Toy Story 3, How to Train Your Dragon, Rumbi Island Grill

ByJohn Brown

Toy Story 3

It’s interesting that two of the most enjoyable films this year are both animated. The first is Toy Story 3. We all know how awful sequels can be, and, in fact, I didn’t like Toy Story 2 all that much. But Pixar defied the sequel slump with this one.

Andy has grown up and is going to college. From a toy’s point of view, that’s tantamount to death because Andy has to clean out his room, and what is he going to do with all that junk anyway? The last few remaining toys barely miss the garbage truck and get sent, by accident, to the local day care instead. Sounds great for a toy, right? They’ll get played with every day forever. But things are not as they seem at the day care, and our crew of toys is put on the fast track to an early death. Will they be able to escape when the other toys there are ruled mob-style by a big pink teddy bear that smells of strawberries?

I laughed and cried and cheered in this movie. There are hilarious scenes featuring Barbie and a Ken who’s gone over to the dark side. More gut busters with Buzz Lightyear when he’s put into Spanish mode and Mr. Potato Head who has powers we never would have suspected.

But the movie goes beyond toys and action. It’s not just a cartoon. It’s about loyalty and friendship and heroics and love and family. Because my oldest will be leaving the nest next year, the final scenes carried extra power for me. But I think they will be effective for almost anyone because Pixar does in this movie what all great art does—it reaches into themes we all share. And in that moment, we identify so strongly with the characters that their situation becomes our own.

How to Train Your Dragon

Dreamworks’ How to Train Your Dragon, based on the novel by Cressida Cowell, is the movie I should have seen for my birthday. Instead, we went to the mind-numbing Clash of Titans. I still cringe at some of the massive plot holes in that one, even though Medusa rocked. Which only proves, once again, that cool effects can’t save a bad story. How to Train Your Dragon, on the other hand, delivers cool monsters, but never once did the writers make the mistake of thinking that cool monsters is what the story was about.

The movie is about a young Viking named Hiccup who wants to be accepted, wants to become one of the burly defenders of his city, like his dad, Stoik the Vast. But Hiccup isn’t brawny. However, he is resourceful. And during a dragon attack, he brings down a mysterious Night Fury dragon with his invention. However, when he finds the dragon, he can’t bring himself to kill it. Instead, Hiccup and the dragon begin a friendship. But will Hiccup be able to save the dragon that everyone wants to kill? Will the Vikings be able to see the truth about the dragons before they’re destroyed? Most importantly, will Stoik be able to accept his son?

I enjoyed the superb animation in this story as well as the dragons. But it was the characters and humor that made this movie so good. There’s Stoik who just can’t relate to his son, but tries to bond with a very interesting use of his dead wife’s brassier, Hiccup, the son, with his dry wit, and Gobber, a peg-leg family friend who has some of the best lines in the movie.

Go see this show. You’ll laugh, and then you’ll wish you had a dragon of your own.

Rumbi Island Grill

The Rumbi Island Grill is a restaurant chain that started in Salt Lake City in 2000. They serve fast, casual tropical food at incredibly good prices. My favorite is their rice bowl. It comes with your choice of sauce, rice, and meat with sautéed vegetables. In the Netherlands I learned to love Indonesian food and the spicy-sweet peanut sauce that often accompanied it, which is why I can’t get enough of the Bali Island bowl with brown rice and shrimp. You might find you love the sauce so much you ask for two servings to pour over your bowl (oh, and add a dash of the hot sauce). The food’s great, but they’ve paid attention to the Hawaiian atmosphere as well. So even though it’s fast food (you order and they bring it out to you), you feel like you’re sitting in a casual dining restaurant.

I always look for a Rumbi when I travel down to Salt Lake City or Provo. Now I don’t have to go so far–a restaurant has opened up in Logan right across from the Wal-Mart on the south end of town! I took Nellie there recently. The staff was friendly and the food was delicious–just what I’d come to expect.

Now all we need is a Cheesecake Factory!

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    Update and Fage

    ByJohn Brown

    I passed the 90% mark today on SERVANT. It’s been wonderful going back through this story, remembering why I loved these characters so much. The cover too is coming along. I’m looking forward to revealing it in the near future. Right now everything looks like it will release on target, although that may change.

    While you’re here, you know I have been on a quest for delicious low-sugar yogurt for some time. I have found it at last. Behold.

    Fage 2 percent yogurt

    No Greek yogurt has a better taste or texture. And there’s no added sugar. Add some fruit and it’s heaven.

    It’s pronounced “fa-yeh.” Except, how do you pronounce that? Who comes up with product names nobody can pronounce? 

    But it doesn’t matter how you pronounce it. We luvs it, Precious.

     

     

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    Writing Update: Curse, trebuchets, CONduit, book industry, & Robinson Wells

    ByJohn Brown

    As of 5 PM this last Saturday I have finished 15,000 words of the climax of Curse of a Dark God. I think I have another 10,000 to go and the book will be done. I’m so close to the end of this draft! So don’t let the progress bars fool you. The ending is coming together fabulously–lots of spectacle, big reveals, and major heroics. At least, I think so.

    While working on this, I had to spend a number of hours finding out how strong a wind must be to pick up humans and stones. I also needed to know the destructive forces of various classes of tornados and hurricanes. Why would I need to know such things? I write fantasy, for Leroy’s sake!

    (Yes, that’s good English; I’m a writer, and one of my prerogatives is to make up silly versions of common expletives using the names of friends and enemies.)

    Here’s why: I just can’t write if I don’t believe in what I’m writing. And when I’ve got monsters (skir) that can generate winds that will be used in a siege, well, I had to know the terminal velocities of what these creatures could throw, and what that might mean for fortress defense. I had to know the limitations and ramifications.

    I won’t rehearse all the fascinating details (and it WAS fascinating), but all that research did lead me to a wonderful documentary. It’s called Secrets of Lost Empires 2: Medieval Siege and was produced by Nova in 2000. You can get it on Netflix or Amazon.  In the film, fifty carpenters worked day and night to create and test what they dubbed “the fourteenth century version of the atom bomb”–the trebuchet (tre-byou-SHAY). The trebuchet as the most popular throwing machine in Europe during the middle ages. If you love the history of medieval war, you’ll love this film. You might want to add to it a reading of the excellent Ancient and Medieval Siege Weapons by Konstantin Nossov, which you can get via the inter-library loan program.

    I’ll share two cool factoids for you history fans. “Catapult” means “shield-breaker,” “cata” meaning break or penetrate and “pelta” being the name of the shield used by the Greek light infantry. The original catapults were NOT big spoons–they sped arrows and balls along a track like a crossbow. However, instead of using the spring force of a bow, they used torsion-springs, which is what you get when you twist fibers that want to be straight. In the case of catapults the fibers were ropes made out of animal sinews or hair (horse or human, a woman’s hair being considered the best) and soaked in oil. Click on the image to see a larger picture. 

    A modern example of a torsion-spring are those balsa wood airplanes with propellers attached to a rubber band that’s hooked to the belly of the plane. To fly them, you rotate the propeller round and round, twisting the rubber band. Then you let the propeller go. Because the rubber wants to be straight, it reverses the twist, spinning the propeller the opposite way you twisted it. 

    You might think these torsion-spring engines were weak. But one catapult was reported as being powerful enough that an arrow shot from it broke through a shield, and the armored warrior standing behind it, at a distance of 400 yards! Hence, the name.

    The other factoid is that “trebuchet” comes from the French term meaning to overthrow. If you saw Return of the King, you’ll recognize them as the engines used on the towers of Minas Tirith. Trebuchets are simply an evolution of the staff sling. When it came to breaking castle walls, there was nothing more effective until the cannon appeared. Of course, in my book I use them a bit differently. You’ll see.

    One funny thing. I watched the movie with my oldest who was just as fascinated with the engines as I was. When she was telling my wife about the film, she kept referring to trech-uh-butts. Which, I guess, is as fair an attempt at “trebuchet” as any. However, my wife kept picturing buttocks and couldn’t figure out what the heck my daughter was talking about–“You were watching what with your father?!”

    The French make things so hard . . .

    ***

    The Monday after CONduit I left for work in Mexico and then Vegas. I didn’t get back until this week. So I just wanted to say I had a great time at the con. Loved chatting with all the folks there.

    It was great to see the Larry Correia, Paul Genesse, Jessica Day George, Isaac Stewart (and his brother Dan), Mette Harrison, Eric James Stone, Darren Egget, Julie Frost, Sandra Tayler, LE Modesitt, Josh Perkey, Nicole (whose husband is an Orem cop and I lost his number), Daniel Who-I-Sacrificed-to-My-Editor, and the Dungeon Crawlers Radio guys.

    It was also nice to speak with Julie Wright who was one of the initial judges for the Whitney Awards. She’s always nice to chat with, but this time it was especially nice since she said reading Servant of a Dark God was like eating chocolate. I’ll take chocolate praise any day.

    I also met new author Janci Patterson who just sold a YA with a great premise. It’s called SKIP and is about a young girl whose parents are divorced. The girl has to go stay with her dad who lives in a trailer and is a bounty hunter. I’m a sucker for bounty hunter stories. Especially this one, because she goes out with him and falls in love with one of the guys her dad has to haul in. I’ve slaughtered the pitch, but I got that good old writer’s envy when she told me about it. Can’t wait to read it.

    I also got to see Barbara Hambly. I was at LTUE when she was there like 20 years ago. We loved her stuff. She suddenly dropped out of the writing scene in the early 90’s and now I know why–it appears Del Rey dropped all their midlist authors except for Anne McCaffery and someone else. Hambly was one of the causalities.

    ***

    After Hambly’s main address, I sat with a few authors and had a brief discussion about the book industry where it was suggested the industry was shrinking–fewer readers, fewer sales, doom, doom, doom. But that is exactly opposite all the data I’ve seen.

    1. Book sales have an annual average growth over the last seven years of 1.1%, adult paperbacks are growing 2.9% http://www.publishers.org/main/IndustryStats/indStats_02.htm or http://www.publishers.org/main/IndustryStats/documents/S12009Final.pdf . Now, this doesn’t show units sold. So it could be that they sold fewer units for more money per unit. Still, it shows at the very least that $$$ aren’t shrinking.
    2. The New Book Titles report here shows an increase in the number of titles: http://www.bowker.com/index.php/book-industry-statistics — 80% increase from 2002 to 2009.
    3. Reading rates are actually on the rise: http://johndbrown.com/2009/03/literary-reading-rates-on-the-rise/
    4. Finally, I contacted Bookscan for their numbers for an ALA conference I did last summer. This is just juvenile fiction, but the numbers are in units. Now, I don’t know if they added more sources to their database and so that caused a rise, but I explained to them what I was trying to do—see trends over time—and this is the data they provided. According to their numbers, more juvenile books are being sold now than in 2004. Click on the graphic below. This means we have more and more readers rising up through the ranks! One author asked how much of that was Rowling and Meyer. During that period books by those authors accounted for an average of 7-10% of all juvenile fiction. Bookscan categorizes “juvenile” as everything for kids. That means from Go, Dog Go up through what we consider Young Adult. R&M accounted for an average of 33-36% of what Bookscan categorizes as science fiction, fantasy, or magic within the juvenile mega-category. What all that means is the growth is across the whole category, not just with their books.

    So I’m very sanguine about the book industry’s prospects. Today’s youth seem to be able to play computer games AND read in great quantities.

    ***

    Finally, one last bit of news. Robinson Wells was the one of the main ones to start the Whitney Academy and the Whitney Awards. Well, he just got some fabulous news. Here’s the announcement from Publishers Marketplace: “Robison Wells’ YA debut dystopian thriller VARIANT, a modern-day LORD OF THE FLIES, set at a boarding school where not everything is as it seems and every day is a fight for survival, in a significant deal, in a three-book deal, to Erica Sussman at Harper Children’s.”

    For those of you who don’t know, here are the PM deal categories.

    • “nice deal” $1 – $49,000
    • “very nice deal” $50,000 – $99,000
    • “good deal” $100,000 – $250,000
    • “significant deal” $251,000 – $499,000
    • “major deal” $500,000 and up

    Oh, baby. Someday. Someday. Of course, I’m nothing but happy for Mr. Wells!

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  • Good Stuff! Million Dollar Arm, Remember the Titans

    ByJohn Brown

    I wanted to let you know about two films I recently watch with the family and enjoyed. Both are based on real events.

    The first is Million Dollar Arm. This is a great film based on the true story of the search for the first pro American baseball players from . . . India.

    MillionDollarArm

    They were hoping to find some pitchers. But it’s not about what you’re thinking. Because there were no pros in India. There was no baseball. There was only the game of cricket, and bowling in cricket requires a totally different arm movement than pitching in baseball.

    This film features plenty of good humor, a cast of very enjoyable characters, and a romantic subplot that’s more about becoming something better than it is about the romance.

    The next is Remember the Titans. I know. It was released in 2000. So I’m late to the party, arrest me. With the internet, the party goes on forever.

    RememberTheTitans

    This is another film based on real events. This time its about a the introduction of racial integration at a West Virginian high school in 1971. Denzel Washington plays Herman Boone, the new black coach.

    This one has plenty of drama, food for thought, and was so good daughter number 3 wants if for her personal library.

    If you like sports movies, you’ll love these. If you don’t like sports movies, you’ll love them, because these two films aren’t about the sports. They’re about something more important. Do yourself a favor, sit down with the family and give them a go.

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  • Good Stuff: Poldark, Monk, and the cure for dragon feet

    ByJohn Brown

    For all of you longing for just one more season of Downton Abbey, I’ve found a new series from the BBC I think you’ll enjoy (thank you Duane Robinson for the recommendation).

    It’s called Poldark and is set in the late 1700s in Cornwall, that little southwestern leg of England that juts out into the Atlantic. The dark-haired and handsome Ross Poldark returns to England after having fought in the American War of Independence and finds that his father has died, and he’s inherited the estate. Except the estate is in ruins.

    The house, which is a long way from being anything grand, is a mess and being inhabited by the deceased father’s last two servants. A man and a wife who are equal parts louts and lushes. The land isn’t producing. The mine is closed. And Poldark has very little money.

    By the way, when we think of British aristocracy, we most often think of dances and fine clothing and large tracts of lands. We seldom think of mines. But Cornwall has been mining tin for a very long time, and so were its lords. In fact, Cornwall was known outside of the Isles anciently, and some historians suggest that Cornwall was probably selling tin to the seafaring Greeks and Phoenicians many hundreds of years B.C.

    So our young and handsome lord has come home to a mess and very little money. But he immediately sets about trying to repair things. And what unfolds is a wonderful story with love, action, humor, injustice, and villains plotting Poldark’s downfall.

    We loved Downton in part for the refinement and high society (and Lady Grantham’s hilarious one-liners). However, Poldark isn’t about the top of the aristocracy. It’s about a man almost at the bottom. And many of those of the lower class who are his friends. There’s a refreshing earthiness about it even while you still have scenes of the high society and all that goes with it.

    We just finished the first season and are hooked. In fact, I stood up and cheered at the end of the last episode we watched. So if you love English historicals, you’re going to enjoy Polkdark.

    *

    The humorous detective series Monk debuted in 2002 and ran for eight seasons. It was a huge hit. But because I’m a cave dweller I didn’t get to it until now. But, boy, I’m happy I did.

    If you haven’t seen it yet, you’re in for a treat. Monk is one of those brilliant detectives like Patrick Jane in The Mentalist or Sherlock Holmes who sees all sorts of details that so many others miss. But unlike those guys, Monk has obsessive-compulsive disorder plus a number of phobias.

    And so he can’t just walk in and stun everyone with his brilliance because at any moment he might get sidetracked straightening pictures or moving lamps or trying to avoid germs. In one funny scene he’s being chased on foot by someone intent on killing him, and he can’t help but touch the poles as he runs by. However, he’s not all helpless because he’s hired a female nurse, Sharona Fleming, to help him. And the interaction between the two of them adds another enjoyable dimension.

    And so you get to experience all the awe of watching someone like Sherlock solve crimes plus laugh along the way. I couldn’t help but laugh out loud during a number of episodes.

    If you like The Mentalist, Elementary, or Psych, I think you’ll really enjoy Monk.

    *

    This last review is for all of you who have dragon feet.

    That’s what I had until two months ago. Dry dragon feet. So dry and with such sharp and jagged calluses that I regularly wore the area on my sheets around my feet to shreds. Nellie’s side of the sheets were nice and smooth. My side, after a year or two, looked like the dog had attacked it.

    The calluses were so bad I periodically sanded them off with 400 grit sandpaper.

    I also got stress cracks in the winter, which I tried to heal with band-aides and Neosporin. And that worked a decade ago. But the stress cracks were just getting more frequent and longer-lasting. This last winter I had three that stayed for weeks and weeks.

    And so when I went into my dermatologist for my annual skin cancer check, I asked him if there was anything to be done. He said, “Get CeraVe cream with SA, salicylic acid. It has to have SA.”


    After the appointment, I promptly drove to Walmart and walked down to the cosmetic aisle and purchased a little tub of CeraVe Renewing SA Cream. And I began to use it that night, putting socks on after I applied it. I applied it every morning and night.

    And, miracle of miracles, a few weeks later my feet were normal human feet again. The calluses were gone. The stress cracks gone. The pain gone. My sheets love me. My wife loves me. I’m saving money on sand paper.

    Folks, if you have dragon feet and want to be human again, let me suggest CeraVe with SA.

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  • Thai Crystal, Rothfuss, Daily Life in the Middle Ages, Perot Charts

    ByJohn Brown

    Thai Crystal Stick - Large, 4.2 ozI don’t like anti-perspirants because they gob up in the underarms of my undershirts. Which means I eventually go walking about with pebbles in my pits. And, yes, we do have a washing machine and use it regularly. There’s something in there that defies anything less than hydro-chloric acid.

    I don’t like deodorants because they wimp out on me. I’ll put on my bracing Speedstick in the morning and be sniffing myself by lunch. And if I put some industrial perfume on it only leads to rashes.

    Someone might be saying that I should just be a real man and smell like a real man smells. But how about I be a real, smart man. See, if you’ve got dog poo in your carpet, you wouldn’t spray it with cologne, hoping to deal with the smell. No, you go to the source. Clean up the stuff and forego all the scents. In fact, if you keep the dog from pooping in the first place, you’re ahead of the game. So why not do the same with underarm odors? Just get rid of the stinkers.

    Well, that’s what I did. Many years ago I found out that natural mineral salts kill underarm bacteria. If the underarm bacteria can’t exist, let alone breed and excrete, then you don’t get underarm odor. What’s more, you can get those mineral salts in “rock” form. Just wet and wipe under your arms and you’re done. It works just like regular anti-perspirant and deodorant, it’s just that you’re delivery bacteria killers instead of perfumes.

    Another good thing about mineral salt deodrant rocks is that they last a LONG time. And I mean looooong. My last rock took about 4 years to use up (heads up all you one-year’s supply people). The problem with them is that you can’t find the rocks in the grocery store next to the big brands. But you CAN find them in health stories. I got my latest from Shangri-lah in Logan. The brand is Thai Crystal (named after the location where the US companies discovered this method of deodorizing).

    Folks, it’s 3:09 PM. I just did the sniff test–aah, the sweet smell of nothing!

    *

    The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle, Day 1)I heard all the hype about Rothfuss and picked up his The Name of the Wind  in a Hastings book shop. The first few pages didn’t grab me and so I put it back. But then I kept hearing the hype. I finally decided, okay, okay, I’ll give it a go.

    By “go” I mean something like five pages. See, I’m impatient with books. If you can’t grab me by the bottom of page one, I’m outta there. I read too many stories in my undergrad program that bored me to the very last page. Sometime after I graduated (why did I wait so long?) I realized that I could increase the odds of reading something interesting me if I only read things that interested me. (You only arrive at this level of brilliance after many years in college.)

    I’m not going to overview the plot here. Just know it’s a fabulous read. For you writers, note that what drives the reader’s suspense is not an overarching plot, but his situation of being alone and destitute. So while there are villains, that really isn’t what keeps the reader going. It’s the wonder of a new place and our hope for this kid.

    *

    Daily Life in the Middle AgesI read more non-fiction than I do fiction each year. I need to so that I have something to say in my writing. And I will tell you that I haven’t found a finer source of cool ideas to huck into stories than Paul Newman’s (no, not the actor cum cookie man) Daily Life in the Middle Ages.

    He breaks up medieval life into topics like Eating and Cooking, Building and Housing, Clothing and Dressing, etc. It’s full of wonderful stuff.

    Did you know that they played football back in old England? Not sissy European style, but hog style, like rugby or American football. Except it was often between two towns and the playing field was miles long.

    Did you know that respectable women wore hats? Those who let their hair go free were young girls and prostitutes. And that if a man knocked a woman’s headdress off it was tantamount to accusing her of prostitution and might result in the woman’s husband or family taking the man to court to exhonorate her. 

    Did you know that the word “curfew” came from the old French “covre feu,” meaning “cover the fire.” Since open flames were such a fire hazard in the old cities, many towns had regulations that required people to douse their lights and carefully bank their fires at a certain time in the evening which was often marked by the tolling of bells.

    I pulled these beauties out just randomly flipping through the pages. The book is full of such delights and you can be sure many of these will be finding their way into my stories.

    *

    I didn’t vote for Ross Perot the first time. I certainly wouldn’t vote for him now. But James Maxey just pointed me to an excellent on-line explanation of the current government budget. It’s worth your time to check this out to be able to understand what folks are talking about when it comes to our money and how Congress spends it. The charts are narrated, compelling, non-partisan, and incredibly easy to follow. Here are more Perot Chart presentations.  

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    Slush I Read by Jim C. Hines

    ByJohn Brown

    Laughs are lovely. I just came across this wonderful parody by novelist Jim C. Hines which will give you a few for free. Enjoy!

    Slush I Read
    by Jim C. Hines

    (Apologies to Seuss)

    I read slush.
    Slush I read.

    That slush I read.
    That slush I read!
    I do not like that slush I read.

    Do you like fanfic with vamps?

    I do not like them Mary Sue.
    Why do these vamps all worship you?

    Here’s a tale from D & D!

    I do not want your D & D.
    I do not like your elf PC.
    I can not stand your purple prose.
    I want to punch you in the nose!

    Would you like a hot sex scene?
    I wrote it for my online ‘zine!

    Go to Hines’ site and read the rest right now

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  2. How to Train Your Dragon is pretty much my favorite movie these days. The soundtrack is superb. I mean, Forbidden Friendship? Fabulous: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CJ96LGGP6w

    I’m basically writing my next book to the soundtrack, since it has the same fun, hopeful feel I want the book to have.

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