Around Christmas I met a real-life Punch and Judy man. (http://www.desktop.demon.co.uk/punch/). He is infamous in Brighton for his x-rated Punch and Judy (although he is more often found on the beach entertaining/scaring children).
He said he had a large collection of Punch and Judy books, and that one of his all-time favourites was about a child watching Punch and Judy out-of-season, and about how frightening the characters seemed.
He said the book was art.
Just thought you might like to know.
Thanks -- I'm always pleased when Punch and Judy Professors like Mr Punch (actually, I'm pleased when anybody likes Mr Punch). I loved his site -- if anyone's ever wondered what Mr Punch sounds like, you can hear his well-swazzled voice by clicking on him on the beach.
and two helpful ones from the same person...
Neil,
The LiveJournal RSS feed is unreliable because they're trying to suck all the items off your main journal page (see http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=gaimanblog - after the 'Last checked' time is a note complaining "Too big").
I got my cobbled together LiveJournal RSS feed of your journal to work by limiting it to 10 entries...although I get multiple versions of each of your entries - it retrieves every item that's changed in the previous hour each hour and so I often get the various revisions of an item.
Of course, -my- feed gives slightly weird output because you use odd characters in your posts (open quotes and open double quotes as spat out by Windows) which don't travel well in XML...
I think maybe it'd just be easier to remember to click an extra link to your journal once in a while. :)
followed by
Okay, having looked at it again and realised LiveJournal should only retrieve the RSS feed from my website once an hour regardless of the number of readers, it's probably okay to mention that http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=neil_gaiman_rss is a LiveJournal RSS syndication that doesn't suffer from being too big for LJ, does parse as a valid RSS feed and now even copes with those pesky Windows-encoded quotation marks I was complaining about :)
which is one of the many reasons why I like you people so much. You're helpful.
First off, let me say what a great blog you have. I never miss a day.
Now as a fan of Neil Gaiman, Sushi, and Food Network, I wanna know when where gonna see the three combined?
I can just see it, Neil takes you on a tour of great Sushi restaurants across America, while stoping at all the great road side attractions on the way.
I'm joking, of course, but we still like to see you do some t.v. appearences. Why not stop by Leno or Letterman sometime?
Thanks,
Bryan
Leno's never asked. Letterman's people are fans and used to ask, and I always said no, because I couldn't figure out what I'd be doing on there, apart from being a personality or something. It's the same reason I've always said no to People Magazine. One should leave fame to the people who want it.
Then again, if the Food Channel asked me to do a Sushi special across America, I'd say yes like a shot, but mostly because I know I'd learn stuff. And get to taste good things.
...
Have decided to take daughters to Walt Disney World for a few days in a couple of weeks. The last time I stayed there was when Maddy was a baby -- we went with our friends the Tebbels, who have Disney down to an art-form, and know what to do when and where to go and how to find edible food and everything, and I was impressed, and just a little scared by the realisation that this was a privately owned county. I've now forgotten all the How to Survive Walt Disney World lore I learned from John Tebbel. I don't even remember which roots are edible.