We were fortunate enough to get a chance to see the Cavalia show while it was here in St. Louis. Created by one of the founding members of Cirque du Soleil, this show is an incredible mix of dance, acrobatics and horsemanship. It is visually stunning, and the athleticism displayed by the riders, acrobats, and the horses is awe inspiring. If you love horses, you should definitely see this show.

Having made reservations a full five months in advance, I had a long time to anticipate Dixie’s birthday dinner at Stone Soup Cottage in Cottleville, Missouri. Prior to attending the Chef’s Tasting Dinner last Friday, I had read that St. Louis Magazine had given them the Best New Restaurant award when they opened in 2009, and had named them Restaurant of the Year again in 2010, so my expectations were pretty high. Chef Carl McConnell and his culinary creations did not disappoint. However, I did find a few aspects of the overall dining experience that could be improved.

The food was simply fabulous — a unique blend of distinctive flavors, with many fresh ingredients from local farms and gardens. A bisque made with corn harvested that morning. A potato puff with black truffles and locally picked morel mushrooms. One should keep in mind that it is a tasting, so the portions are small, but with six courses and a few extras on the side, no one leaves hungry. We also chose to include wine pairings with our dinner (at an additional charge), and the selections (two white, two red) were very good.

The restaurant is a restored cottage that dates from the 1850s, with a small dining area that seats about twenty people, at well-appointed and candlelit tables. Having Chef McConnell personally deliver most of the courses to our table and comment on them only adds to the intimate atmosphere. But, my only criticism would be of the dining area itself. The room was dimly lit, and as we approched the final courses, well after sunset, I could barely see what I was eating, which is a shame since a great deal of effort goes into the presentation. With its hardwood floors, the room is also loud, and the night we were there, a boisterous party of 10 made it difficult at times to carry on a conversation. So I would think they might benefit from a few area rugs (if not wall-to-wall carpeting), and a few tapestries on the walls perhaps, as well as turning up the dimmer switch just a bit.

Overall, our meal was fantastic, and I would strongly recommend this cozy place to anyone looking for a unique dining experience to celebrate that special occasion.

I took Noah to Powell Hall tonight for their Sound of Music Sing-a-Long. They showed the movie complete with lyrics in the subtitles and everyone had a blast singing along. Before the movie started, they had a costume contest, so a lot of people dressed up as characters, including an adorable pair of little twin girls dressed as nuns (who should have won, in my opinion). We were instructed to hiss at the Baroness and boo at the Nazis, and they taught us some choreography to do during Do-Re-Mi. We’ve watched the movie before with Noah, and he likes some of the songs already, so he really enjoyed it. Good times.

We took the kids to the St. Louis City Museum today, and it was amazing. If you’ve never been, you really need to go — at least once. But if you go once, you’ll most likely want to go back. I know I do. The kids can’t wait to go back either. It’s a giant playground for kids and adults that defies description. The only word I can come up with that does it justice is eclectic. The building is full of things to climb on, through, and under, with slides galore, and other sights you might only see in a carnival sideshow. We spent all day there and didn’t see everything there is to see indoors, plus there is a whole other set of outdoor activities that we will have to save for a summer day. In the meantime, enjoy this video of Noah going down the roller slide:

I don’t think I’ve ever written a restaurant review before, but since I’m waiting for Dobbs to change the oil in my car, and this was the first place I found within walking distance with a free wi-fi connection, here we go.

This is the first and only location of Sammy Scott’s, at Olive & Mason in Creve Coeur. They aspire to be a chain, however, if the employee conversations I overheard are any indication. You have to admire their entrepreneurial spirit — they opened a sandwich shop six doors down from an established Jimmy John’s. Risky, but hey, maybe they have what it takes. The proof is in the pudding, er, sandwich.

I ordered the Cuban, which was very good, although a little small for the price: $5.50. It’s about half the size of a $5 Subway footlong. For $2 more, you get to choose from a fairly long list of sides, and a drink. I went with potato salad and lemonade. Plus a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie, that was delicious and almost as big as the sandwich. Total damage: $10. They are proud to tell you that they bake their own bread and roast their own meats in the store. They also serve breakfast before 10am.

Overall, a good meal. If you’re in the Creve Coeur area, you should check them out.

I just watched Sci-Fi Channel’s miniseries The Lost Room for the second time, and I have to say that it is really very good. It originally aired in 2006, but I didn’t watch it the first time until 2007. At the time, I was in between seasons of LOST, and found the two shows to be similar in a lot of ways. The mythology of both shows is dense, sprawling, and very intriguing. But I was ultimately frustrated with how The Lost Room ended, believing that they could have done a better job answering the questions raised.

Having watched it again, knowing that those questions are not answered, I can say that I appreciated the intricacies of the plot, and the character development a lot more, and I enjoyed the show much more the second time. It is my hope that one day I’ll be able to revisit LOST again, and find a new appreciation for it as well. Although, I’ll probably have to wait until I retire before I have 120 hours to waste watching TV. But the point of this post is to let people know about The Lost Room and encourage you to watch it. It is only six hours, and I will save you the frustration by telling you up front that they never reunite the objects. Go ahead and watch it, immerse yourself in the world that the writers created, and enjoy the ride!

I was disappointed with the Lost finale. There, I said it. It wasn’t very good. Actually, it was good — just like every other episode of the show, it was well acted and well made — it just wasn’t very satisfying. But there are a ton of people who are in denial about that. They are raving about the deeper philosophical meaning embedded in the show and how the finale was not only deeply meaningful but the only ending that fit. Well, I call bullshit. People who say that are just embarrassed to admit that they, like the rest of us, wasted 120 hours watching the show.

Perhaps that is too strong. I don’t feel like the time was wasted, necessarily. I was entertained by the show, after all, and the story is still intriguing. But I feel like I’ve felt in the past when a show has been canceled prematurely and didn’t get a chance to tie up all of the loose ends. This is especially frustrating since producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse deliberately called their own end to the show, limiting it to six seasons, claiming that they had to determine the pacing to tell the story they wanted to tell. Very well. You may have told a story, but you didn’t answer the questions — and that was your only job in the eyes of most fans. The questions were as confounding as they were incessant. The questions piled up season after season, like the mountains on the island. The questions were the yarn of the entire tapestry of Lost. And in the end, they are left dangling at the bottom of an impressive, but nonetheless incomplete, masterpiece. Why wouldn’t you leave yourself enough time to properly answer the questions?

I not only committed 120 hours of my life to watching the TV show, but I also indulged the producers for untold hours listening to their podcasts. The podcasts were entertaining in their own right. “Darlton,” as Damon and Carlton came to be called by podcast devotees, would spend a good portion of the show answering questions emailed to them. Sometimes the answers even shed light on the direction the show was taking, or would take in the future. On more than one occasion they refuted claims by fans that the island represented a kind of purgatory, and that everyone on the island was already dead. They assured their listeners that this was not the case, and that they had a much better explanation for the island’s strangeness. This is especially frustrating since this appears to be exactly what they ended up doing with the show. Everyone was dead and trapped in the island’s purgatory until they could find a way to collectively “let go” and move on.

I am left to believe that, despite their claims to the contrary, the roadmap for the show was not laid out in any great detail from Season 1, and that they were ashamed to admit that those fans who guessed purgatory way back in Season 1 were right on. Rather than rewarding those astute observers, they strung us all along promising us a grandiose mythology that could only come from the mind of a genius (or several geniuses), each season growing ever more implausible until somewhere around the end of Season 5 they realized that they had painted themselves into a corner. With no remaining path forward, they fell back to the only solution that ever made any sense and punted.

Lost had great potential, but like The Matrix trilogy, it just never lived up to it. Maybe one day after I retire, I’ll go back and watch the entire series again and find some new appreciation for its genius. In the meantime, I’m just disappointed.

Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl make a pretty good team in the new romantic comedy Killers (whose plot seems strikingly similar to the Cruise-Diaz vehicle Knight and Day that opens later this month — just sayin’), although I will say that the on-screen chemistry seemed to be lacking, when compared to Heigl’s previous pairings with the likes of Gerard Butler (The Ugly Truth) and Seth Rogen (Knocked Up), so I guess I’ll have to blame Kutcher for that.

As a comedy, the movie has its moments. Former Marine, and former Daily Show correspondent, Rob Riggle lights up the screen in a supporting role not unlike his scene-stealing cameo in last year’s The Hangover. And The Mustache That Wet A Thousand Panties makes an appearance, as Tom Selleck returns to the big screen with a solid supporting role as the over-protective father, deadpanning his disappointment with Kutcher as a son-in-law. Overall, this movie is formulaic, predictable, and a bit implausible in places, but still entertaining.

My favorite show on NPR is Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, and we attended the live taping of Saturday’s show. The panelists were Charlie Pierce, Roxanne Roberts, and Mo Rocca. I think Mo is tied with Paula Poundstone as my favorite panelist. The show was very good, and it was interesting to see all of the things that go into making the show. The show was taped at Powell Hall in front of an audience of about two thousand. Besides the panelists, the host Peter Sagal, and announcer Carl Kasell, there were a handful of producers on the stage, monitoring the recordings and passing notes to the participants. Following the show, there was a brief period of re-takes to rerecord portions of the show that did not have the best audio quality.

At the end of the show, an audience member was selected at random to come up on stage and answer a quiz question — this segment was not recorded as part of the radio show. The woman selected identified herself as a school teacher, and her question was in regard to train stations in Japan. She wasn’t sure of the answer, but an audience member in the front row was from Japan and gave her the answer. To everyone’s astonishment, the teacher spoke fluent Japanese, and had a brief conversation with this person. Peter Sagal’s reaction to this exchange was hilarious. Needless to say, she gave the correct answer.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that Avatar will soon be the biggest-grossing movie of all time — and even if it doesn’t, it probably deserves to be. Living up to most, if not all, of the hype surrounding it, the film is visually stunning, and the story is compelling, if a bit formulaic. Director James Cameron has spent literally decades developing this project, and it is obvious that this is the work of someone with great attention to detail. The technology behind the production is simply staggering, and is likely to change how movies are made for decades to come — not just the 3-D gimmickry, but the innovative motion capture techniques he has created. The CG graphics are impressive, but like any good movie, they support and enhance the story, they don’t detract from it.

Many have criticized the movie for being too political, as it draws obvious parallels between the war portrayed in the movie and the current war in Iraq. The anti-imperialist message is undeniable, of course, but the movie succeeds at delivering that message without coming across as preachy, which is not an easy task for any storyteller. Most notable for me is that the story is also surprisingly spiritual, invoking our own indigenous Native Americans in describing the people and cultures of the fictitious world of Pandora. That spirituality ultimately plays an active role in the story’s outcome, and is not just an afterthought.

Overall, Avatar is exquisitely made eye candy that is also emotionally satisfying. I would recommend it.