Actually, that but should probably be an and, since lack of recognizable branding is a major selling point for me. How I abominate all those swooshes and bitten apples and those little badges on the fronts of automobiles! What kind of culture tolerates this stuff? I buy brandslop* when necessary but always give it the Cayce Pollard treatment where possible. The main reason I'll never ever buy an iPhone again is that even if you remove or cover up all the logos, kids can still recognize it from the way the camera lenses are arranged or something. Now I've got some no-name Chinese thing, fully Pollardized, and feel much more at ease with it.
My new shoes are almost completely Pollardized -- the logos were stitched on and could be easily removed -- so all that remains is ARNOR written on the back.
I've been transcribing all of Daymon Smith's "ancient words" to a blog preparatory to tackling a linguistic analysis. (The main benefit of the blog format is the sidebar links for cross-referencing where the same word is used elsewhere. Today I started the ninth set of words, where Daymon's translation twice (9:2 and 9:4) references the "Arnor Stone" in contexts where (although Stones of Arnor are a thing, too) it is pretty clearly a typo for "Anor Stone."
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10 comments:
My Words blog had zero views when I published this post. Now, less than an hour later, it has nearly 1000 views. This post itself has a whopping 8 views. How does that work?
Glad to have escaped the walled garden of Apple? The comparative freedom of choice is why I've stuck with Android devices, even though Google is a pain.
Hrm, maybe the webcrawlers were excited to find a new site? I'll be interested to see how your analysis develops. (It looks like a suitable project for a TiddlyWiki, but the tradeoff probably isn't worth it.)
I only use my phone for basic functions that are pretty much the same on any platform, so I don't care. As long as it (1) has a long battery life and (2) looks nondescript, that's all I'm looking for. My present phone outperforms Apple on both criteria.
Speaking of Tiddly, how's the Rest coming along?
I've just noticed that this is my 2222nd post on this blog.
Nice quads!
Ah, other projects have pushed the Rest onto the back burner for a while. A few drafts need some reworking, and before that's done there's little point transferring wiki-ised info from my offline setup.
Thanks! I've been doing lots of squats.
About the Rest, yeah, that's what I'd figured. Take your time.
Not sure what you can do about this but I can't navigate past Words 2:9 on the sidebar. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/gmn0ya7j4bz5taryi2o2m/Screenshot-2026-02-27-at-4.25.00-PM.png?rlkey=7qnjebk0zvpvdwio0347o2nmx&dl=0
I'll see if I can find a way to fix that. Perhaps it's too many posts in one month, so I'll have to backdate some of them.
Leo, I've added links in the sidebar manually.
Black shoes with the word Arnor on them brought to mind the Witch King of Angmar. Seems like a fairly strong symbolic reference, and makes some sort of sense since he and the other Nazgul were colleagues, of sorts, of Pharazon during those last days of Numenor. As you would have read in Daymon's version Words of the Faithful, while Pharazon was causing havoc on Numenor, the Witch King was causing his own mess in the land that would ultimately become Arnor after the destruction of Numenor. And in Tolkien's writings, the Witch King ultimately destroys Arnor, which was the Northern Kingdom of the Dunedain (the Numenorean descendants). In Daymon's writings, we also see the Nazgul in general actively taking part in events on Numenor during Pharazon's final days.
The Witch King has a unique place in my story, since it was he that Eowyn and Merry killed at the Pelennor Fields, and he would (I think) have been the first Nazgul/ evil Being to have found and used the Ithil Stone when he took over Minas Ithil and renamed it Minas Morgul, since the Ithil Stone was kept there (and then ultimately it was given to Sauron for him to use during events of LOTR).
So, Eowyn and the Witch King (and the Ithil Stone) have an interesting history, and so it is also interesting to see a symbol that points to him here. Many guess that the Witch King was a "Black Numenorean", or a King's Men, but I don't think we know. Anyway, those guys have come up before on your blog in the form of that Black Feather on your doorstep a couple years ago.
The Nazgul actually ties, I think, to your recent dream of Pterodactyls but I will leave that comment on that post. For this, since black is so heavily associated with the Nazgul, it is likely why I saw the symbolism of their leader so readily in your Arnor shoes.
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