Wednesday, September 14, 2022

So My Movie Ends, And...

      I have been watching the Peter Jackson films of "The Hobbit" a little at a time and I finished the middle one last night.  It's innocent enough so far, essentially what you'd get if you turned a bunch of bright, High School-aged, D&D-playing Tolkien fans loose on the book with a big budget and instructions to not get too far from the basic plot while expanding it: lots of action sequences, many only tangentially related to the original; a kind of a love-story sub-plot; more orcs (and uglier); increased foreshadowing of the later books and so on.

      Like the current Amazon series, either you're happy getting some extra time in a version of Middle-Earth or you aren't -- and if you aren't, go do something else you like better.

      As the credits rolled, I stopped the stream and realized there was a loud, rattly motor running outside.  I went to the windows to look and it was a single fire truck, all lit up.  This had me worried about our next-door neighbor, but no, the firemen were walking around a house across the street and a few doors down, shining bright lights around and generally checking the place out.  As I watched, they started straggling back to the truck, slamming doors as they climbed aboard.  When the last one boarded, they drove away, leaving the house pitch-dark.  I have no idea what that was about.  The place looks fine in the morning light.

1 comment:

fillyjonk said...

a wired-in alarm that automatically calls the fire department triggered by mistake? I remember YEARS ago, in the old house, my parents had one of those, a spider built a nest in it, and it started going off one night. They took turns sitting by the control panel all night because there was a "click" right before it went off and they could hit the reset.

In the morning they called the company to come fix it, that's when the spider was found.

Anyway: maybe it was a false alarm.