If you ever find yourself reading Laurie Keller’s Scrambled States of America to your children, try rendering the narrator’s part in the voice of Hal Holbrook with just a dash of Frank Morgon thrown in. I don’t know what results you’ll get, but my younger gels love this treatment so much that they actually request it.

UPDATE: By the bye, the eldest gel and I are no great way off from meeting the Rohirrim for the first time and I’m trying to figure out a way to distinguish them from the Men of Gondor. Would I be consigning myself to eternal flame if I went with a kind of modified Scandinavian-Teutonic accent? I mean, if I’m already doing Sean Connery as Gimli, is there anything to stop me from doing Der Ahnold as Eomer?

Yes, I know what you’re thinking: “Peace ist vat ve vant und do have/Und a piece of anything dat you have!”

(Spot the quote.)