language, Nevbosh ("new nonsense"). At age twelve Tolkien's mother passed away (his father having died when he was only a baby), and he found solace in the beginnings of what would become his life-long obsession: the construction of an elvish language. This fascination with languages eventually helped Tolkien attain a position as Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford, concentrating on philology. He spent most of his free time inventing "faerie languages": "Quenya" is reminiscent of Finnish, "Sindarin" of Welsh. As he crafted these languages Tolkien had a singular revelation: For a language to be "real," it has to consistently reflect a cultural perspective; the "story" of a culture. In other words, a real language both implies and demands a myth. For instance, the English word "excruciating" alludes to the story of the crucifixion of Christ.Tolkien published The Hobbit in 1936 and The Lord of the Rings in 1954. Both were written in service to Tolkien's imaginary languages, and he found it frustrating that most people assumed the reverse. In an article explaining his obsession called A Secret Vice Tolkien wrote, "The making of language and mythology are related functions. Your language construction will breed a mythology."Tolkien's work was a modestly successful "guilty pleasure" in academic circles for over a decade: professors and students were reluctant to admit how much they loved a story about "silly elf-and-dragon stuff." It wasn't until an American company illegally published a cheap edition in paperback that Tolkien's work finally reached the mainstream. By the mid-sixties The Lord of the Rings was probably the most influential fantasy story in the Western world, occupying the same position Star Wars did in the late seventies and Wagner's Ring Cycle did toward the end of the 19th century.Lucas has often cited The Lord of the Rings as a major influence on Star Wars. The superficial stuff is the most obvious, but the subtle lesson Lucas learned from Tolkien is how to handle the delicate stuff of myth. Tolkien wrote that myth and fairytale seem to be the best way to communicate morality - hints for choosing between right and wrong - and in fact that may be their primary purpose. Tolkien was devoutly Christian, and wrestled a bit with figuring out how to talk about The Christian Bible. He observed that the New Testament in particular is structured just like a myth, and wanted to be able to explore that without giving anyone the impression that he was belittling what he saw as a genuine divine revelation. Finally he decided that the Bible is a true myth, and stories like The Lord of the Rings are "sub-creations."Star Wars may be "Flash Gordon on the outside," and the structure is mostly Campbell, but the heart, the myth, may draw most deeply from Tolkien. That doesn't mean Lucas ripped Tolkien off!! Tolkien's primary inspiration for the tricky good vs. evil stuff was Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (14th century CE, author unknown), and Tolkien recorded his frustration at being unable to find the sources for that story. He had no doubt that such sources existed, and hoped to learn from them the same way Lucas learned from him. All great stories have deep roots.Here are a few of the obvious similarities between Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings:

Star Wars .Lord of the Rings.

Obi-Wan and Luke's lightsabers glow blue. Darth's lightsaber glows red.Gandalf and Bilbo's magic swords glow blue. The Balrog's magic sword flames red.
Obi-Wan Kenobi Gandalf
Darth Vader The Witch-King of Angmar
Emperor Palpatine Sauron
Obi-Wan digs Anakin's lightsaber out of an old wooden box, gives to Luke.Bilbo digs his magic sword out of an old wooden box, gives to Frodo.
Darth cuts off Luke's hand, which plunges into the abyss with Luke's lightsaber.Gollum bites off Frodo's finger, which plunges into the abyss with the One Ring.
Yoda foretells the future, and Luke must decide whether to help his friends or not. Yoda warns that he's seen only one possible future. Galadriel foretells the future, and Sam must decide whether to help his friends or not. Galadriel warns that she's seen only one possible future.
Darth tries to convince Luke to join the dark side, thereby bringing order to the galaxy.Saruman tries to convince Gandalf to join the evil wizards, thereby bringing order to Middle Earth
Mysterious figure throws back hood of robe to reveal that he's Obi-Wan.Mysterious figure throws back hood of robe to reveal that he's Gandalf
Luke: "I shouldn't have come, I'm endangering the mission." (Because Darth can sense him).Glorfindel: "It is you, Frodo, and that which you bear that brings us into peril." (Because Sauron can sense the One Ring)
Luke watches from across a chasm as his mentor Obi-Wan duels with Darth Vader using blue and red lightsabers.Frodo watches from across a chasm as his mentor Gandalf duels with a Balrog using blue and red flaming magic swords.
Heroes are walking through a forest when they're surprised by ewoks, captured at spear-point, then taken to a village in the trees.Heroes are walking through a forest when they're surprised by elves, captured at arrow-point, then taken to a village in the trees

Epic Inspirations for LOTR

Tolkien's deepest linguistic influence was probably his discovery of The Kalevala (roughly "Song of the Land of Heroes") in the original Finnish, a joy he compared to drunkenness. He used it as the primary model for his own language, Quenya. Tolkien was fascinated with the idea of a magic relic so powerful (and metaphorically flexible) that it could serve as the center of an entire heroic epic. The Kalevala's version of the One Ring, the Tsampo, is described so vaguely that to this day scholars debate about what exactly it is. (A ring? A staff? The Golden Fleece?) This enticing ambiguity probably influenced Tolkien's idea that a great story never gives the reader all the answers. He wrote: "Part of the attraction of the L.R. is, I think due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed." The Kalevala was collected into a single story in 1849 by Elias Lönnrot.

Another huge influence for LOTR was Beowulf. The earliest surviving epic poem written in English, Beowulf was most likely composed in the seventh or eighth century by an Anglian bard. Beowulf tells the story of a Scandinavian hero and his battles with the beast Grendle, Grendle's mother, and a dragon. Tolkien translated it, taught it, wrote papers about it... it is no exaggeration to say that Beowulf's current position as a "classic" in Western academia is due in no small part to Tolkien's efforts and prestige. Tolkien loved Beowulf because it was the first story he'd ever read by a Christian that portrayed the Pagans not as godless savages, but a sympathetic and noble people. Tolkien saw Beowulf as a magnificent reconciliation between the two cultures. He also loved the great heroes, monsters, swords and orcs, which he borrowed for his own stories. The halls of Beorn and Théoden are very closely modeled on Heorot, the hall of Beowulf's friend Hrothgar, king of the Danes.The basic plot for The Hobbit is probably borrowed from this offhand line in Beowulf "...a dragon on the prowl from the sleep vaults of a stone-roofed barrow where he guarded a hoard; there was a hidden passage, unknown to men, but someone managed to enter by it and interfere with the heathen trove. He had handled and removed a gem-studded goblet; it gained him nothing, though with a thief's wiles he had outwitted the sleeping dragon; that drove him into rage, as the people of that country would soon discover."

The other major source for The Hobbit is probably Tolkien's favorite childhood story, The Story of Sigurd, as published in The Red Fairy Book (1890) by Andrew Lang (1844-1912). Hobbit also includes a few ideas from H. Rider Haggard (1856-1925), in particular from King Solomon's Mines (1885) and She (1886).Tolkien even borrows his title from Beowulf: line 2345 reads, "Oferhogaode ða hringa fengel," usually translated "Yet the prince of the rings was too proud..." This suggests Beowulf's trait of sharing gold rings and other spoils of war with his men, thus earning their loyalty. I strongly suspect that Tolkien translated this title of Beowulf's as "Lord of the Rings."

The Lord of the Rings was also influenced by Le Morte D'Arthur, the "definitive" story of King Arthur written by Sir Thomas Malory in 1485. Tolkien considered it a shame that the English thought of King Arthur as their central myth, since he felt it was "essentially French." One of his goals in writing LOTR was to give England a myth which was truly English. Tolkien's favorite King Arthur story was Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (14th c., anonymous). The title of the third volume in LOTR, The Return of the King is probably inspired by the common British legend that King Arthur, like Christ, will one day return to reward good and punish evil (a title probably echoed by Return of the Jedi).

While Tolkien borrowed the form of the epic and several great ideas from The Kalevala, Beowulf and Le Morte D'Arthur, his greatest influence was probably Norse mythology. The Lord of the Rings reinvigorates ideas from every major work of the Norse cannon: The Elder (Poetic) Edda (composed between 800-1200 CE, authors unknown), The Younger (Prose) Edda (Snorri Sturluson, 1222 CE), The Volsunga Saga (13th c, author unknown), Das Nibelungenlied (13th c, author unknown), Thidreks Saga (c. 1200 CE, author unknown), and Heimskringla or The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway (Snorri Sturluson, c.1225 CE).

So its apparent how epics of yore have inspired the blockbusters of each generation. If the Lord of the Rings was popular during the 50's and 60's, Star wars was the magnum opus of the 70's and 80's. So is it fair to blame a certain Ms.Rowling of pilferage simply because she adapted the best of literature into a tale which caught the attention of the internet generation and defined modern fantasy fiction? I think not, and whatever criticism Harry potter and his adventures have been subjected to fails to see the impact rowling created in young and old minds alike, literally bringing reading back into fashion.