Up indeed betimes, with our feral Chanticleer steadily proclaiming the changing Orizontality of the Sonne--

Dame Pertilote's wilde paramour and my Apple clock together telling me it's 5:47 a.m.--I will soon be abroad, a-bus, and Taking Care of Business:  paying back an installment on the Great Debt I was suffered to incur from Housing Solutions, Inc. last summer (on the occasion of having my apartment fumigated for bedbugs, which Thank-the-Lord worked); rendering unto Netflix, by return mail, their DVD copy of The Fellowship of the Ring.  About which, not to seem churlish, I am as well pleased as anybody might be who has read the beloved original, maybe, thirty times--After all, that is Strider, and Boromir, and Legolas (in the persons of Viggo Mortensen, and Sean Bean, and Orlando Bloom who portray them) in the flesh.  But the too-early intrusion of Arwen and the exclusion of Glorfindel at the ford of Bruinnen is a monstrous fucking  goddamned blasphemous usurpation. And if Peter Jackson should protest that otherwise the narrative had been too exclusively male, without gender balance, I would answer, for him maybe, but, for those of us who constitute the vast majority of the Lord of the Rings' readership and viewership (and let's face it, girls don't understand TLOFTR, or get it, or like it),  having a male (high) elf (lord) set Frodo on his horse, Asfaloth, to ride  through the ford of Bruinnen and to call down the destruction of its torrent on the steeds of the ring-wraiths is important work, in which girls, be they elf-maidens or no, can, and should, have no part.  (Because they're fuckin' dip-shit girls.)