The Slate Culture Gab Fest is brought to you by Audible.com, a leading provider of spoken audio

information and entertainment. Listen to audiobooks whenever and wherever you want. Get a free book

when you sign up for a 30-day free trial at Audiblepodcast.com slash culture fest. And by

stamps.com. Buy and print official U.S. postage using your own computer and printer

and have your postal carrier pick up the packages.

Sign up for a no-risk trial and get up to $55 in free postage when you visit stamps.com

and use the promo code CultureFest.

The following podcast contains explicit language.

I'm Stephen Metcalf, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest trapped in a glass box with Dwarves Edition.

It's Wednesday, December 19th, 2012. On today's program, Slate's own Dan Engber joins us to talk about

The Hobbit, the latest, of course, offering from Peter Jackson to the world of J.R.R. Tolkien.

And then, what is it with Redneck Reality TV? We talk about Duck Dynasty, which is a monster

hit for A&E. And finally, the Myers-Briggs personality test turns 50, and we marked the occasion by each of us taking the test.

Joining me today is Slate's film critic Dana Stevens. Hey, Dana. Hey, Steve. And of course, Slate's deputy editor Julia Turner, though I should say Julia is not able to make it into the office today, so she's joining us remotely. Hello, Julia. Hi, Steve. All right. Well, before we dive in, we just want to send one more shout out for our call-in show, which will air on December 26th.

If you want to ask the panelists a question, you can call us at 424-255-7833 by 6 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Wednesday, December 19th.

Just leave us a voicemail with a question, cultural or otherwise, something you've always wanted to hear us discuss, and we'll hopefully we'll get to it.

All right, we look forward to hearing from you.

And that number one more time is 424-255-7833.

The Hobbit is the first in what will be a series of three epic fantasy adventures based, of course, on the underlying source material by J.R.R. Tolkien. It's directed as the original Lord of the Rings trilogy was by Peter Jackson. It's filmed as those were in a lush and beautiful New Zealand. It stars Martin Freeman, who is the wonderful Tim from the British office. And Elijah Wood is returning to the series as is Ian McKellen, as Gandalf and Ian Holm is appearing as the old Bilbo.

I am not a Tolkienist to begin with, and so we've, and nor am I much of a tech head, a gearhead.

So we've brought in the brilliant Dan Engber slate columnist to talk to us

about all of these things. Because Dan, as I understand it, you are not only someone who understands

...