Now that there’s definitely going to be a Hobbit movie as well as a sequel bridging the gap between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the question is: what’s going to be in the sequel?

Here’s some speculation.

As a modest start for my own edification, I set aside every copy of the New York Times from September 12 through September 25, 2001, fourteen days in which every edition featured a banner headline across page 1, not a record for the newspaper in wartime, I later learned from the newspaper’s archivist – that would be a seemingly unsurpassable 141 consecutive issues, from December 21, 1944, through May 10, 1945, during World War II – but an extraordinary passage in recent American history nevertheless. The record for consecutive banner headlines in peactime, I also learned from that telephone call – and I have saved all of them as well – is November 8 through November 27, 2000, twenty issues altogether, which followed the surreal process of deciding who would be the forty-third president of the United States.

– Among the Gently Mad: Strategies and Perspectives for the Book-Hunter in the 21st Century, by Nicholas A. Basbanes