geekosystem

Death from the skies! There's a video on YouTube right now that allegedly shows a golden eagle swooping down in a park and attempting to carry off a small child. Golden eagles are one of the largest birds in North America, but could one actually lift a baby? Nope. They can't. There were few things about this video that made us suspicious, and with good reason. It turns out it was fake after all.

Fans of The Lord of the Rings each have their own special way of celebrating the countdown to yet another film installment of their favorite franchise. Some opt to dress like hobbits and refuse to shave their feet until opening night, and others devote themselves to speaking nothing but Elvish for any and all social interactions. Portland's hometown hero the Unipiper, on the other hand, takes it one step further by combining his famous schtick -- playing the bagpipes whilst riding a unicycle -- with his reverence for Gandalf the Grey. What we ultimately get is too much nerdiness for one video to possibly contain!

Fun fact: The Lord of the Rings trilogy is about 3,000 times longer than the average Dwarves song. Also: Facepalm. (via Reddit)

The 5 Best Cults (Neatorama) The Geopolitics of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? (The Atlantic) Hobby Shop Guy Rips of Peter Jackson for $189k (A Distant Soul) Yoda Bathrobe Pales in Comparison (Fashionably Geek) Decorate Your Walls With Giant Marvel Prints (Comics Alliance) The Colonel's Secret Recipe Revealed! (Internet Today) Gandalf is Better than Dumbledore (Geeks are Sexy) (pic via Fashionably Geek.)

Not a trollquote: In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Sir Ian McKellen disappointed Lord of the Rings slash-fic enthusiasts everywhere when he put forth the theory that there's no sex in Middle-earth. McKellen, who is gay and an outspoken advocate for gay rights, laughingly brushed off the interviewer's question as to whether Gandalf would be savvy about gay bars in Tolkien's fictional universe. McKellen:

Tolkien was the only authority on that world, and I don’t think he was very interested in sex, at least not with the evidence of Lord of the Rings. Other people can read into it what they like or what they can. But I don’t really see it. Although I have heard speculation that Sam and Frodo might be an item, but I don’t think Tolkien really saw it that way. I don’t think Peter Jackson does either.

(Vanity Fair via MetaFilter)

He's Gandalf and Magneto, and we will never get over it. (via Reddit.)

"It's all fun and games until your ex-girlfriend tells everyone the password to your friends-only LiveJournal account is the first letter in the names of each of the Ring-bearers, listed in the order they held it, including Sauron, Isildur, Smeagol and Tom Bombadil but neither Deagol nor Gandalf." --From Greg Ryan's excellent McSweeney's piece "Events, Over A Life Span, That Precipitate The End Of Fun And Games." (Thanks, Hannah.)

This past weekend, Sir Ian McKellen attended an event in Hyde Park to protest the policies of Pope Benedict XVI on the Pope's very first state visit to the UK. Shortly thereafter, the photo to the above left began to make its way around the tubes, wherein McKellen wears a shirt that says "I'm Gandalf and Magneto. Get over it!" The Internet being the Internet, it "went viral," as the kids say, with the picture getting more than 250,000 views on Twitpic, close to 200,000 more when it was ripped to Imgur, and who knows how many more via blogs and other third-party sources.

Indeed, it is a pretty awesome shirt. However, it is not the shirt that McKellen actually wore to the anti-pope rally: Rather, he wore the shirt to the above right ("Some people are gay. Get over it!") which actually makes a lot more sense considering 1) that the typeface changes in the Gandalf shirt, but is consistent in the real thing; 2) that the protester behind him is wearing the same shirt in both instances; and 3) that as mind-blowing as is the Gandalf-Magneto singularity presented by McKellen, the Church's positions with respect to homosexuals are a bit easier to protest. All good Photoshop fun, maybe, but it apparently actually fooled a lot of people; The Advocate ran the shopped McKellen shirt on their website before correcting it, and lots of social media sharing of the picture takes it at face value. As The Daily What wrote when they debunked the 'shoop earlier today: "Before this goes so far that it gets picked up by the Times ... right - real; left - fake." It's instructive how this happened: