Good grief, this is as stupid as wanting to make a stuffed animal tiger and selling it with the label Hobbes. Or stupider. I just got "The Two Towers"--I am that much a sucker for marketing and consumption--which came with a booklet selling the obvious crap, like elven brooches and Arwen's pendant and a truly unspeakable vomitation of porcelain and pewter and also RDC's Christmas present. All of that is offensive to my aesthetic taste, because the "jewelry" is costume, not of elvish or dwarfish quality and the vomitation is...unspeakable and the chess set is tacky and so forth.
I don't mind the idea of a Hobbes: Just as "Calvin and Hobbes" burst into syndication, HEBD gave SEM an enormous bear, about the size of a St. Bernard, whom he dubbed Hobbes. I mind a mass marketing of, rather than an individual relationship with, Hobbes. Similarly, I don't mind the copyright violation that Bill Watterson did mind when folks made t-shirts reprinting the strip where Calvin and Hobbes dance in their sunglasses. I don't even mind non-Watterson Calvin and Hobbes interpretations that respect their spirit, like their playing with Max where the Wild Things are. I have always despised those violations featuring, fr'instance, Calvin and Snoopy and Opus, bleary-eyed and weaving, captioned "I get by with a little help from my friends" or Calvin, drunkenly pointing and saying "What about that one?" and Hobbes nearly puking, captioned "Friends Don't Let Friends Beer-Goggle." (To be honest I haven't seen these since college.)
So. Selling a mock-up of the One Ring violates the entire principle of The Lord of the Rings and, I daresay, "The Lord of the Rings" too. One ring. One. Also, it's bad! It's evil! It's wrong! And it gets fucking destroyed!* It doesn't exist!
* What, you didn't know that?
The icing on the cake is that it's in mere 10K gold.
Okay, I wouldn't call this "reading," really. RDC said, "What is there about Sense and Sensibility you don't have yet?" I should like to emphasize that I would never read a novelization based on the movie "Sense and Sensibility," should there be one--Emma Thompson said she would hang herself--and regret the absence of Lady Middleton and Anne Steele. (However, overall I am so glad Emma Thompson could even out the satire Jane Austen didn't yet have a handle on, and adore Margaret so much, that the movie is a Very Good Thing.
Anyway. Reading Emma Thompson's production diary. "I'm excited about the fact...that Hugh Grant, for whom I wrote Edward, has agreed to do it despite having become after 'Four Weddings' the most famous man in the world." I screamed in no little pain, because I first misread that, replacing "Grant" with "Laurie." Yikes.
And remind me not to be disappointed: the title is The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries, not The Making of, as with "Pride and Prejudice" with all its satisfying, if insufficient, detail about how casts and settings were chosen and developed.