Boxes within boxes with different recipients. You hand the gift to the first recipient, who unwraps a plain cardboard box, opens it, and finds a gift wrapped with a bow and a new recipient. The gift is handed to the next recipient who repeats the process, and the gift moves on. The final tiny box is a dollar store magnet. The first box was the size of a refrigerator. Everyone gets a present.

I thought the morning constitutional was taking a shit.

Fireball: Not even once.

Didn't the ring slip away from Gollum because it sensed Sauron gaining strength? I thought it was dormant more than anything. If the ring had somewhere better to be it would have acted on Gollum sooner. Gollum chilled in the cave for 500 years because that's what the ring wanted to do, just waiting for its master.

My career hasn't changed much since the 1700s, I'm a winemaker. Our company doesn't have a vineyard we buy grapes from farmers, so our winery is in the city not some villa on the hill. At first glance our warehouse full of barrels is pretty similar to an old school winery. I could show my counterpart advances we have made in automation, like our bottling line or the giant industrial press, and I bet they'd get a kick out of moving stacks of barrels or fermentation tanks with a forklift. Using food grade plastic instead of wood makes cleaning easier, and our pump is electric not hand driven, but ultimately little has changed. Our wine lab is pretty high tech and probably the main exception, I dont think they tested for things like acidity and sulfur levels until the industrial revolution. I was literally just talking about this yesterday with my coworker. We had the bottling line out in the yard and we were sanitizing it by pumping boiling water through it with a diesel powered compressor. My contemporary may not understand sanitizing, or the equipment we used to do it, but he would easily understand the bottler and the importance of keeping it clean. I would love to share a few bottles of modern wine with a pre industrial master and vice versa.

My first thought also. Developing the infrastructure to exploit natural resources under the cover of providing humanitarian aid, while simultaneously supplying the weapons that create the need for humanitarian aid.

Doesn't literally EVERY elf live until the end of the world? Like their body may be slain but their spirit just returns to Aman to chill in the Halls of Mandos with all the other 'dead' elves until Iluvatar summons them to fight in the final battle. Even then you get Glorfindel just too Chadly to stay down, he walks right out of the halls with a blessing and sails back to middle earth to terrify nazgul. Not every elf was born in Cuivenen and exists for the entire duration of Ardas history, but every elf sticks around in some form or another until all creation is destroyed and remade. That's why elves choosing to be mortal is such a big deal, they actually die. Their soul isn't returned to their family members in Aman to catch up, they go wherever men go. Didnt Feanors mother's (Idril?) soul get so damaged by (implied) rape that she was set apart in the halls? She died and still went to the halls but was basically catatonic forever. She still 'lived' in Aman until the Dagor Dagorlach, even though her injuries were so terrible she probably longed for death. That sounds more like eternal torture than eternal life, but either way its forever, she didn't get oblivion or whatever happens to men.

We learned the secrets of firemaking from helpful friendly earthworms.