Results tagged “reports” from Overlooked
If I weren't a lady, I'd call him Babe-raham Lincoln.
In honor of America's birthday, we are delighted to celebrate Abraham Lincoln, an icon known both for his contributions to the Union and to the illustrious legacy of facial hair. This coif of beard-with-no-mustache (also known as a "chin curtain") has been an inspiration for thousands of Amish and sexual deviants everywhere (I strongly advise you against clicking that link unless you wish to have your idyllic visions of Mr. Lincoln destroyed forever).
Fun Facts About Honest Abe
From all of us at ShopWiki, we wish you a happy and safe Independence Day, and a belated Happy Canada Day to our friendly neighbo(u)rs to the north! May your holidays be as glorious as the hair atop Lincoln's chin!
He sets my Middle-earth on fire!
Today for Hunk Friday, I am taking a cue from the eminent Armsweat and writing a report on our subject at hand: JRR Tolkien.
When it comes to shaping generations of delicate, asthmatic, small-handed man-children, only a smattering of names come to mind: William Shatner, E. Gary Gygax, Stan Lee, that knight at RenFair. But no other historical figure was more memorable than JRR Tolkien, the author of the Lord of the Rings novels.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892 in Bloemfontein, South Africa to Arthur Reuel Tolkien and his wife Mabel. The couple soon discovered that scolding John Ronald Reuel often left them short of breath, and so took to calling him "JRR" as an homage to their favorite character on "Dallas", the wildly popular TV series. JRR himself was a "Beauty and the Beast" fan and preferred to simply be called Ronald.
For the true hunk-loving hobbyist
At the age of three, Arthur died of rheumatic fever and the young family went to live with relatives in England. Mabel was entrusted with Ronald's early education and allowed him to read a great deal. He was a fan of stories about Native Americans, but disliked Treasure Island after an ill-fated trip to the zoo wherein he was verbally abused by an irritable mynah bird. This left him distrustful of exotic birds in general ("cantankerous bastards" was his preferred manner of describing them) and the bird in question actually served as the model for Gollum in "Lord of the Rings".
Ronald was something of a rebellious youth and fell in line with a gang calling themselves the TCBS: "Tea Club and Barrovian Society". The members met often to drink tea at a store called Barrow's, and later on as they became more and more caffeine-addicted, they took to drinking tea illicitly in the school library. Many a TCBS member was sternly reprimanded for leaving water marks on the library tables, but their thirst for Earl Grey could not be slaked.
Of course, this very derring-do made Ronald a hit with the ladies, but he only had eyes for Edith Mary Bratt, three years his senior. However, his guardian saw her as an unnecessary distraction and forbade Tolkien from corresponding with her until he was twenty-one. Thankfully, his crippling tea addiction occupied him until then, but on his 21st birthday following a massive detox, he proposed. Edith, in the meantime, was convinced that she had been discarded and had become engaged to another man, but Tolkien won out in the end. The two were married in 1916, Edith carrying a bouquet made of chamomile flowers.
After marriage, Tolkien took a job at the Oxford English Dictionary working on the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter W. It was a tedious job, even for a cunning linguist such as himself, and his demons eventually came back to haunt him: within months he was up to 8 cups of Darjeeling a day. These caffeine highs and lows laid the seed for the three volumes of the Lord of the Rings, especially the Ring-wraiths, a product of a hallucination involving rabid mynah birds.
Sadly, Tolkien died in 1973, but his legacy is kept alive to this day by hunk-enthusiasts and gawky adolescents alike. JRR Tolkien, we salute you!
