Back again for another highly opinionated — some might even say downright cranky — look at the week in fantasy. You’ve been warned!

SO HOW DID MY WEEKEND GO? THANKS FOR ASKING!

Last week, I told you how I was going away to play D&D with my buddies.

How did it go, you ask?

We had a really great time as usual. It’s funny how, the older we get — most of us are in our 40s now — the less we seem to take it all for granted. There was actually talk of our getting together more than our present four-weekends-a-year.

I was the DM, and I was pleased that I was able to find a “classic” mummy’s-tomb dungeon. But it was a little light, so I sort of improvised a few rooms on the fly.

In one, there are five statues of giant sleeping cats. One by one, they come alive and ask a riddle. If the players got it right, the cat resumed statue form. But if they got it wrong … well, it still resumed statue form, but one of the other cat statues came to life and attacked from behind (my brilliant players got all five riddles correct, which is saying something, since two of them were quite tough).

So I had to quickly improvise five riddles. Here’s one I used that I wrote several years ago for a (still unpublished) book. It was one of the easy ones:

The two of us share a home

I write the poems, he works the loam

He is free to move about

But I’m locked inside, I can’t get out

Though we are one in many ways

I pay the price when my brother strays

He loses love, I feel the pain

He makes a kill, I bear the stain

But I’ll have revenge when death taps the door

For I know a secret passage to something more

And while he must face the dirge and stay

I’ll be free to slip away

Think you know the answer? It’s at the end of this column!

DOES ANYONE REMEMBER COUNT CHOCULA?

So I was researching an article the other day, and I came upon a Wikipedia entry on “General Mills monster-themed breakfast cereals.”

This really stopped me in my tracks. If you weren’t alive/aware when these cereals were popular (back in the 70s and 80s), it’s hard to communicate just how popular they were. Maybe it’s because we were all watching the same three TV shows (with no cable or video or computers), so they were able to effectively bombard us with non-stop commercials, pretty much bludgeoning all kids submission (we’d then whine to our parents until we’d bludgeoned them into submission).

My memory is that, even with all those television commercials, Frankenberry (strawberry flavored) was still pretty much inedible, and Boo Berry (blueberry flavored) only slightly less so. In fact, I don’t remember any of my friends ever eating anything but Count Chocula.

But here’s something I didn’t know: there was a fourth “monster” flavor — Fruit Brute, which later became Fruity Yummy Mummy (”fruit” flavored?). How is it possible I’m unaware of this? God knows I watched enough commercials.

Something else I didn’t know: they still make these cereals (except for Fruity Yummy Mummy), although it sounds like Frankenberry and Boo Berry are mostly available only at Halloween.

(Good God, it’s criminal the crap we feed our kids. Why don’t we just serve them bowls of lead-paint chips while we’re at it?)

Anyway, here’s one of the commercial, and it’s scary how vividly I remember it. I don’t remember it being nearly this cheesy, however. And how pathetic are those “mini-monsters”?

THE TINDER BOX TAKES ON THE IDIOT BOX

Starting this week, The History Channel is rerunning the first season of their series, Clash of the Gods, a show that claims to look at “history” behind various mythical gods and monsters — but mostly seems like an excuse to geek out over really cool myths and low-budget-but-still-cool-looking graphics. The first episode is about “Thor,” and the second one is “Tolkien’s Monsters” (Monday, 10 PM, History Channel). Here’s a preview of the latter:

Speaking of TV, is anyone watching The Vampire Diaries? I confess, it didn’t much interest me (sick of both vampires and angsty teen dramas). But I hear reports that it’s actually quite good! True?

THE TINDER BOX AT THE BOX OFFICE

No new fantasy/sci-fi movies in theaters this week, but new movies out on DVD include Land of the Lost, the first complete season of Legend of the Seeker, and The Objective (the latest from the co-creators of The Blair Witch Project. (Support TheTorchOnline.com by buying any of these movies through our links!)

Well, this week’s flame has sputtered out, but join me again next week when I promise I won’t be nearly so cranky.

Oh, who am I kidding?!

The answer to the riddle: the human soul.

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• BATTLE OF THE SMITHSONIAN is Right: Ancient Egypt is Really, Really Cool

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