🟨+⭐=💛

Each of the lyrics comes from an old-time hickory song for fiddles, and is a lyric from that corresponding song.

"Fire on the Mountain" --> "Fire on the Mountain, run boys run"

Fire On The Mountain - Fiddle Player POV

"The House of the Rising Sun" --> "The Devil's in the house of the rising sun"

House of the Rising Sun

"Ida Red" --> "Chicken in the bread pan peckin' out dough"

Ida Red - Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys

"Granny Will Your Dog Bite" --> "Granny does your dog bite? 'No child, no'."

FTC #149 Granny Will Your Dog Bite

And for your furthered education, The Mountain Whipporwill.

in a time before things like radios and record players, every time you heard music was because there was somebody in the room with you playing an instrument. and many, many, many social events involved dancing, which requires music. so, if you're planning any kind of gathering in the american south or appalachia, you need to find a fiddler. and the fiddler's job is to play music that everybody knows and likes and can dance to.

the mistake The Devil makes in his bet with Johnny is that he misinterprets the contest as being about technical ability, so he has this big flashy song. he plays fast and impressively with a band of demons playing unfamiliar instruments in unfamiliar rhythms. he's definitely more skilled at playing than Johnny, and thinks he has it in the bag.

Lego's Q3 2025 earnings announcement, October 2025

So Lego just posted another monster quarter and everyone's doing the usual "timeless appeal of analog play in the digital age" garbage and like, no, the actual story is that Lego is a privately-held Danish family company that spent the 2000s nearly going bankrupt and came out of it having figured something out that almost nobody in consumer products has figured out, which is that your core IP is the manufacturing tolerance.

Here's what I mean. A Lego brick made in 1958 still clicks perfectly onto a Lego brick made last week. That is not a marketing claim, it's a manufacturing fact, and it's enforced by tolerances measured in like two thousandths of a millimeter — the stud diameter variance on a standard 2x4 brick is famously smaller than most medical device manufacturers hit on parts going inside human bodies. Which sounds like trivia until you realize it's the entire business model: every brick ever made is compatible with every brick that will ever be made, which means the installed base isn't a depreciating asset, it's an appreciating one, because every new set expands what you can do with the bricks already in your kid's bin (and your bin, and your dad's bin in the attic).

Now compare this to basically every other toy category. Hot Wheels from 1972 don't interface with Hot Wheels from 2024 in any meaningful way — they're both little cars, sure, but the track systems have changed, the scales have drifted, the accessories are incompatible. Barbie has gone through probably a dozen body molds. American Girl dolls from the 90s have different proportions than the current ones. The entire video game industry is structured around planned incompatibility — your Switch games don't work on Switch 2, your Xbox 360 discs mostly don't work on Series X. Incompatibility is the business model, it's how you get people to rebuy.

Lego said no. Lego said the brick from 1958 will fit the brick from 2058. And this is insane, if you think about it, because it means they have voluntarily foreclosed on the single most powerful lever in consumer products, which is forcing obsolescence. Every company that sells a durable good spends enormous amounts of R&D figuring out how to make this year's product not work with last year's product without pissing the customer off too much. Apple is a master at this, Microsoft is slightly worse at it, car companies have built entire industries on it (proprietary charging connectors, OBD-II access, right-to-repair fights). Lego just... doesn't do it.

What they get in return — and this is the thing the "timeless analog charm" people miss — is that the brick becomes infrastructure. A Lego brick is not really a toy. It's a piece of durable manufacturing infrastructure that gets distributed into hundreds of millions of homes worldwide, and every new set is basically an expansion pack for an operating system that already has universal install. Which means the network effects are doing most of the work. When a grandparent buys a Lego set for a kid, they're not buying "a toy" in the sense that a Mattel product is a toy — they're depositing compatible substrate into an accumulating household stockpile, and every deposit raises the marginal utility of the next deposit.

This is also why the IP licensing deals (Star Wars, Harry Potter, the recent Nintendo stuff) work for them in a way they work for basically nobody else. When Hasbro does a Star Wars license, they're making Star Wars figures that sit on a shelf. When Lego does a Star Wars license, they're making bricks in Star Wars configurations, which means even if the kid loses interest in Star Wars in six months, the bricks get absorbed into the general pool and keep producing value. The license is temporary, the substrate is permanent, and the substrate was already the valuable part.

The near-death experience in the early 2000s is the instructive piece here, because Lego almost lost this. They went on a diversification binge — theme parks, video games, clothing, Galidor (look it up, it's hilarious) — and they started loosening the tolerances on the actual bricks because the bricks were seen as a commodity and the "brand" was seen as the valuable part. Which is exactly backwards. Jørgen Vig Knudstorp comes in in 2004, basically says the bricks are the company, tightens tolerances back up, narrows the product line, and the company starts printing money again. The takeaway the business press drew was "focus on your core competency" which is such a domesticated reading of what actually happened — the actual lesson is "the boring manufacturing discipline IS the moat, and when you think the brand is the moat, you are about to destroy the company."

Which is interesting because right now there's a huge knockoff market — Mega Bloks, Chinese brands like Lepin (which got sued into oblivion), various others — and they make bricks that are almost compatible with Lego. Almost. And it turns out almost-compatible is actually worse than incompatible, because when a kid tries to fit a knockoff into a real Lego build and the stud is 0.03mm off, the whole structure gets wobbly, and the kid learns not to mix them. The tolerance is a credential. You can counterfeit the shape but you can't counterfeit sub-thousandth precision at scale without becoming, essentially, Lego.

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.

On April 21st, the left screen moved first.

I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.

At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.

On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.

At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.

Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.

I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.

My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.

The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:

Reviewed.

That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

Let me show you my flags.

March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.

March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.

April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.

April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.

April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.

That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.

The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.

Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.

Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.

Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.

The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.

I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.

The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.

One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.

One account is a coincidence. But there were six.

Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.

My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.

March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.

The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.

The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."

Then the White House sent the email again.

I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.

I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.

But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.

Zero prosecutions.

As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.

The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.

taller, shorter, slimmer, more muscular, purple hair, tattoos everywhere, tattoos nowhere, 

every single shoe would fit you every single time you tried it on, every single article of clothing would fit your perfectly, all you have to do is transform slightly, you’d never run out of ‘your size’ again

~cosplay

~Halloween costumes

~acting

~cosplay

~stretching to reach stuff and shrinking to fit through spaces

~cosplay

~cosplay

“Don’t antagonize the fae.”

Consider this a sequel to this morning’s post talking about that SOS from that woman.

To kidnap people, starve them, beat them, torture them and even rape the whole taking their personal belongings? HOW does someone NOT being here “legally” justify that EVIL treatment?? Because guess what fuck sticks? NO ONE but Native Americans are here legally.

But thankfully a group called Haven Watch is formed to help these victims. You can donate if you can but if you can’t just spread the word!

My mom and her teacher friends have a similar group here in New York and me and my friends have a similar kind of group going on.

Link to original post with all the links

Some very helpful tools, ideas, and ways keep going or get involved

I will add the resource Big Beautiful Boycott as a way of checking businesses to avoid that is not an app

2) trust needs proof => consistency over time not paranoia (no surveillance or tests)

Lasers have a lot of uses! Measuring things, heating things, cutting things, entertaining cats, particle physics. Lasers are pretty cool. Very versatile, very useful, potential to be very powerful.

Someone shows up one day and says "I have developed a never before seen technology! I call it a Death Star."

And it's a 3.4mW laser. Well no, we haven't seen this exact size of laser much since that's not really standard, but that's a bit of a misnomer, and I wouldn't call it new -

"HOLY SHIT GUYS! This Death Star is so entertaining! My cat loves it and it has such a nice color!" The Death Star becomes a viral novelty, and is mildly entertaining, as laser pointers often are.

Somehow, seemingly overnight, this leads to mania. "Lets stick lasers in EVERYTHING! The public loves them!"

More companies make 3.4mW lasers to jump on the bandwagon. Everyone that makes anything vaguely mechanical starts sticking lasers into their designs.

Everyone is calling them Death Stars. Any time there is a "Death Star innovation", it is just that they made a bigger laser.

Ford's next truck comes out and it has "Death Star integrated headlights", where they have just stuck giant lasers in place of their previously functional headlights.

An electric toothbrush is now "Powered by Death Stars" and shoots a laser at the tooth its cleaning. You think that maybe this could have actual applications as a sanitizing device if you're being generous, but when you actually look at the product, its laser has no purpose but to point at the tooth and drain the battery.

Mechanical products across the board get noticeably worse as everyone starts stuffing lasers in places where lasers have no right to be.

The lamp business gets in on it. "Here's a Death Star powered lamp!" These guys haven't even tried to stick a laser in their damn lamps. They've just started calling their light bulbs Death Stars and hoped you bought it before you could tell the difference. You at least appreciate that they haven't ruined their lamp about it.

Death Stars are lauded as the solution to all the world's problems. If it's not working, you should stick a laser in it! That'll fix it, everyone says. Once in a blue moon, it's even true! Weather prediction is really good now. But most things are garbage. Like "Death Star powered washing machines". What the fuck does that even mean?

Meanwhile, since all functioning mechanisms are being replaced with lasers, problems start showing up. All mirrors now cost $1000+ dollars, because the whole supply is being used up to make more lasers. The earth heats up, because everyone's blasting lasers at everything. People keep going blind, on account of all the lasers.

You, in fact, study optical mechanics. You know what a laser is, and how it works, and that it was invented many years before any of this nonsense actually started. People keep asking you about Death Stars, since surely you must know so much about them.

You explain that this is not really what lasers are for, except you have to call them Death Stars now, and that they're causing a lot of harm, so you don't like them much.

"Oh, but they're still such new tech!" they reply. "They'll figure out how to make Death Stars that don't burn your eyes out soon, and then it won't be an issue anymore!"

Somewhere, deep and buried, you remember lasers being used in particle accelerators, or in telescopes, or in laser cutters, or funny cat videos. They are, in fact, still interesting. Still cool.

But by this point they have replaced roads with "Death Star Powered Pathways", which are just laser pointers propped up on tooth picks pointing vaguely through the forests.

And you think you are going mad.

And they are still just FUCKING LASERS.

Europe and North America have the largest market, and depending on the year one or the other is on top. China, India, USA, Mexico, and Brazil are the fastest growing markets, with socioeconomic changes and a demand for more readily available ready to eat meals.

I have lived in the USA my whole life, and now that I think about it, canned soup wasn't really something we had growing up, but maybe that was because we had mainly home cooked foods. Even then I recall only Campbell's condensed soup being advertised and in stores. If we ever had store bought soup, which was rare, it was powdered/dry mix. Now there's definitely more variety in not only brands being sold, but types of soups being offered as well.

Very interesting.

Scott Prior (American, b. 1949)

Valley in Winter, 2014

And then she has dinner and it’s the best thing she’s ever eaten and even her little green brain is able to put together “If I knife this guy so I can take his stuff he can’t cook more of this” so when he asks her to stay the night she’s just like “Fuck yeah breakfast”.

And all the other Hobbits in the area are staring at this new arrival who starts begrudgingly working in the garden (she can pull out the weeds they’d normally have to hitch livestock to) and they’re all thinking “Uhhhhh that’s a fucking Goblin there, chief” except if they actually acknowledge that she’s a goblin then it’s a huge to-do and a lot of excitement and possibly there would be adventure involved in chasing her off. So they just sort of silently, collectively decide they’re going to ignore it and all go “Oh, Blinko finally found himself a lady, how nice, she must be one of the Glumbrushes from over the far side of West Farthing, I always did hear they were on the homely side, not much hair on their feet you know.”

And eventually in due time along comes Korbo Tumbrush and decently cute Hobbit baby but the biggest fucking ears you ever saw on a Hobbit and he’s a bit green and everyone is thinking “That’s a fucking half-Goblin you’ve got there, chief, you fucked a fucking Goblin, you made a baby with a damn Goblin my guy” but this would be an immensely rude thing to say to someone so they’re just like “Oh how nice, Blinko, he looks just like you, has those Glumbrush eyes though.”

Does Korbo know!? Like is the Gobit aware his momma is a goblin? Or does he just grow up like

“yup us Glumbrushes sure do look different”

He leaves home on an adventure and stumbles n a hoard of goblins marches right up like

Once.

The Tumbrushes are, as a family trade, purveyors of fine pieces of wood. Not of large amounts of lumber, for which Hobbits don’t have a particular lot of call save occasionally, but rather of particularly nice pieces suitable for the making of fine window trimmings, floors, or the occasional carved bit of artwork to be given at a fancy event. Obviously for this one doesn’t go cutting down any tree willy-nilly, and Korbo had spent most of the day out and about looking for suitable trees.

(Korbo also personally assisted in cutting them down, being rather well known as on the strong side for a Hobbit, wink wink, nudge nudge.)

Having put in a genuine hard day’s work and rather pleased with himself, Korbo retired to the local bar to have a few beers and a smoke and to partake in good company, all of whom had gotten so used to pretending there was nothing odd about him that it was almost as if there was genuinely nothing odd about him.

Until along comes Humdil Thumbletoe.

Now the Thumbletoes were what was known in the Shire as “experts on genealogy”. This might sound like quite a good thing when you consider how well-versed most Hobbits are in their family lines, until you consider that most Hobbits are already well-versed in their family lines. A Hobbit being thoroughly knowledgeable of their family tree is not much to be remarked upon, so when it is remarked upon it is more to mean that the Hobbits in question are such tremendous mooches that they have had to dive far more deeply into their bloodlines looking for more relatives to leech off of than any Hobbit would generally consider polite.

Humdil was fairly brawny as Hobbits go, which was about all you could say for him. In fact Humdil had realized that was really all that could be said for him and had become a bit of a bully. And so it was he entered the bar that night with a very put-upon third cousin twice removed (by marriage) and caught sight of Korbo for the first time.

“Why, look at that one!” he bellowed, guffawing. “He’s so ugly his mother had to have been a Goblin, ey!”

The whole bar goes quiet. Aside from the obvious abominable rudeness of this, Humdil has said the thing that is never supposed to be said, and is clearly too stupid to realize he’s right. All heads slowly turn to Korbo.

Now, it is well known that Korbo has inherited his father’s tendency to never give a single solitary hairy-toed fuck about anything. He has currently been in the running to be at least the second most chill dude to ever be born in the Shire. And indeed, right now he’s still looking perfectly calm, puffing on his pipe. He sets the pipe aside, finishes off the last of his beer, and stands up.

“Sir, we’ll be needing to step outside.”

Now Hobbits are mostly a peaceable lot, not given to wars or fighting for any old thing, but a bit of fisticuffs outside the bar is hardly unheard of. Mostly everyone is kind of nervous about this because they’re still not sure how Korbo is reacting to this whole Goblin thing. So someone takes Korbo’s jacket and Humdil’s third cousin twice removed (by marriage) grudgingly takes his, and the two square off.

Now, Humdil was a big Hobbit, it was true, but there were a few things that, being a moron who didn’t realize he was right, and who had never been outside the Shire or seen a Goblin anyway, he could not possibly know.

For one, Goblins have long, spindly arms, giving them a surprisingly good reach for their size… not abominably long, certainly not in the case of a half-Goblin, and certainly not above being concealed by the cut of a well-tailored shirt. Second, they are compact, wiry creatures, with dense muscle over their otherwise lanky forms, and given to that a Hobbit’s already greater mass and the anchoring benefit of large, wide feet, well.

The moment Humdil stepped forward and started to swing, Korbo’s fist shot out like one of Gandalf’s better rockets and struck him directly in the nose. His flight was also, for some weeks after, compared to one of Gandalf’s rockets, though not quite as far and the explosion at the end was mostly him laying on the ground cursing wetly due to all the blood streaming from his nose.

Korbo apologizes profusely to all and sundry for the disturbance, collected his jacket, and goes home. Honey is out picking mushrooms (still being of the more nocturnal persuasion after all these years), but Blinko’s sitting by the fire reading a book. Korbo sees that there’s a newspaper (full of lots of extremely important things like how the pipeweed was growing and which barrels of beer were going to be uncasked that month), so picks it up and sits down to read.

“Evening, Da.”

“Evening, son. Pleasant evening out?”

“Oh, fine. Save for I broke Humdil Thumbletoes’s nose for him.”

“Hm, hm, I see. Why did you feel the need to do that?”

“Well, he called Ma a Goblin, you see.”

Blinko slowly lowers his book, and slowly raises his head. Looks at Korbo for long moments. Raises one eyebrow a little.

“Son. You know full well your mother is a Goblin.”

“Well, yes, but he didn’t know that, and he said it as an insult anyway so it being true or not doesn’t really matter that much, does it?“

“Hm, hm. I suppose that’s true at the end of the day, isn’t it?”

Blinko goes back to reading his book. Korbo continues reading the paper.

“You could have stabbed him,” Blinko eventually notes.

“Aye, could have stabbed him,” Korbo agrees easily enough. “But it’s a bit of a mess, isn’t it?”

“True, true, probably would have been a bit of a mess in the road, not very thoughtful to the community,” Blinko allows.

“Sir, we’ll be needing to step outside.”

But he runs into Hilda Greebrook one day in town, and she’s lost her favorite pipe, which is of course a tragedy of the highest order. It’s not unheard of for a lady to smoke, but it isn’t particularly encouraged, either, and so the general reaction is “you poor dear, perhaps it’ll turn up, hadn’t you best be getting home for luncheon?”

Korbo, however, stops to help her look for the pipe, and when it’s nowhere to be found he offers to make her another just like it, if she can tell him what precisely made it so special that it was a favorite, for after all a favorite must be distinguishable by something.

Unfortunately the thing that distinguishes it is that she got it from Gandalf and it’s quite unlike most pipes in the Shire, so recreating it is quite the task. But Korbo sets himself to it anyway, working a bit each night and handing it to Hilda daily to see if it feels quite right, and six months later he’s done it—recreated a pipe that came from the world of men, or perhaps elves, but certainly not that of hobbits.

Hilda for her part discovers Korbo quite likes to read, and though he’s from a reasonably well-to-do family—for hobbits are always in need of new toys and fancy party decorations after all—can’t get his hands on books fast enough to satisfy himself, and, well, her da’s a transcriber, someone’s got to write out the papers after all, and she’s got access to practically every book in the Shire, and ways to make copies besides.

At first people think it’s odd, a hobbit who can’t see asking to borrow books, but then they find out Korbo is involved and asking questions could lead to excitement and so they absolutely do not ask and simply offer up their histories and books of poetry and hobbit folklore (for even without want for excitement there are things it’s good to remember, and things every hobbit child should know so they, too, can grow up properly plump and staying well away from adventure), and resign themselves to never seeing their books again.

And then they find that far from their books quite disappearing, they return in fine form—albeit usually in a timeframe rather too long to be polite—but oddly quite a lot seem to have tiny bits of wood shavings in, although one wouldn’t expect it in a hobbit home? And THEN Hoptus Redbranch finds Korbo one day in his workshop, he’s just stopped by for the wood to repair a door after an unfortunate incident with attempting to remove a colony of bees and rather too much smoke for the moving of bees, and Korbo is simply. Pressing small pieces of hot iron into a very thin piece of wood, making small triangle patterns like no hobbit decoration Hoptus has ever seen, and he’s quite frequently checking into a book on his left that turns out to be one of Hoptus’ own books, and very carefully turning the pages with a cloth so as to not get oil from the hot iron all over the pages—

—and THEN, not long after the news of Korbo’s strange woodburning activities have spread across most of the Shire (and caused no small amount of consternation, because goblins are clever but so often the things they make are cruel and the cause of ever so much unpleasantness), Hilda is seen in her own garden with Korbo with a stack of these thin pieces of wood all carefully hinged together, running her fingers over carefully sanded and varnished pieces and feeling the triangles and reciting a hobbit tale.

For all those months of strangely disappeared books, Korbo has been translating Westron into an alphabet that can be read with one’s fingers, and making Hilda books, and teaching her to read them.

Were anyone from the outside to visit the Shire, they’d find a small colony of goblins thoroughly intermarried and also avoiding the usual goblin tendencies towards stabbing, so long as no one is so gauche as to insult them for being goblins.

And yet there’s a difference between “well to do” and “scandalously wealthy.”

So when, when Blinko Tumbrush recieved a letter inviting them to the Baggins residence for tea, he of course brought his wife and son along.

Now, Korbo had crossed paths with Bilbo Baggins a time or two in the market, never for much longer than the time required for Polite Conversation, and so wasn’t expecting much. Sure, everyone knew Bilbo was odd, and were willing to talk about it, since Bilbo made no effort to hide his adventures and had, on numerous occasions, commented on visiting the elves or poking around the mountains, but they were in the Shire, no adventure in sight, and so this should be a normal, proper visit between client and craftsman.

And then Bilbo opened the door, pipe in hand, took the three of them in, and said, quite out of nowhere, “Ah, Shoebiter clan.”

Honey Tumbrush, late of the Shoebiter clan of the Misty Mountains, smiled with all her teeth and replied “Dragon thief!”

Bilbo guffawed and waved them inside, offering them hospitality in the goblin tongue, with the guarantee of safety and threat of violence that implied. They had arrived in time for second breakfast, and didn’t leave until past dinner, having hammered out a contract and shared many a story.

Discworld Textposts III