"I have to be careful around Eagles fans," he says.
Kollins has yet to see Gnomeo and Juliet, the movie about star-crossed lover-gnomes and their warring families. But it's the pint-size creatures' latest pop culture cameo - after Amelie, The Full
Monty, and those Travelocity commercials - to spark a surge of interest in the characters best known as kitschy lawn ornaments.
Gnomeo has grossed more than $175 million worldwide since its release in February.
Perennially trendy, gnomes actually have been stock characters in international folklore for centuries. "Mankind has always had a relationship with little creatures like this," says Brian Froud of Devon, England, an expert on "faeries" and other "earth-centered creatures," such as leprechauns, sprites, and elves.
The term gnome first pops up in the works of Paracelsus, a 16th-century Swiss alchemist who described "humanoids" capable of moving through the earth as people move through air, according to Leonard Norman Primiano, a folklorist and chairman of religious studies at Cabrini College in Radnor.
Despite their "cute, Disneyfied image" in this country, these underground creatures are sometimes portrayed in other cultures as ugly and malevolent.
"If you go to Newfoundland and investigate traditions there, fairies are not nice. Guess what, they take your children!" says Primiano. "By the same token, gnomes can be nasty-looking, with not very pleasant features."
That is certainly not the case in Gnomes, the book by the late Wil Huygen and Rien Poortvliet that has sold more than a million copies since it was first published in 1976.
