Concerning Hobbits

      I was among many people who were chomping at the bit for Peter Jackson's first of three films of the iconic story to finally hit the theaters.  I was in no way disappointed either.  I thought it was great, from the opening scenes of the destruction of Erebor to the last scene where Thorin realizes the value of Mr. Baggins.  Waiting for the other films is going to be difficult.  I want to see them now.   
      Another movie I liked was the Avengers (which after watching I had to watch all the other films in the series again - Iron Man 1 &2, The Hulk, Captain America, and Thor).  The interactions between the various egos of the superheroes was entertaining.  I laugh every time I see the scene where Iron Man/Tony Stark calls Hawkeye "Legolas."  The Whole scene where Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow is tied to a chair being interogated also makes me laugh.  The bad guys get a phone call, and puzzled, they say to her, "It's for you."  They put the phone by her ear, she tell the caller "not right now, I'm interrogating these guys for some vital information."  The bad guys look more puzzled, and then she proceeds to kick their butts, break from the chair, and kick some more butt, all the while still holding the phone under her ear.  Cobie Smulders did well too in her role - quite a difference from her regular role on a TV sit com.
      Jack the Giant Killer was a great take on an old story from the world of the Brothers Grimm, actually it was a combination of two old, classic stories.  Modern CGI and other special effect just made all those images come alive that I had in my head as a child listening to my mother, or grandmother reading them to me.  That was the same for the Hobbit or any of the Peter Jackson films of Tolkein's stories.
      I like movies like this - action, sci-fi, fantasy.  Unfortunately, the movie critics usually don''t.  In fact they usually stick their noses up at movies like this and say bad things about them.  In his defense I will say that Roger Ebert (R.I.P) wasn't usually like that.  He didn't slam a film just because of its genre.  The average critic though, like the ones that have a weekly report on MPR hate films like this.  They hate the genre, and then say things like, "It was so boring, because it was so predictable (of course it was predictable - this story has been in print now for almost 80 years [The Hobbit] and the Grimm stories have their roots going back many centuries to the Black Forest of Germany) the bad guys do bad things, and after a few troubles the good guys go and defeat them.  Way too predictable."  Then they say something about being bored to tears watching it and wishing they had their two hours back.  Then they go on to talk about the movies they did like, and by their description, they are movies I would never want to watch.  ""The Spit Cup" was set in Victorian England an is about a house servant for a rich, old Lord and head of a university board of regents, whose job it is to follow the old man with a cup to catch his drool, because the old man had a condition that caused him to drool all the time.  And the spit cup itself was a metaphor for humanity and the struggle for......"  ENOUGH!!  There's no way I would ever watch that.  Okay, so that movie isn't a real film.  I just took it from an old SNL skit with Michael Palin from the mid 70's, but the films the critics like to watch are surprisingly like this.

      Now concerning Hobbits.  Archeologists and paleoanthropologists got all excited a few years ago when the found the remains of the Flores Man in south east Asia.  They were a people about 3 1/2 feet tall who lived in caves and hunted Komodo dragons.  In time they found that these people were not homo sapiens at all, and some skeptics said there was something wrong with the bones and how they all fit together.  Then everyone's visions of a paleolithic Hobbiton and Bagshot Row with Bag End just disintegrated.
      So why doesn't anyone ever do a report about the people of Khirokitia.  They were a people living on Cyprus during the Neolithic.  Their houses were round (not their doors) and were dug into the ground (but only a few feet as a foundation).  And the people were very short.  They have changed the web page since I first visited it, but their height used to be measured in mm.  I wrote it down in my notes then and it was 152 mm for females, and 164 mm for males.  We Americans don't do well with metric measurements so I had to mark it out on a doorway.  These people were very short.  They have since changed the page, as I said, and now the heights of the people are measured in inches, but the new measurements are about 6" taller for each.

      Their houses were really small too.  They were between 1.4 m, and 4.8 m across.  You would have to be tiny to fit in there.  They were cylindrical in shape with domed roofs.  They were made of cut stone and white washed over with plaster. 
       And just like the people of the Shire, these people were also farmers.  Their farm implements have also been found in the excavations. 
      So here's a society of people who were all very short, and they were truly and undeniably human.  They liked the pastoral life, just like the Hobbits.  I wonder if they liked the "pipeweed," or if they brewed some kinds of ales.  I'm sure though that they didn't dress in Georgian period weskits.  These weren't a bucnh of non-human rock throwers, whose very existence is disputed.  These people really existed, and were really a race of human. They really were Hobbits as close as the definition can come (do you think they had hairy feet?)  .