Mathematizing The Lord Of The Rings

Fundamental entities

Set of parameters: P(θ) = {θ₁, θ₂, ..., θ_n} = P^θ

Set of constants: C(φ) = {φ₁, φ₂, ..., φ_n} = C^φ

Constitutional entities

Problem space: I_P(x, y, z, t) = I_{P(x, y, z, t)}(P_i^θ, C_k^φ)

Solution space: I_S(x, y, z, t) = I_{S(x, y, z, t)}(P_j^θ, C_l^φ)

Active entities

F(θ, φ): I_P(x, y, z, t) --> I_S(x, y, z, t)

E(x, y, z, t) = Ē

Game definition

Players

P^F: Frodo Baggins / P^S: Samwise Gamgee / P^P: Peregrin Took / P^M: Meriadoc Brandybuck / P^G: Gandalf / P^A: Aragorn / P^L: Legolas / P^I: Gimli / P^B: Boromir / P^R: Faramir / P^D: Denethor / P^S: Saruman / P^Z: Sauron / P^H: Gollum

Fixtures

C^S: Shire / C^B: Bree / C^W: Weathertop / C^R: Rivendell / C^C: Caras Galadhon (Lothlorien) / C^M: Moria / C^O: Rohan / C^H: Helm’s Deep / C^G: Gondor / C^L: Morgul Vale / C^Z: Mordor / C^U: Orodruin / C^I: Isengard

Problem function

I_P, _Ē = I_P(x, y, z, t, u)[({P^F, P^S}, {P^R, P^H}), ({P^P, P^M, P^G, P^A, P^L, P^I, P^B, P^D}, {P^S, P^Z})]

Solution function

I_{S, Ē} = I_P(x, y, z, t, u)(P^F, C^U)

As simple as that.

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="Making sense of Middle Earth"][/caption]

The Blog Pact: A poem

What’s the use of a blog pact /
When no one will blog /
They always say they will /
But no one has blogged /

The weeks turned into months /
The months turned into years /
The pen has run out of ink /
But the canvas is empty and in tears /

Like a brave warrior with sword /
Turned away from his destiny /
I blog like a lost weapon /
Craving for a just adversity /

If only someone would write /
I might have something to read /
I write and I write and I write /
And it’s become like a selfless deed /

One thousand pages are filled /
One hundred quills have withered /
Twenty thousand eyes have been pleased /
Only two have witnessed any work /

It’s your choice to write or not /
It’s your word to give or take /
There is no oath ever levied /
Although it helps if a promise is made /

The eyes are lonely and the road barren /
Each day’s demands are a sullen pique /
The pages are many and the ink awaits /
I must write now so you can read and sleep /

Related Articles

• Poem: God May be Out There, But Very Busy (fmpoetry.wordpress.com)

Ode To An Ex

Found in an old chat log.

--

I'm always wrong and you're always right,
When I come looking you're out of sight!
I could be done with your rapidfire crap,
But I'm only waiting for the jaws of the trap!

When you talk so much you fucking blink
Like a skunk let loose a quick fucking stink.
You think you're a smart and pretty lass but
Your birdbrain's buried in yo ex's horny ass.

Throwing pillows like you're a cute little girl
Show babydoll your bra and she's gonna hurl
We're waiting to yell when you walk down that street
Reply beetch! Reply beetch!

The Voice

There are many different kinds of voices. Some you can hear, some you can't, some that seem to boom into your cavernous head from all sides, some that seem to sprout from the centre, some that come and go as they wish, some that you bump headlong into like an innocuous but ubiquitous lamppost. Then, there are those voices that are not inside your head at all, but at the other end of the phone call you're attending to right now.

These voices have bodies, I'm given to believe, something to which a head is affixed to, and through the head, words are spoken. For the record, I don't like spoken words. One moment they're there, the next moment they're gone. I hate that kind of indecisiveness - unless of course they're forced into a small box called a "voice recorder" or if they're carved into stone by a manic engraver. The voice in my earpiece is now telling me about what a bad morning it had.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Early morning... blues?"][/caption]

How do voices have bad mornings? Are they blown out into the world through a snot-smeared windpipe? Or do they bear messages as murky as the mind that conceived them? Actually, the voice in my ear seemed to be suffering both maladies: expletives four to fourteen letters long were clamoring for an audience with blatant disregard for the Doppler effect, and the immutable moss-green of the phlegm I could almost hear.

Whether voices can have bad mornings or not, I can. I was having one then and there. First call I get in the morning is from a "friend" complaining about how her HDD crashed and how I could be responsible for it. I was stupefied when I heard that, and when she went on to inform me that the catastrophe befell her after I forwarded an email from Reuters, I snorted. That was the signal, I'm thinking, for the barrage of mucosal sludge.

Even so, I don't like being looked down upon or frowned upon for hitting out at a messenger who's brought me bad news. That is unfair, to expect a receiver to receive all kinds of glop and remain silent. Come to think of it, that'd be the psychopathic silently-thinking cold-bloodedly-conspiring contemplatively thumb-twiddling Mephistopheles down the hall. An honest man should be allowed to lash out, to have it over with. The mistake lies with the dolt who set the messenger on his journey. He didn't sponsor any armour.

What can you do against voices? What can you do against something that seems to come from a head far, far away? You can shout back, sure, but that's head versus head. Can you trap voices in small black boxes? I don't think so. What's going to be in the box when you reopen it later is a rant without beginning or end, eviscerated neatly out of a morning it had sought to destroy but now, doing nothing to the evening.

How do you knock the serrated stiletto out of a voice that's waiting to stab you in the back?

A posse ad esse!

Any reality is better than this one.

Nebula had lifted early, his sanguine underbelly hoisted with the rising currents of this cauterized morning. The blue and green rays of light sprang through the miasma of constriction, vacillating between some vague yellow of progress and another pink proclivous of preservation, infinite lines bent around a myriad wrong choices and half as many right ones, bastard bubbles of turbulence surfacing here and there, intermittently. I turned away, shielding my windows with two vulcanized tentacles that seemed to have prostituted their comfort for subconscious pleasure; despite the desuetude, they stiffened in a trice to their embryonic vigour.

Smoke was soon at hand, seeking some sign of a susurration, some sedulous sweep of season over my stirring silhouette. I was a weak guest, a mannequin doomed in the confines of her hospitality to announce prowess, to proclaim achievement, to provide attention, to attain perfection, the convolution conspicuous for everyone to contemplate on, for my soul to smoulder under, for in the absence of fight, I am slave - united not by blood to some ancient sinew of perseverance but by endurance to a thew of rebellion; unfortunately, the cerise fruit needed years to ripen, to turn chartreuse. Until that spell conceded, I could and would survive in that receptacle of patience, walled in by a past fecund with enlightenment. Also, coffee, fulminated.

Propaganda occluded, with errorless aplomb and occupation, every orifice of audacious idiocy in the abode, a wild lope across the thousand tiles leaving a spoor of precipitous overawe assured by augmented obeisance or a reservoir of obloquy accrued by authority, all so voluptuously asinine as to leave some Communist speaker tower somewhere horribly jaundiced. A momentous blow to the occiput being the cause, so astounding was the devotion to routine that all the reproofs of religion unduly lolled forgotten under mountains of conciliatory atrocities, held by the throat in the throes of commitment.

Mansuetude was marked the hour of the coming of Sister, a distant vengeance stained on the blunt side of a knife, dried like dead blood, and it was dusk. Any reality, was it prophesized, to have been better than this, for in this hour the verdict is altered: she is the first among equals and second to none. Nefariously humbling was the spirit encumbering my desuetude shoulders – as had advanced the quick night. I suddenly found myself rapt on the other end of the swing of time, nay, a pendulum, and all was reset, for what had commenced with putative note now had crescendoed with palliative counterpart. Servabo fidem! Hic sunt leones! A posse ad esse!

A posse ad esse! A posse ad esse!

Notes

The above is intended to be a work of surrealist creative writing. Each paragraph describes a different time of day, different people, different objects, different conflicts - all at the same time. Feel free to interpret, to deduce, to infer, to be offended even.

1. Most of the words in the second paragraph, commencing with "Nebula...", place a stress on the alveolar ridge when they're pronounced - making it sound reinvigorating and aggressive when read aloud (alveolar plosive, dental plosive, uvular trill).


2. The first line of the third paragraph has an obvious alliteration in the first line.


3. The second line of the third paragraph has an alternating alliteration ("announce prowess, proclaim achievement...").


4. The whole of the third paragraph is built to reduce the stress placed on the alveolar ridge, instead diverting the tip of the tongue to the alveolar process of the lower mandible (alveolar fricative).


5. The fourth paragraph involves frequent usage of the phonetic alphabet that describes the pronunciation of the word "awe" (/ɔ:/).


6. The penultimate paragraph ("Mansuetude was...") contains a prosaic acrostic - with an ambivalent dedication to a friend - as well as completes the chronological cycle begun in the second paragraph.

A Fatidical Caliginosity

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="130" caption="Here, there, everywhere!"][/caption]

As I sat absterging the world wide web for methods to model vortex streets, I came across one particularly agrestic site featuring, inadvertently, a vaticinating article on the caducity of some olidly spelt and nitidly pronounced words of the English language. A malison seemed to descend on the article that had included them, archetypically having been done so as roborants.

Those are only few of the fubsy words facing extinction from a language that continues to evolve with no mansuetude, constantly borrowing words to appease its speakers and exuviating words as and when the same speakers are done using them. A smart language, in other words, and over the course of the 20th century, it has come a long way in restructuring itself to be spoken more easily and, consequently, become more accessible and less embrangled in the eyes of those for whom it is a second language. As words changed, portmonteaus took shape and sentences became shorter, those encapsulations of meaning that were too specific to salvage any versatility - so very important these days - were sidelined with often methodical oppugnance. I don't think it's surprising at all that a language that is mutated on a daily basis begins to show Darwinian characteristics of evolution over the course of two centuries.