Is this what wisdom smells like?

• In certain cultures, hunger is personified as a wolf. When you get just a little bit hungry, then eat, it is like you ate the little baby wolf. How could you do it. If you get moderately hungry, you then kill the hunger by eating the adolescent wolf, a better adversary. But if you get really really hungry, then the wolf grows stronger. Too strong. Now the wolf is invincible no matter what you eat to kill it. Then you have no choice but to call upon the deity known as the Crazy Hunger, who alone is capable of dispatching this terrible wolf-beast. You set up a massive feast, I mean we're talkin' a competitive eating type of setup here, just neverending let's say hot dogs and apple pies, and you get down on your knees, and you shake your fists and call out to the heavens, 'Crazy Hunger, EAT THIS WOLF!"
  
• I noticed I waste a lot of time worrying about things that actually turn out to be just the problems I was worrying about. Like, e.g., waking up thinking about how later on I will have to pay some bills and find something to eat and figure out what to teach some kid on the piano. But this is such a stupid thing to worry about, because whether or not I worry, I'm still gonna pay those bills, find something to eat, and figure out what to teach some kid on the piano. So I was thinking what are better things to worry about. Of course the saints among us can probably worry about something unrelated to themselves, like global warming or hunger or that sort of thing. I tried that and it doesn't do the trick. Don't get me wrong, I care about those things, but I can't get myself to wake up too early worrying about them. I need some self-interest in there. So my new plan is instead of worrying about the inevitable and inescapable knots and obstacles of the everyday, I will start worrying about what to do in unlikely situations. Like for instance, say you were falling from a blown-up airplane towards the sea from not all that huge a distance. I figure if you are able to streamline your body into a perfect dive, you might not break all your bones and die when you hit. Or how about if you hear a nuclear explosion but it is a good ways off and you have like ten seconds to get somewhere safe from the shockwave, where are you gonna go? Or say someone wants to mug you, what sort of things are you gonna do to make them think you're too crazy to fuck with? Or what if someone decides to interview you about something you did, what are you gonna say to not sound like an idiot? What if you are driving across a bridge and there is an earthquake and you have to decide in like two seconds whether to try to slam on the brakes or accelerate enough to jump the newly formed gap in the middle of the bridge? These are the sorts of unlikely but possible scenarios that I want to waste my worrying energy on from here on out.
  
• Every single time I ever get annoyed with someone, and I mean EVERY single time, I then realize it is really something about myself I see in the someone. This goes for cats too.
  
• I taught a kid to play the drums. I am a dude who taught a kid to play the drums. If I didn't teach him, well, probably someone else would have. But still.
  
• Little kids like Buster Keaton because people falling is still the funniest thing.
  
• It turns out it is really easy to make delicious mustard at home with nothing but mustard seeds and water, and probably you want some vinegar or white wine too.
  
• It ain't no Hubble deep field, but when you look in ordinary binoculars, you are fucking looking back in time. I mean, not much, just a tiny little infinitesimal micro-nano-mini-second, but still.
  
• Our understanding of the things and relationships in our world can be favorably compared to the Hubble deep field. For one thing, we only see shit if we look really close at a spot. For another, things look 2D unless we use our brains and more evidence (like, say, the red shift caused by the electromagnetic radiation doppler effect from galaxies receding from us at varying rates) to figure out how they fit together in 3 d's. There's always gonna be more to understand the closer you look, and you're still gonna be wrong from the perspective of the dude in the future who gets a better look.
  
• You should google up some info on the Hubble deep field, I decided it is kind of ridiculous to link to general information like that in a blog post.
  
• If you're naturally curious, the internet makes you smarter.
  
• The most normal person you know is completely fucking weird as HELL.
  
• Keep your eyes on CERN, they are gonna discover some shit that will blow all our minds, even though it is just the shit that everything is made out of. Which fact itself blows my mind.
  
• I guess not all of these count as wisdom.
  
• I guess potentially none of these count as wisdom.
  
• Just because you're older doesn't mean you're wiser.
  
• It's not up to you whether what you say is wise anyhow.
  
• Just because you put things in topical bullet points doesn't mean they follow any sort of organizational pattern beyond the visual.
  
• Good bye.

Fun with anagrams

I saw that movie The Vanished a few days back, and like a week or two before that, Shutter Island, and then maybe a couple years ago Memento, all of which got me thinking about anagrams in the back of my mind somewhere, I guess, cuz then lo and behold the other day my mind went blank for a while, then when I came to I realized that "saint" and "isn't a" are anagrams, and then I did this thing you always have to do in music theory where you find the different "rotations" of a series of notes, resulting in something like this (only scrawled out in the sort of messy writing indicative of a crackpot revelation in progress):

isn't a saint
(sntasainti)
(ntasaintis)
(tasaintisn)
as ain't isn't
saint isn't a
ain't isn't as
in 'tisn't as a
(ntisntasai)
(tisntasain)
isn't a saint


Then I thought it would be cool to make a poem where you had to use all the five letters before you reused them, but I had to sort of cheat, and it looked like this:

saint isn't a saint
-but-
saint ain't isn't as saint isn't
-so-
ain't a saint a saint?


I dunno, it seemed worthwhile at the time but now it seems like Matty ran out of crosswords and the internet was broke.

Well I'll be... (repost from last year)

Wouldn't you know it, but the league run by some kind of strange tribal warlords who have instituted a form of cheating into the rules of the game won again. I for one am shocked that the league which builds its teams around this institutionalized form of cheating ends up being better every year. It just doesn't seem to follow from the fact that said cheating increases revenue, attracts more sluggers and lets them play longer, and allows pitchers to focus solely on pitching. So why, since the DH was first introduced to the mid-summer classic in 1989, has the AL won seventeen games and the NL only three? Beats me. In the words of my favorite cartoon cat, Ray Smuckles, "Dear. God. I. Am. Not. A. Religious. Man. But. Please. Help. Me. See. The. Connection. Here."

Also, there is the matter of this:

It isn't easy but I'll try

I woke up with this terrible pun in my head, then spent the past hour or so trying to build a joke around it. I think it was gonna have something to do with that movie Throw Momma From the Train. It was gonna be something like "What did Sidney Poitier say to Danny Devito on the set of Throw Momma From the Train?"

Figure 12: Toss her with love.

Way early, but...

...mark your calendars. Write it down in your date-books. Update your blackberries. Or is it blueberries? Whatever. Put this shit in your iphone already. Etch it directly into your forearm, if you are a goth and a cutter. Tie a string around your finger. Don't cut off your circulation. You'll need that. Buy your tickets. There's only a hundred. It comes with a pint of beer. I recommend the English Brown Ale. I just had three of them yesterday. Each one more delicious than the last. I drank them as I talked to a guy who agrees with me that you should come to this show. Listen to him. Listen to me. Listen to us.



Check out some sneak previews if you don't believe it's all that.

To my St. Louis reader(s), please come see this tonight

You'll cry.

But take heart– you can can come back to my place afterwards and do any one of the following:

• Shoot a BB gun at some cans or maps of Europe
  
• Drink one or several beers
  
• Give us adulations various and sundry
  
• Listen to a recitation of some of the Illiad, if it turns out to be That sort of night.
  
• Spill things on my floor
  
• Listen to music on my ipod until someone decides to change it because I have the same seven or eight non-party-friendly albums on there I always do
  
• Make merry

This happened to me yesterday.

I was watching Caddyshack, and I suddenly didn't think it was funny. I mean, like, at all. But then after the commercial break it seemed funny again.

It was weird, man.

Vindication; Scopitones

First, vindication from Siskel and Ebert, who loved one of my favorite movies, Revenge of the Nerds:



I found this review on accident when, starting from a recommendation for this one, I was clicking around a site full of scopitones and discovered that the cheerleaders' portion of the talent show at the end of Revenge of the Nerds is a direct adaptation of an old, kinda pornographic scopitone (NSFW, but just barely, if you really crane your neck and get close to the screen). But that scopitone, awesome as it is, is just one of many. And most have cool pop songs from France or America and scantily clad 60s-lookin' chicks. My favorite might just be this one, or wait, maybe this one, or really it might just be this one. Hell, the thing to do is probably just go waste half a day watchin'em all yourself.

Figure 12: A Scopitone machine (they were like video jukeboxes, see)

Two old movies I saw last night: Part 2

So after The Hustler was over I was hungry, so during the credits I made some sandwiches. Then when I was eating them the next movie started, and it was The Shootist. This was John Wayne's last movie, and it has some neat parallels between the actors and the characters. The main character, J.B. Brooks, is an old, famous outlaw who comes to Carson City to confirm with a trusted doctor that he indeed is dying of cancer. Just a few years earlier John Wayne was diagnosed with lung cancer and thought he might die (but instead he had a lung out and was fine for a few more years until it came back and got him in the stomach in the end). But besides the exact disease, the parallels are a lot cooler. J.B. Brooks wasn't an outlaw for the glory or anything, he lived by the motto "I won't be wronged, I won't be insulted, and I won't be laid a hand on. I don't do these things to other people, and I require the same from them." By all accounts John Wayne himself lived with a similar attitude (case in point: he made them change the script of this very movie so that he would get to ride his own favorite horse and so his character wouldn't shoot a dude in the back).

We don't know too much about his past, but there is a cool montage right in the beginning where acts and deeds supposedly in Brooks' past are represented by actual clips from previous John Wayne movies (I couldn't name them all, but I definitely noticed one scene from Rio Bravo). The lead female and vague romantic interest (this is an awesome aspect of the movie, that the romantic interest story is all a what-may-have-been) is played by Lauren Bacall, who in real life had watched her real husband Humphrey Bogart die of cancer. In 1976 the kinds of Westerns John Wayne had made a career with were getting to be out of style (is this even true? I'm no film scholar but it seems like it is. I mean, there were still Westerns, but I think they were getting more gritty and Clint Eastwood-y), and Wayne himself must have been feeling a bit like he outlived his time. Same with J.B. Brooks, who is surrounded during the whole movie with the beginnings of running water, electricity, and increased law and order in what used to be the wild wild west.

So J.B. goes to this wise old stuttering stammering doctor who seemed familiar, and it was because it was freakin' Jimmy freakin' Stewart.

Figure 12: Jimmy freakin' Stewart

So great old wonderful old Jimmy Stewart has to tell John Wayne how he's gonna die, but then suggests if he were a brave man he would find a cooler way to die. John Wayne takes it to heart. With the help of a young Ron Howard (you don't need me to link Ron Howard's wikipedia page, do you? I mean, come on, you know who Ron Howard is, he is in or has directed like every single movie there is) and that guy who has the Shining, he sets up an awesome way to go down in a blaze of glory.

Figure 12: That guy who has the Shining, aka Scatman Crothers

Figure 12: Not this kind of blaze of glory, but then again not too far off

All the while he is being hilariously taunted by that dude from MASH, and he also totally dresses down the father of the dude who would try to take that pebble out of that dude's hand.

Figure 12: The dude from MASH, who is freakin' hilarious in this movie

Figure 12: The dude from whose hand the dude in this movie's son would try to take a pebble

Also for good measure the producers originally didn't even want John Wayne, but rather this dude named George C. Scott, maybe you heard of him.

Figure 12: Maybe you heard of this dude

This movie is fucking brilliant. It is a great story in its own right, as nothing more than a story. The pacing is perfect, with little titles that count down from "1st day" to "6th day" or so to "last day." The humor is honest-to-god laugh-out-loud stuff, especially that dude from MASH and a lot of times the Duke himself. There is also some biting satire in the form of all the minor characters trying to make a buck off the death of a famous outlaw. But then it is also a really touching depiction of time passing one by, and of a proud and stubborn man facing his inevitable decline and death, which I can tell you is one of the saddest things. It really struck a chord with me on some of my own feelings about dying, like for instance when the Duke talks about a man's death being the most private part of his life. I mean, I cried.

You wanna cry too? Get this: the horse the Duke made them write in was his prized horse, and he wouldn't let others ride it. In this movie he gives away his horse to the young rascal Ron Howard, like he is saying, here, kid, my time's up, now you can ride my horse. And it kept its name it has in real life ("Ol' Dollor") as a character in the movie. So it was like the Duke was literally giving up his horse. It is eerie, a little, and sad, and beautiful. Go see it.

Two old movies I saw last night: Part 1

So last night I just never had that thing happen where you get sleepy. I watched all of both baseball games, then I was flippin' around the channels, and I landed on AMC for the very beginning of The Hustler. I was immediately interested because there was a guy named Fast Eddie, and living in St. Louis it would be almost impossible to avoid hearing Mike Shannon talk about Fast Eddie's Bon-Air in Alton, Illinois every single day of every single summer.

Figure 12: The most famous thing about Alton, Illinois

Well little did I know that Fast Eddies is named after Paul Newman's pool-hustlin' character. Also little did I know that Minnesota Fats (the real pool player) used to be called New York Fats until this movie came out and he adopted the name of Minnesota Fats (the character played by Jackie Gleason). And then there is the matter of the incredibly hot lead actress, Piper Laurie.

Figure 12: The incredibly hot lead actress, Piper Laurie

The great shock about this incredibly hot young woman is that she went on to play two extremely memorable roles later in her life:

Figure 12: The incredibly insane supporting actress, Piper Laurie

Figure 12: The incredibly sly supporting actress, Piper Laurie

Also for good measure there's a dude in the movie named George C. Scott, maybe you heard of him.

Figure 12: Maybe you heard of this dude

I guess what I'm trying to say was this movie was just really good. I'm not one of those guys who thinks movies are good just because they're old. In fact I think in general older movies suck compared to newer ones. So when I see an old one that is good, I am extra excited about it. I am excited about The Hustler. I think you should go see it.

P.S. My favorite line was when Paul Newman gets this faraway look in his eyes and says "I'm gonna beat that fat man."

Please come to this if you live in St. Louis

Also we will play it again Sunday at 1:30 at the Ragtag Cinema in Columbia, MO. Why not see both?

Well I'll be god-damned

Wouldn't you know it, but the league run by some kind of strange tribal warlords who have instituted a form of cheating into the rules of the game won again. I for one am shocked that the league which builds its teams around this institutionalized form of cheating ends up being better every year. It just doesn't seem to follow from the fact that said cheating increases revenue, attracts more sluggers and lets them play longer, and allows pitchers to focus solely on pitching. So why, since the DH was first introduced to the mid-summer classic in 1989, has the AL won sixteen games and the NL only three? Beats me. In the words of my favorite cartoon cat, Ray Smuckles, "Dear. God. I. Am. Not. A. Religious. Man. But. Please. Help. Me. See. The. Connection. Here."

Also, there is the matter of this:

New looks

New look around here. Been tweakin' it. I know just enough html and css shit and all to knock humpty dumpty off the wall, but not quite enough to put him back together again. There's egg on your face.

Also I got a haircut. Once again I look like Bob Saget. That's ok, the last time I got as shaggy as I was, some dude told me I looked like Daryl Hall.

Um, what else. You guys should feel my pecs. My pecs are for some reason so strong now. Makes me want to set up a weight bench and a kiddie pool in my front yard, get a little Muscle Beach STL action goin' on (J. Richardson, K. Malley et al, ca. 1998).

Let's see, there's this hot new blog out there I got a hand in.

I been cookin' mostly non-comedy food lately. Some sci-fi (astronaut ice cream), some drama (using my tears to brine some chicken), even some biopic (I recreated the actual sandwich Hall & Oates shared backstage before their famous concert at the Apollo on September 20th, 1985) (I realize there isn't a biopic on Hall & Oates. Yet...)

And yes, in case you were wondering, there is such a thing as a porno cooking show (NSFW & also NSFTWADBHPSRB) (=Not Safe For Those Who Are Disgusted By Horrible Plastic-Surgery-Ridden Beasts). Talk about your Adult Education.

Figure 12: Adult Education, Live at the Apollo,
September 20th, 1985
(oh my god is that G.E. Smith?!?!)

this is a city of crime

(don't step out of line)



It somehow warms my heart that there are little cultural tidbits like this that even now, even today, in the middle of the future, with wireless signals buzzing around our heads like golden flying moths, with text-to-landline technology threatening to make us laugh at even the saddest of phone messages, with flying cars just around the corner, with five hundred reaction videos to a single shock site, that the only internet representation of this horrible, horrible disfiguration of "rap" music by one-and-a-half respected American actors is a shitty VHS rip with catastrophically unsynched sound. Somewhere in my heart, nestled between fond memories of Honey Nut Cheerios at Grandma's house and hidden flames for older professors, between the aorta and the left ventricle, there is a closet Luddite jamming up my arteries. This is a city of crime. Don't step out of line.

the fabled catbird seat

St. Louis native John Goodman was the first person I ever heard refer to "the fabled catbird seat," talking to his character's brother in Raising Arizona. Well, that's not really true. I most likely wasn't paying attention when I saw the movie, and I never really heard it until a friend kept saying it and I asked what it was. I had a vision that looked something like this:

My friend had no idea what it meant. Hmm, I thought, this is the exact reason the internets exist. So I looked it up, and had to amend my mental image:


Turns out the catbird is just a kind of bird in the South that tends to pick really high branches to sit on, according to this little investigation. The phrase may have originated down south, but it's currency in the north was assured by none other than legendary Brooklyn Dodgers broadcaster Red Barber, who heard it playing poker (which does sound to me like the perfect time to use it) and added it to the list of colorful phrases that so endeared him the public (here's a nice discussion on that).

Here's where it comes full-circle for me. I first (maybe) heard the phrase from John Goodman, a hometown hero from my current hometown. It's entirely possible that John Goodman first heard the phrase from famed humorist James Thurber, a hometown hero from my ancestral/fake hometown of Ohio, who wrote a short story called "The Catbird Seat" (cliff notes here) in 1942.

Turns out The Catbird Seat is also an indie record label/podcast/review site, a rabble-rousing political intrigue & exposé site, and even the personal web log of a youth minister's wife and mother of two. One thing is clear: wherever it came from, this phrase is here to stay. In a world such as ours, what with its neverending panorama of rising and falling idioms, with phrases flashing in the pan for just a year before they fade from favor and consciousness, "the catbird seat" is truly sitting in the fabled catbird seat.

muncie indiana

Until a few months ago, the only thing I thought of when I thought of Muncie, Indiana was the scene in The Hudsucker Proxy where Jennifer Jason Leigh tries to sing along with Tim Robbin's rendition of his alma mater's fight song (gooooo Eagles!!!!). Well, that all changed when my roommate/bandmate Robbie started researching midwest bands for possible show-tradings. Turns out there's some kick-ass artsy-folky-rock-type music (come on now, you try to describe it better than that) being made in Muncie, Indiana.

First off, there's Arrah and the Ferns, what with their banjo-licious grooves and unparalleled bounce. Plus, who else is gonna sing a song about Emo Phillips? Next up is This Story, who actually seem to have about four hundred members, but not in a creepy, cult-like, Polyphonic Spree sort of way, and who take full advantage of their potential loud- and quiet-ness with some real damned dramatic tunes. Finally, from nearby Portage, IN, there's the Holographic Angels, purveyors of the tastiest in guitar and mandolin stylings.

Needless to say, I can't wait until July 26th, when Arrah and the Ferns and the Holographic Angels are coming to town to play with my band and St. Louis' own The Aquatic Record. It will without a doubt be a Wednesday night to remember. I already remember it, though it hasn't happened yet. How could I ever forget? I will always remember. I will never forget. Ever. No way. Not a chance. No god-damn uh, uh, . . . , shit, wait a second, lost my train of thought here . . . what is it I'm writing about? Aw, the hell with it. It'll come to me later.

Ray Harryhausen

This Sunday, God willing and the creek don't rise, I'm going to see Jason and the Argonauts and another few short films on the big screen, followed (or is it preceded?) by a talk from Ray Harryhausen himself. For some reason I've seen Clash of the Titans about 50 times in my life, but I've never seen even a scene from Jason and the Argonauts. I only know two things about the movie. First, how cool the famous skeletons look:



Second, the score is by Bernard Herrmann, whose score for North by Northwest has got to be about the best movie music ever made (though he's more famous for Psycho and Citizen Kane). Yep, he's a national treasure.

So throw in some bad-ass skeletons, throw in a spectacular composer, and add to it Harryhausen himself (who seems to be a great talker, based on interviews like this one), and you can see why I'm so excited. Of course, it will most likely sell out and I won't be able to see it anyhow. Damnit. God might not be willing, and the creek may well rise this Sunday. Looks like I've got some ark-buildin' to get to...

The Ring

To make up for that rant I just wrote, I want to talk about a re-make I thought was good: the American version of The Ring. Not only was it good, but it incorporates into the plot what I take to be a bit of an editorial comment akin to my rant below. If you've not seen the movie, don't keep reading.

For much of the movie, we don't really know the cause of all this evil shit. There's a weird tape, there's something about water, and something about utter terror. When the hero of the movie investigates the weird tape further, she finds this young girl with weird psychic powers who is dead down in the bottom of a well. Predictably, this young girl had a bad childhood, and was hated and killed and everything. So, and this is the twist I think makes the movie great, the hero is convinced that if she just unearths the body, this evil force will let go, and the curse will be lifted, and the child's spirit will finally be free to go to heaven or whatever. This is just the sort of pat over-explanation that tends to ruin re-makes and other movies. And The Ring tricks you that it will follow that formula with a fake ending at this point. Then it turns out the hero did something terribly wrong, because now she has unearthed this evil creature who isn't grateful, isn't set free to rise to the heavens, but is let loose to do evil in a much more direct form. Ha! The motivation of this evil girl has transcended the clichéd, too-neat explanation most movies are too ready to ascribe to evil characters.

Now, granted, for the same reasons as outlined in the previous post, it is a lot less scary once you actually see the girl, since the visual impact can't match the terrible things you'd imagined without seeing. But that twist, the fake ending, really injects the movie with enough energy to drive to the real ending. And the mystery of evil is never solved, but remains a sort of brick wall which must be dealt with as it is and can't be liquidated by any pop-psychology bullshit. At the end of the movie, I am left with the hope that the next two viewers of that tape will be Dr. Phil and George Lucas.

On the warpath: Redux Schmedux

People, I'm on the warpath. For too long I've been silent about something that really raises my hackles (well, that's a lie, I rant about this about once every two weeks, but not often in written form). Raises 'em right up there, sky-high. What the hell are hackles, anyhow? Oh, the hairs on the neck or upper back. I see.

What I want to rant about are all these remakes of old movies. I have nothing against remaking old movies in theory, but here's the crux of my irritation: all these remakes ruin themselves by trying to give back-stories to everyone or to explain everything that might have been less than crystal-clear in the original movie. A few examples should clarify my position:

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: why do we need to know about Leatherface's horrible childhood? Why do we need to know about his motivation? Isn't it way more terrifying to have no idea why this psychotic halfwit is trying to kill, dismember, and eat people?

Charlie & the Chocolate Factory: even Tim Burton falls into the trap, with the back story on Willie Wonka and his relationship with his father. Seems to me a big part of the appeal of Willie Wonka the character is the mystery of who he is and where he came from. The lack of explanation is a real driving force in the original, and filling that empty space in in the remake has the effect of suffocating the viewer.

The Amityville Horror: this is one of the worst. Instead of just some evil force that confuses and terrifies us, as in the original, the remake provides a child ghost, a possessed father, and finally a ridiculous buccaneer-looking guy who ran a native-american torture camp underneath the house. Again, how much more terrifying to not know the cause of this evil? How much of a let-down when the movie foists answers on the audience instead of leaving us room to think?

The new Star Wars movies: so technically these aren't remakes, but part of what makes them suck so much is their obsession with filling in every last unknown from the original trilogy. Every loose end is tied up, every appealing mystery is solved, every place where we might have imagined something vague and wonderful about what the original movies didn't tell us has been replaced by some pat story or connection. This is especially true with all the useless-to-the-plot information we get about Bobo-Fet, or however you spell that guy's name. I mean just seeing him without the mask is an immediate let-down, and I guess the mask is a cheesy but apt metaphor for my problem with these remakes in general: whatever face these remakes supply, it can never hold a candle to what the audience imagines if given a little room to do so.

I guess as a movie fan I like to have some room in which to interpret things, and wonder about details, and imagine different pasts for characters. As a lover of horror flicks, I find that confusion and lack of understanding heighten the sense of terror. So I take it as a personal affront when some director decides to fill in a bunch of holes in a remake. I think of those holes as places where a movie, as a living organism, can breathe. And as doorways through which an audience member can get into the world of the movie. Filling them in kills the movie and shuts out the viewer. Fuck that, I say. I'm on the warpath. Maybe the thing to do is to get these remakes on VHS, then randomly delete a few minutes here and there throughout the movie, just to cut yourself some slack and make them watchable. Then again, as with all rants like this one, why don't I just not watch the shit? Fine, I won't.

the riddle of steel

Giants stole steel from Crom. Crom was angered. And the earth shook. Fire and wind came down from the sky, and killed the giants. Steel was left on the battlefield. Who found it? Not gods, not giants, just men. Learn the riddle of steel Conan. Learn its discipline. Only this can you trust, [points to sword], not men, not women, not beast. This you can trust.

These are the final words Conan hears from his father before his entire tribe is wiped out at the beginning of Conan the Barbarian. Judging by the magnitude of ass Conan goes on to kick, most viewers would probably agree Conan must indeed have solved this riddle of steel. But what the hell is the question, and for that matter, what the hell is the answer? And don't give me any of that "it's too complicated to put into words" bullshit. You're selling Conan short if you don't think he has the poetic skills to express the riddle of steel. When asked what is best in life, Conan's response is practically a haiku:

To crush your enemies,
have them driven before you and
hear the lamentation of their women.

Whatever the answer is, Conan keeps his mouth shut about it. Obviously he takes his father's advice to heart: killing men, throwing a woman into a fire, and punching a horse are all great ways to avoid trust. And he's always talking up good old Crom who, by the way, is of the earth. I don't think he buys James Earl Jones'-- er, Thulsa Doom's-- explanation that flesh is stronger than steel, either, and neither does the author of this amusing article on the subject).

So what is the riddle of steel? Hell, I don't know. I'll have to go check out some metallurgy books from the library and get back to you on that one.