Neil Gaiman's Blog, page 39

"Of course, in Alabama the Tuscaloosa, but that is entirely irrelephant..."

I went to Alabama, to Tuscaloosa.
Before I left, I was interviewed by Tuscaloosa newspapers. "What do you expect of Alabama?" they asked "What do you know of Alabama?" I was a bit puzzled by that. It's the kind of question you usually get asked by small, nervous countries who don't get many visitors. ("Have you heard anything about Ruritania?" they ask, and you tell them that you've heard that the strudel in Strelsau is excellent and you're glad that Jews can now own land there a...

Small Bee Blog

Today was warm -- warmer than it's been for weeks. I missed the hottest part of the day (I was taking my son Mike back to the airport) but got home while it was still daylight and slipped and slithered through the thick, half-melted snow, to inspect the hives. As I expected, there were lots of dead bees around, freshly dropped, and lots of small brown spots on the snow. The bees in the hive took advantage of the warm day to clean out the dead bees from the hive, and to, er, defe...

Goofball

It's like owning two dogs. There's this one who poses nobly for photographs whenever he gets to the top of a hill or looks out over a river. And then there's this mad goofball. Normally the mad goofball doesn't show up in photographs.
We just went for a walk in the snow. I took my camera. And the goofball came out...
At the top you see his "Oh boy? We're really going for a walk? This isn't you just taking me out to pee? WOW!" face. At the bottom you get his "Hai! I can has BIG...

What Today Is...

Today is a very important day. Viz and to wit: Jack Benny's 116th Birthday. Which means that somewhere out there, he is still 39.
(A quick Google found 12 episodes of the Jack Benny Radio Show that you can download at . Very much worth a listen: the show's dated less than you'd expect, because the humour of the Benny show tended to be based on people, rather than topical gags, and I'd say that from around 1942 to ...

With Great Power comes, well, something...

Last year I linked to R.A. Lafferty's short story "Slow Tuesday Night" (The new syfy channel that replaced the old Sci-Fi channel no longer have it up on their website, but you can find it in internet archives here.) It's a story about a world in which things happen fast. You should read it.

Sometimes I think it was written about Twitter.

For example, last night, before bed, I noticed this: http://hidenseek.typepad.com/come_out_come_out/2010/02/cannot-chase-paperchase.html It look...

Now We Are Nine

Now we are nine.

I keep doing things I think are temporary and then most definitely aren't. I don't really know how much longer this blog has to go -- time enough to tend it and keep it growing and flourishing the way I know I should gets harder and harder to find -- but when I started I never expected it to last nine years.

To celebrate, http://www.neilgaiman.com/p/Cool_Stuff/9th_Blogiversary is the page where you can post your own photo of you doing something with a nine in it....

A Quick One

I know. I'm really behind. Right now I ought to settle down and do a solid big blog entry.
Only it's a choice between that or sleep. And sleep is just about to win.
CORALINE got 5 ANNIE awards tonight -- more than anyone else. (Although we lost Best Picture and Best Director to UP.) I was ready to give Dawn French's speech if she'd won best voice, but she didn't.
(Her speech, had she won, was "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!" I could have done that.)

And then there's this. Which deserves i...

Playing a small imaginary me

I'm so behind.
In LA. Working hard, meeting people, sorting things out, the usual. Woke up this morning to a phone call from my agent, letting me know that CORALINE had been nominated for an Oscar. It would be nice if UP won Best Picture and CORALINE took Best Animated Picture, but truthfully, I do not believe that will happen.
Then went to record my part in PBS's "ARTHUR". I play me. And I also play a tiny imaginary version of me. (This is me recording my part, above. I am just ...

Still Alive

Because people have started commiserating already (and prematurely), there's an article from the LA Times that's been widely syndicated that's pretty good:

http://www.latimes.com/lat-neil-gaiman-sl,0,1690916.storylink

But the headline that's showed up a few times (variants on Graveyard Book Movie Is Dead*) is not good or reliable or, well, true. Someone couldn't resist a pun. And now people are reading the headline not the article and reporting the headline as news. So...

What I s...

Phone card query...

I noticed that Maddy managed, without trying, while she was in the UK, to run up a $600 phone bill, using data on her phone. Which mostly came from a day when she was stuck in an airport that was closed, and her cousin browsed the web for a bit on Maddy's phone to kill time. T-mobile now charges $16 a meg for data when you're out of the US. To put that in context, according to Vodaphone's site, "On Mobile Broadband 50MB is approximately 100 Emails & 4 Hours browsing", and on T-...