Life-Size LEGOs

What do a saucepan, the bottle opener of a multitool, and a borrowed mallet have in common? All three were involved in assembling my brand new IKEA furniture. I moved for the seventh time in six years of college in August and for the first time ended up in an unfurnished townhouse. After three days without a bed and a week without any other furniture, I got a ride to IKEA and finished furnishing my bedroom, minus desk chair. (I lasted a solid month without any chairs in the apartment.)

Over the next week, I assembled a bookcase, desk, and dresser. I started with the bookcase, which was about as simple as it gets: sides, top, bottom, backing, and shelves. The problems began with the screwdrivers required. I have an entire precision screwdriver set with several dozen screwdriver bits. Key word: precision. Shockingly enough, screws you might find in a computer or watch are not the same size as screws you might find in furniture. I grabbed the largest Phillips and flathead bits I had, ignored the call IKEA for help page in the instructions, and started putting pieces together.

This continued until I reached the back of the bookcase. The backs of cheap IKEA bookcases are a dense cardboard-type material that you slide into a slot and nail into place. Problem number two: I don’t have a hammer. Instead of summoning a hammer from the sky Amazon or borrowing one from any number of people I know who might plausibly own hammers, I started looking around for solid metal objects. I only own a limited number of solid metal objects, so it didn’t take long for me to settle on my pot. My faithful pot, which has now cooked me two years of pasta and rice, served nicely as a hammer.

A couple days later, I worked on the desk. I pulled out my trusty precision screwdrivers, ignored the fix this item with a friend page in the instructions, and inserted the first of many screws. Everything went fine until the end. I had gotten the top aligned, everything was secured in place, and then I looked down at the remaining dowel in my parts bag. Dowel, singular, not used in any of the remaining steps. Third problem? Or not? After flipping back through the instructions, I believe it was an extra part. If not, the desk hasn’t fallen down yet. I should have counted, but there were no spare parts for the bookcase and I really wasn’t interested in counting four dozen screws, three dozen cams, three dozen dowels, and various other miscellaneous parts.

This brings us to the dresser, which I left for last after realizing that I would have to assemble each and every drawer. This is also where the multitool and mallet come into play. My screwdrivers and I ignored the tipping hazard page in the instructions and got the frame of the dresser screwed together, aligned, and standing. Next, the drawers needed to be put together. After temporarily misplacing all my drawer fronts (they were on my bed), I identified the backs, sides, and bottoms and got to work. I attached the sides to a drawer back. The bottom slid in nicely. The front needed to be secured by ridged plastic nails(?). Return of problem two: I (still) don’t have a hammer. I decided to spare my pot, the drawers, and my neighbors’ ears and borrowed a mallet.

Finally, after several hours, a scraped palm, and a lacerated toe, I could insert the drawers into the dresser. The last step was tightening plastic screws to keep the drawers from being pulled out all the way. Problem number three: my precision flathead screwdriver was not just probably too small, but entirely, utterly, much too small. I started looking around for other flat metal things and settled on the tip of the bottle opener on my multitool. I’ve been wondering if a coin would have been better, but the multitool sufficed without too much damage to the screw heads.

And that is how you assemble IKEA furniture with exactly none of the proper tools. Except the provided hex key. Long live the IKEA hex key.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

Note: All but this note and the next paragraph contain spoilers, so if you haven’t read the book and want to find out what happens in the movie yourself or if you’re a Tolkien purist and don’t want to hear how Peter Jackson massacred J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterpiece, don’t read anything except the next paragraph.

To get it out of the way, I’m first going to say that I really liked this movie and the trilogy as a whole. Not as much as The Lord of the Rings, but I would voluntarily rewatch any and all of the three Hobbit movies. It is worth noting that I've read both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (as well as The Silmarillion, The Children of Húrin, and Smith of Wootton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham, which has nothing to do with Middle Earth, but was surprisingly entertaining).

Because it’s all in the book, I didn't have initially have the complaints that people had about the ending of the movie lacking any sort of closure. Then I thought about it and while the ending still isn't my biggest problem, it is true that only two characters have the movie definitively state where they go after the battle. Thranduil and the elves presumably go back to Mirkwood and Gandalf does whatever Gandalf does, but that still leaves the treasure that Bilbo and the dwarves spent two movies trying to get, not to mention the dwarves and the entire remaining population of Laketown. It’s only known that Bilbo goes home to the Shire and Legolas goes to find Aragorn. And Legolas isn't actually in (the book) The Hobbit, though he could technically have been hanging around when the dwarves came to visit his father in Mirkwood.

Unlike, say, Tauriel, who is mentioned exactly zero times in all of Tolkien’s work, maybe because her character was made up? Regrettably, because without her, The Hobbit really doesn't have any major female characters*, I didn't end up liking her role in the plot. At first, I was willing to look past the elf-dwarf romance. And then Ravenhill happened. Kili was doing fine until Tauriel arrives and starts yelling around for him, at which point they both run around yelling for each other until Bolg shows up and kills Kili. Kili and Fili do both die in the book, but they’re protecting Thorin, not running around to find the elf they’re inexplicably in love with. So when all was said and done, I would have preferred less (read: no) time spent on the elf-dwarf romance, which might have allowed a more developed ending and maybe some actual lines for the dwarves. It would have been an improvement over Tauriel’s “Why does it hurt so much?” Sorry Legolas, guess she never loved you after all.

*Galadriel makes an appearance and the women of Laketown have a scene where they prepare to join the men in a last stand. This is pretty consistent with what would be expected in Middle Earth – the (human) men go and fight while the women stay back, dwarf women are never seen, and it’s technically not specified whether Thranduil’s elf army is completely male.

My main problem with the third movie is the same as it was for the first two. One word, Peter Jackson: gravity. Maybe the mountain goats the dwarves ride to Ravenhill can spring up near vertical faces, and maybe the giant bat can carry a fully grown elf (though I refuse to believe the bat was steered by a knife plunged into its brain), but that scene with Legolas leaping up a crumbling bridge? No. Just, no. And really, there can be epic fights without the participants falling twenty feet every thirty seconds.

Ignoring the lack of an ending, unrealistic romances, and the apparent disregard to physics, the conflict between the elves, men, and dwarves was done well, and overall I liked the forty-five minute long battle scene. Like I said at the beginning, I’d watch the movies again, and enjoy them.