Alec, I love the parody. Isn't Alison Richard no longer the provost at Yale? Did you win the bet by going to an out of date page, you sneaky sneaky boy. Sarah Hatter has this great long post today on being jealous of monogamy, or something like that.

I think one could make many strong arguments for gravity working roughly the same in Middle Earth as here, even without resorting to claiming that middle earth is an earlier version of the same planet.