The Hobbit and LoTR calendar of events found in OS X easter egg
Nov. 30, 2012 (4:02 pm) By: Russell Holly
Fans of the Lord of the Rings know that the series transcends the books and movies that gave rise to it. Many of us grew up with the books, and then movies have taken our imaginations and amplified them to untold proportions. We laugh at the occasional reference in pop culture like a Hobbit-inspired safety video but its still special when you see it referenced somewhere unexpected. An unused file in the OS X calendar has revealed the remnants of a great easter egg, calendar dates for important points in Lord of The Rings.
If you head to a terminal in OSX and type in cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.lotr or take a look at the file on Apples Open Source website youll see a file that lists dates for all sorts of events in the Lord of the Rings books, each listed in a single line as if the creator expected it to be readable at a glance in the actual OS X calendar.
The file contains $FreeBSD: src/usr.bin/calendar/calendars/calendar.lotr,v 1.2 2003/10/09 which likely means that this showed up right around the time that OS 10.3 was released, not to mention the release of The Return of the King to theaters. Whats really impressive is that it remained undiscovered until recently.
Given that were now weeks away from the release of The Hobbit, the timing for the discovery of this particular easter egg is nothing short of uncanny. Some of the points the the calendar actually come from The Hobbit, like the Death of Smaug and Bilbo rescued from Wargs by Eagles entries. Its always great to know that developers are able to sneak fun things like this into our day-to-day lives and have us not be aware of it for years, while other easter eggs are discovered just hours after they are released.
