Rumor has it that McCartney would have played Frodo, George Harrison would’ve portrayed Gandalf, Ringo Starr would’ve been Sam, and, funnily enough, John Lennon would have played Gollum.

Fortunately, Tolkien himself had the wisdom to cast this idea into the fires of Orodruin.

Multiocular O - just going to quote Wikipedia:

Multiocular O (ꙮ) is an exotic glyph variant of the Cyrillic letter O. This glyph variant can be found in certain manuscripts in the Old Church Slavonic phrase "серафими многоꙮчитїи" (serafimi mnogoočitii, "many-eyed seraphim").

There are apparently other instances of Old Church Slavonic scribes playing around thus, rather like people dotting their i-s with little hearts or me turning the letter S into a python given the slightest excuse. 

Hat tip: Odious.

 Highlander: a Celtic Opera

Yes. That Highlander. Not, frankly, recommended except as a curiosity.

 Today I learned: the first English translation of Euclid included pop-ups for 3-D proofs. (I was fact checking a claim that John Dee was the translator. No, but he wrote the preface and did some editing.)

 Sloth bears! (with excellent photographs)

 The Ambracian gulf is a lowland lament with brekekekex! from Preveza, koax! from Amphilochia and an answering koax! from across the mountains from Missolonghi.

-Patrick Leigh Fermor, Roumeli, Travels in Northern Greece

 This article details--no, it doesn't summarize well. Here's an entrée:

"Out of this group would arise several radical separatist movements with overlapping membership, including a religious one called Lux Madriana—worshiping a female god with rituals supposedly passed down from a “magical matriarchal community” in a distant past—and an elaborately fleshed-out otherworld called Aristasia. Much like the rich fantasy worlds created by Tolkien or the Brontë sisters, Aristasia became an ever-growing obsession for its creators, with its own customs, calendar, literature, and history, to the extent that some of the worldbuilders eventually dropped out of university to attend their own unofficial Aristasian school instead. In Aristasia there were two genders, both female (assertive brunettes and demure blondes); the decadent modern world was known as The Pit; and the word for person was not man but maid."

ht Emily Short

FURTHER: A short, somewhat melancholy history of Aristasia-in-Telluria

Washington, man... where cattle rustling is white-collar crime.

Exhibit A:

Cody Easterday, has admitted to a scheme in which Defendant [Easterday] has falsified records and submitted fictitious invoices in order to defraud Plaintiff [Tyson] out of more than $225 million. Among other things, Defendant has manufactured documents in order to hide the fact that it was reporting to Plaintiff approximately 200,000 cattle that simply did not exist

Exhibit B: 

A newly filed federal lawsuit alleges WSU researchers stole blood samples and trade secrets used in a proprietary genetic test to rate the beef tenderness of cows prior to slaughter.

Re. the latter I will note that the term "Callipyge Gene" is really wasted in being applied to tenderness of beef.

 

 Names for chess pieces in many languages

 All empires should be judged by their drink. Thus:

Soviets: vodka

English: gin

Mongols: arkhi (though I can't find a good source for the history of this one)

America: moonshine, Heaven preserve us

French: wine

Chinese: baijiu

Zulus; Egyptians; Incans; Sumerians: lite beer

Mexica: hot chocolate

The Deep Sea.

I was not prepared for some of the mammals.

 Fun toy: Scroll around the globe and eavesdrop on local streaming radio. Language lovers will have a great time. Music lovers will be intensely frustrated by the realization that most of the world now listens to the same crap we do, albeit sometimes in their native languages. But there may be rewards for the persistent.

 For all you liguistomasochists out there: Tongue twisters in Klallam, a Coast Salish language from Washington's Olympic Peninsula. Click on them for sound.

Here's a map of Klallam toponyms if your interests that way tend.

 Vedius Pollio and execution by lamprey... Wikipedia's notes claim that it must rather have been morays. Appalling and rather tough to credit either way, even by Roman standards, but nonetheless remarkable.