As seen at Jezebel, click on the pic to get to the designer's website...



I just don't even know where to begin.

( Monday September 8, 2008 )

OMG! LOLjagers! Here, and here!

Shiny stuff from today's idle browsing: a free sample issue of the Journal of Military History. It's an old issue, but no less shiny because of that.

The Most Popular Book in the Whole World

Chapter 21, "I Use My Brain to Make a Decision"

I woke up to a pounding headache. There was pounding in my ears, pounding in my feet, pounding in my nose. There was even pounding in my liver. Sitting up felt like forcing my head through a minefield littered with explosives and woodpeckers.

"Gaaaaaaahhh," I pronounced carefully. Where the hell was I, anyway? This didn't look like my cardboard room.

"Mmmmmrrrufrugh..." If I could find Lou, I could ask him for some contraband Advil. I forced myself out of bed and wandered in a zombie-like state toward the door. Upon approaching the door, I considered it carefully. In my headache-y state, the knob looked complicated and confusing. What sort of sadist would invent such a counter-intuitive device? Instead of attempting to turn it, I chose instead to bang heavily upon it's wood-like surface.

It opened, revealing a woman. "Frig? You awake?"

Oh yeah. I remembered now. I was at the Winston's. And also I was going to die horribly.

Well, life sure sucked right now, that's for sure.

( PROBABLY IT WON'T IMPROVE DURING THIS CHAPTER, JUST A GUESS )

Catch up with the chapters you may have missed somehow!

The Rose Elf by Hans Christian Andersen


IN THE MIDST of a garden grew a rose-tree, in full blossom, and in the prettiest of all the roses lived an elf. He was such a little wee thing, that no human eye could see him. Behind each leaf of the rose he had a sleeping chamber. He was as well formed and as beautiful as a little child could be, and had wings that reached from his shoulders to his feet. Oh, what sweet fragrance there was in his chambers! and how clean and beautiful were the walls! for they were the blushing leaves of the rose.

( During the whole day he enjoyed himself in the warm sunshine.... )

Hi!

I've just made an Etsy shop with some items from a fashion show I participated in, it can be found here:




( 'Half jacket', Victorian Bathing Suit.....and more =) )

I'll probably add more stuff to the shop later when I got more nice things to sell ^.^

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/09/anteater-needs-knife-and-ive-got-mine.html

When the RoboPanda fund drive went off successfully, I realized that I would be deluged with requests from people wanting to harness the awesome might of this fully operational blog audience for other, less whimsical, collaborative fundraising tasks.

And lo, it has come to pass. And this one is too amusing to resist: We can name a Mexican anteater (tamandua) after Mr. G!

picture lifted from TamanduaGirl
The Staten Island Zoo takes animals around to NYC schools for educational programs. Their current menagerie is getting on in the years and would like to retire. With our help, the zoo can purchase a new tamandua and name it "Neil Gaiman". (Or maybe "Mister G". I dunno, we can vote on it later.)

It would take 440 of us giving $10. I think it's worth a shot. The window is open for 14 days, so that (if we succeed) the deed will be done before Mr. G gets back and he can't stop us from naming it after him.

I tried to paypal myself $10 and it wouldn't let me, so for my part I will buy the tamandua it's own Neil "Scary Trousers" Gaiman shirt.


(ps- This site is currently #8 when you google "robopanda", right after the Wikipedia entry.)

---

If Mr. G was here, I know that he would be blogging about the censorship scandal ripping through Britain's poetry community, so in his absence I will do my best to channel him:

It seems that the AQA board has "removed a poem containing references to knife crime from the GCSE syllabus", which has been met with cries of censorship. That poem is "Education for Leisure" by Carol Ann Duffy, who the Guardian reports is "widely considered a front-runner to be the next poet laureate".

It was originally reported that the board had asked schools to destroy the anthology containing the poem. Later, the AQA stated that "schools were not being urged to pulp the anthology: This is not about destroying books. They are allowed to continue teaching the poem, if they wish, but they are not going to be examined on it, it said."

The plot thickens from there. The Guardian writes that:

The most recent complaint was made by Lutterworth grammar school's exams invigilator, Pat Schofield, who welcomed the board's decision and said: "I think it is absolutely horrendous - what sort of message is that to give to kids who are reading it as part of their GCSE syllabus?"

In response, two days later, Carol Ann Duffy published a new poem in the Guardian entitled "Mrs Schofield's GCSE".

In the accompanying article, quotes are given by Duffy's literary agent, Peter Strauss, and Mrs. Schofield:

Strauss said last night that the poem was not written in an attempt to spark a spat with Schofield. "Oh no, not at all. I don't speak on behalf of Carol Ann Duffy, but I wouldn't say she is angry. She just wants her words to speak for themselves. It's basically a poem about poetry, and why poetry matters."

Contacted by the Guardian last night, Schofield said she felt "a bit gobsmacked" to have a verse named after her. She described the poem as "a bit weird. But having read her other poems I found they were all a little bit weird. But that's me".

---

• Today is the last day to bid on Mr. G's first draft Waterstones story card! Proceeds will go towards saving the house in which Superman was created.


• Update on the London stop of the GRAVEYARD BOOK UK tour: The London bit of the Graveyard Book tour will be run by Blackwell Charing Cross Road, and will be on Halloween, the official publication day. From 6.30 on Friday 31st October, join Neil for a talk (followed by a signing) at the Old Theatre at the London School of Economics. Tickets will go on sale shortly, and notice will be posted here when they do. If you have any questions for now, email events.london@blackwell.co.uk with 'Gaiman' in the header.


• Colleen Doran has just posted a drawing of Morpheus and Orpheus done for a Sandman 20th anniversary gallery exhibit coming up in October.


• September 27th, the day of the National Book Festival, is also the first day of Baltimore Comic-Con this year. Anyone traveling in from elsewhere might consider stopping by. Or if your tastes run more towards the renaissance, the Maryland RenFest will be open that day as well.

I've been purposely staying out of the debate about the U.S. presidential elections on my f-list--I have LJ friends from both sides of the fence--mostly because I'm not American anyway and I don't bloody know what those weird Americans want for their country. The whole thing made me think about the upcoming Indonesian presidential elections in 2009, though. Nobody knows who the candidates are going to be (yet), but I'm already sure of one thing: if the current president (Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, popularly known as SBY) runs again for the presidency, I'm not going to vote for him because he's not decisive enough. What Indonesia needs is an outright asshole--somebody who's willing to defy the forces of terror and of economic globalization. But now I'm wondering if such an asshole could survive long enough in the notoriously corrupt world of Indonesian politics to run for President.

Anyway, on a somewhat brighter note, the gallery for Christian Fletcher's Dog Days 2008 is up. None of the pictures there felt as evocative to me as the winners of the previous years' contests (warning: sword lovers may want to fit drool protectors over their keyboards before clicking this link), but there's enough funny stuff in the gallery to make it worth at least a cursory look.

This image was on the main page of nytimes.com yesterday.


I call your attention to the image on the left.
Why has this ugliness been perpetrated against us?

I like ugly couture sometimes, but this is lacking in dignity.

I was happier not knowing shorts-suits existed.

For some reason (possibly brought on by a previous post about TP making Harry Potter in-jokes) I started thinking about character names in Discworld and how many Discworld type surnames I'd come across in my life time.

At my primary school we had two dinnerladies called Mrs Horseinfield and Mrs Umblebee.

Anyone got any better ones?

For those interested, kinda late notice i know, but:

Colour of Magic is going to be on Prime at 8:30 tonight. Thats a New Zealand channel, New Zealand time XD (I think it could be an Australian channel as well? I dont know)

I havent seen it announced here and I thought if your hanging around you might wnat to check it out :D

(I'm taping it, I have to study :S)

Maybe this is a coincidence, but somehow, with Pratchett, I doubt it.
I have been listening to the TIffany books on tape while doing chores and noticed quite a few names from Harry Potter crop up.

e.g. there are:

- Neville and Trevor who work as guards at Roland's castle
- Mrs Umbridge at the post-office in Twoshirts (I think)

I was wondering if he is having his own private little joke that I am not getting...

What do you think?

I love how the cat underneath looks so long-suffering.  "Yeah, he does this all the time."

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/conscience-will-guide-senators/2008/09/02/1220121234450.html

POLITICIANS will be allowed to follow their conscience on a proposal that Medicare funding be removed for abortions carried out between 14 and 26 weeks.

There is a facebook group about the issue -- Guy Barnett get your hands off my right to choose! -- but so far I can't find any other online organising sites. If you live in Australia, please write to your state or territory senators about this issue!

Also, Victoria is considering decriminalising abortion (removing it from the Crimes Act). Here's a great article about it: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/abortion-law-reform-promises-better-health-care-20080903-484x.html

If I were
a stream
starting as a trickle
from a cold mossy mountain rock
bumbling down
past wet layered leaves
through dirt
as dark as night
carving a path
curved like a belly
that widens
like a smile
with rocks that
grow smooth like paper
dark like winter trees
and slender silver fish
and ribbon snakes fluttering past
I would flow
till I reached you
and there I would dig my toes in
and my edges would grow green grass
and I would deepen
till the rocks at the bottom
looked like emeralds
and at the bottom of me
one could tilt their face up
and see sunlight
if they looked where we two met.