And the strangest thing that happened today is that I got an e-mail from a Winnipeg reporter, wanting to interview me: currently, the Winnipeg police are reading American Gods, after a fake security guard with a fake night-deposit box got away with $40,000.
Of course, he could have got it from http://www.snopes.com/business/bank/guard.htm. Or he could have got it from Chuck Whitlock's Scam School, or one of the other books on scams it's mentioned in... but I suppose he may well have got the idea from me.
(Strange: I fogged the details of the credit card scam in American Gods because they were too easy to pull off, but I detailed that one because it seemed unlikely to the point of impossibility that anyone would read it in the novel and then try to pull it off.)
....
Got an FAQ message from Storme (is this the Storme from the UK with the tee shirt? Probably) to say I thought you might find it interesting.
Earth might have a third moon. I wasn't aware we had a second moon!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2251386.stm is the story, though credit for drawing attention to it goes to a friend of mine, Peter Berman.
and then
Corollary to previous email: check out http://burtleburtle.net/bob/physics/cruithne.html
Check out the orbits.
And they call that a moon.
Storme
It's madness on the writing front right now, lots of tiny things to do along with the big things, and none of them are moveable. Got to write an appreciation of Dave McKean for the World Fantasycon program book, for example, and it's time to write something for Tori's Scarlet's Walk tour program booklet. (I'm being sent the CD glued into a glued-together Walkman. When I pointed out that I already had a copy of an early version of the album on CD, and that I wasn't really likely to leak it to the web, I learned that Everybody was getting their CDs like this, which made me smile. I was also warned not to follow the lead of someone I will not identify here [ I shall disguise his identity, to save him embarrassment, and will only identify him by his initials -- MC -- and say that he is a percussionist of great coolness and excellence]. Anyway, this unnamed person apparently decided to try and open the sealed Walkman and remove the glued-up CD, and managed to cut his hand quite badly in the process. So I shall not do this. Nor shall I go to plan B, Boil the Walkman. I shall just press the play button, and be happy. I'm really looking forward to hearing the whole story in finished form, and trying to decide what kind of thing to write. Diary entries, maybe. Or a sort of American Gods thing. Or something else. Ah well, I'll talk to her and we'll figure it out.)