Uncategorized

It's shamed I am. Shamed.

Leave a comment

Am I a hypocrite?

Apparently.

Am I for sale?

It would appear so.

As you may recall, I groused a while back about the new animated Disney movie, How to Train Your Dragon. Not merely because of the historically inaccurate horned helmets on the Viking characters, but because of my intense weariness with the innovation—which long since became a cliché—of the sympathetic, victimized dragon.

Dragon

Guess what? One of our local IMAX theaters (the one at the Minnesota Zoo), has asked the Viking Age Club and Society to be there in costume for the opening, next Saturday. And I’ve agreed to participate.

My price? A free ticket to a movie I’m not even particularly interested in.

It’s for the good of the club, I tell myself. To raise our public visibility and attract new members.

So I’m taking a bullet (or, more authentically, an arrow) for the group.

I’m a hero.

That’s how I intend to look at it, anyway.

Now the only question is, why did they invite us for the 20th, when the official opening is a week later? Sneak preview?

I’ll keep you posted. As it is, we’re scheduled to be at the Great Clips IMAX Theater at the Minnesota Zoo from 9:00 to 10:00 a.m., this Saturday.

For those of you in the area, who wish to come and rub it in.

Update: I just found out this is a special preview. My source wasn’t sure if it was open to the public or not. So if you come to mock me, you may not get in at all. Which only serves you right.

Non-fiction

Irish Comfortable Familiarity with Death

Leave a comment

Great Irish Lives is a collection of Irish obituaries from a people who appear to relish the news of someone stepping into the great beyond. Suzanne Strempek Shea, writing the review, quotes from one obit, “We believe there is no doubt that Mr O’Connell expired on Saturday, the 15th of this month, at Genoa. He yielded up his latest breath at the distance of many hundred miles from the remains of [his] humble dwelling….” She then writes:

Don’t let language stop you from reading, and learning. The obituary of James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, Jan. 13, 1941, includes the story of his meeting as a student with W.B. Yeats, whose obit resides nearby. The back-and-forth: “We have met too late,” the budding novelist said, “you are too old to be influenced by me,” to which the poet answered, “Never have I encountered so much pretension with so little to show for it.”

Uncategorized

DreamWorks To Film "The Help"

Leave a comment

DreamWorks has acquired the rights to produce Katheryn Stockett’s debut novel, The Help, is a good read in Southern literature. They hope to begin filming this summer in Mississippi. The book is good, and the author has consulted the script, so the movie may be passable.

Reviews

Film review: Outlander

Leave a comment

Outlander

I’d heard rumors about this movie Outlander, a science fiction/Viking movie hybrid, starring the redoubtable Jim Caviezel. I’d heard some good things about it, so I rented it from Netflix, hoping I’d be able to recommend it to you, the discerning consumer.

Alas, I can’t honestly give it much of a boost.

What you’ve got here, essentially, is a cross between The Thirteenth Warrior and Predator. If you’ve seen those movies, frankly, I can’t think of much reason to watch this one. Unless you’re just keen to see a Viking ship in a movie, which is always worth the trouble (unless the movie is [ptui!] Beowulf and Grendel, which we hates, we does).

Outlander ship Continue reading Film review: Outlander →

Uncategorized

Report from the barricades

Leave a comment

This controversy over the health care bill must be galvanizing the American people, because it roused The Most Sedentary, Antisocial Man in America (your humble servant) to join a rally at the Minnesota state capitol in St. Paul on Saturday. Although it was unseasonably warm for mid-March, we had overcast skies and a nasty cold wind, and I wished I’d worn a nondescript watch cap, rather than my stylish fedora.

I persuaded a friend to come with me. We heard, among others, Captain Ed Morrisey of Hot Air blog, and Rep. Michelle Bachmann (I was able to tell my friend that I’d shaken her hand once, which filled him with satisfying awe).

Very stirring. On the evening news, our local CBS affiliate seemed conflicted in their reporting of the attendance. At one point they called it a huge rally. A minute later they described the crowd as “hundreds.”

My own guess (and I’m not very good at this) was about 2,000 people. That jibes pretty well with the estimates of the capitol police, as reported here at Power Line.

Don’t look for me in the photos. I was pretty far back. And I’m not very tall.

Goofing

If Star Wars were an Icelandic saga

Leave a comment

Mike Z. Williamson, author of Better to Beg Forgiveness, and other novels, sent me this link to a tongue-in-cheek analysis of the saga roots of Star Wars.

Great fun for you saga geeks and, let’s face it, who among us isn’t a saga geek?

Music

"The heart that has truly loved never forgets…"

Leave a comment

Speaking of enjoying music, and in honor of the upcoming St. Patrick’s Day holiday, I offer one of my own favorite Irish songs, one considered quaint today, but which I find deeply moving, “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms.”

The lyrics were written by the Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779-1852), who also wrote “The Minstrel Boy” and “The Last Rose of Summer.” I believe there’s a story that Moore wrote it to reassure his wife, after she contracted a skin disease, but I don’t put a lot of faith in such tales. Let me know if you have verification.

The idea of life-long love seems to me to have fallen on hard times in the 21st Century. Does anybody write love songs anymore (as opposed to sex songs) outside of Country music? (Not that Country doesn’t count. I just find it remarkable that a large segment of popular music seems to be devoted to songs that aren’t devoted—songs about booty calls and hotness.)

The clip above isn’t exactly what I was looking for, but it’s nice and the singer does both verses, with the words roughly right. I note that his last name is McLarsen. I wonder what the story behind that is. I know of a family named McCarlson, whose ancestor came to America and added a “Mc” to his name to a) differentiate himself from all the other Carlsons in a Norwegian town, and b) be more American. My own great-grandfather did something similar, but changed his last name altogether.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture