As much as he might like, there are no trips to the haberdashery for Chainsaw Minotaur. Not for a smart stetson or a cool fedora.  Once he dons his new lids their reduced to straw and felt.

Last night we braved the elements to see "The Knights of Badassdom" at the AMC theater in Coon Rapids. I want Peter Dinklage's "Pinball Wizard" shirt. Afterwards our friend Stephanie and I were suggesting to my wife that she would love Live Action Role Playing.  She said something about only doing something like that if she could stay in one place.  "Perfect" I said.  I had just the role in mind.

Participants go to the oracle when they want to know the lowdown on the other players.  If you think about it the oracle is always the character who has the skinny on all the other characters in the story.  The oracle just knows where everyone's skeletons are buried.

Just hang out at your booth and dish on the other players.  I give you, the LARPing Oracle.

"Beware of Maester Lohan's +3 Odorous Cloud of Personal Enveloping.  Smelling it won't kill you outright, but it may remove your will to live."

I went to see the film adaptation of Mark Helprin's "Winter's Tale" on Valentine's Day with my wife.

This is a book with complex resonance for me since I read it in 1983. A story that stuck with me and a style that both confused and intrigued.  Up until then I'd been picking up and reading mostly high fantasy and science fiction. I remember being curious because the jacket cover blurb mentioned something about a flying milk horse. I picked it up and started reading.

The book was an impressively detailed historical adventure novel with a wide cast of memorable characters and locations and occasional hints of all out magic.  After I finished the book I admit I was perplexed about how I felt about it. It was year's later that literature bean counters started gathering otherwise unrelated novels together and stamping them with the label Magical Realism. Books like the "Milagro Bean Field War" and "Kafka on the Shore". Given a name for what I had experienced, I was satisfied.

Despite what was suggested at the time though, Magical Realism is not a new genre. Merely a new name given to a class of novels that goes back decades. "The Tin Drum" by Gunter Grass is a novel from 1959, I would argue definitely fits into this classification. "The Master and Marguerita" by Mikhail Bulgakov is a novel from 1967 about Stalinist Russia that definitely rates highly if you are a fan of this genre.

"Winter's Tale" is a darling of the Magical Realist novel, however. The way Helprin's style smoothly transitions between breathtaking descriptions of New York in the early 20th century and a burglar on a flying horse trying to escape Pearly Soames and the Short Tail gang. It almost seems like a textbook definition for the writing style. In addition, it is also a novel that will lead you to fall in love with winter.

Life of Pi or Am I Still Alive...With Meerkats

Saw "Life of Pi" the other day on the Home Box Office. My wife the deal broker got us hooked up. I have to admit I thought it was really good. I also have to admit I've never read the book. Shamefaced if you could see it now.

Another Ang Lee movie I've heard a lot of muttering about.  Hey, stupid Hollywood people.  If you don't want an Ang Lee movie, don't hire Ang Lee to direct your movie? However, if you're going to shoot a movie about a boy alone on a boat with a ravenous Bengal tiger, he's your guy. He's not going to direct a Michael Bay clone for you or a film by Clint Eastwood.  Although Eastwood and Lee have a lot more in common stylistically than either of them have with Michael Bay. Meh, Michael Bay.

Anyway, I can't say anything about the movie. Don't want to spoil it for you if you haven't seen it and are curious. You wouldn't relate if I just tried describing it to you. That is the nature of this beast the Internet.  I could tell you two stories about the movie, and you could decide which one you liked better.

Rowlf the Dog....For Cialis

Been feeling annoyed by a particular commercial I have been seeing a lot recently.  In it, the Muppets all pile into a Toyota Highlander and then proceed to have a muppet-gasm about how spacious the interior of their luxury sports utility vehicle is.  It very well might be the very last thing I would expect the Muppet characters to have a muppet-gasm over.  Now I am aware from the tagline at the end of the add that it is a cross promotion for their new movie.   I could just go off on a rant about how commercial the Muppets have become since Disney bought the rights to pimp them muppets anywhere they see fit.

It's more complicated than that. Now when we were kids and the target audience of the muppets, I won't say how many years ago, we would have told you the "muppets are going to last forever".  Clearly, the marketing and merchandising people were hoping that too.  The fact is though that the fondest fans of these characters remain that original target audience.  Not their children, and not their grandchildren in some cases (gasp). 

With Fox Newsy News and the Republicagencia trying to convince half the country that Sesame Street was a communist plot from the get go and with the other characters firmly under Disney lock and key between movies, they really aren't reaching a younger audience the way Henson's original cast and crew did.

So maybe I just have to accept the idea that the Muppets fans are slowly aging out. That they really want to know if there is any room for boring in the new Toyota Highlander.  And maybe one day soon in a print add or in between segments of television programming, I will have this to look forward to.

Curious parallel today between what is going on internally and without.  Reading Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase. Here we are first introduced to the Sheep Professor and Murakami's curious spirit totem the Sheep Man. Murakami describes him as a character who epitomizes something that is lost in Japan. Yet when I read his novels, I imagine the same character making his home here as well. Or maybe someone similar.

Running errands in the Saturn I came up the the overpass on 94th, I saw a person picking her way around the piles of snow thrown up by the plows.  She was dressed from collar to boots in camo silk screened for tall grass, like she was going duck hunting. On her head loosely flopped a stuffed hat with the round block ears of an ever trade marked rodent. She had the air of someone scurrying. I felt like I had glimpsed America's answer to the Sheep Man. Dressed not for warmth but for false security and denial of the self but at the same time tagged with mass marketed nostalgia. 

"I am dressed for confrontation but don't look too closely so that I might slip away.  Look at me, I am an individual, but the more you look the more I fade into my surroundings. I am told what I cherish."