When you wish upon a fruit bat.

Had a wonderful day in St Lucia. Wonderful scenery wound with roller-coaster roads. I visited the "drive-in volcano", stood under a waterfall and got magnificently wet, and I left with a general sense that a day was not nearly enough time to spend in St Lucia. Also big chunks of the last bit of Anansi Boys sort of sorted themselves out in my head, the way they do when you're not trying. A more or less perfect day. (On the little prop-plane back from St Lucia I wrote more of my story about the frogs in Central Park, which is a story for kids that I write in my little notebook whenever I have a quiet half hour. It'll probably be finished in a few years at this rate. It's started getting funnier, anyway, which made me happy. I mention this because, if one day I finish it, it will no longer take everyone by surprise.)

Someone queried my comments about the unreliability of the Johnny Grib's Hog Farm Calculations:

The method you mention is actually a very valid method. In statistics (and sometimes physics I believe) instead of calculating an integral for the area under a curve and dividing the area by two and solving for the center, if a 3-D model can be made of the given graph the point where it balances has exactly half of the mass on one side, and half on the other. Expanding this into three dimensions the same holds true. I was just hoping to instill some validity into the situation.

Well, sure. What I meant (but singularly failed to say) was that we were discussing the accuracy of a hundred-year-old cardboard-cut-out of the US coastline. I don't know how truly accurate it could possibly have been; I don't even know the size of the ultimate cardboard cut-out, or the size of the pin. These days, with satellite measurements of coastline and size, you could probably get a great deal more accurate -- I can't see that the "Johnny Grib" result back then could have been anything more than a very rough approximation, with a great deal of room for error. I could, of course, be wrong, and often am. If anyone feels like replicating the experiment and letting us know where the centre of America really is, I'll be happy to post it, or a link to it, here.

And while we're on the subject:

Hello I'm sure lots of people already sent you this, but you never know.... Here's a link to the actual page for the center of the land you linked through the wayback machine in your last journal entry: http://www.clui.org/clui_4_1/lotl/lotlsp99/geo.html (this one has pictures! ;-) )Best wishes, and I love reading your books.

Thanks.

*sigh* Are you as bummed about John Peel as the rest of us?Paul Griggs

Very much so. When I was fifteen going on sixteen, John Peel actually played punk bands on the radio, back when it didn't seem like anyone else did. That was when I'd start listening, and apart from discovering bands like the Undertones, I'd also hear things like "Sir Henry and Rawlinson's End" and songs by Tom Lehrer or John Cooper Clarke reading "Beasley Street". Definitely broadened my horizons. But mostly I'm sad because he was the kind of broadcaster who treated the listener as a friend, so you felt that you knew him.

Note to not-English people: you can read about John Peel's death at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/news/altnews/041026_john_peel.shtml?rhppromo
And I'm pretty sure that Radio 1 and Radio 4 will both be doing the sort of tributes to him that will give you a good idea why he was that loved. (Although you needed him to be part of your life for most of it to really get it.)

I'm new here, so I don't know if I missed this being mentioned, but I came across the following at the Dark Horse Comics site:
Mirror Mask PVC Set #1 http://www.darkhorse.com/profile/profile.php?sku=10-247
Mirror Mask PVC Set #2http://www.darkhorse.com/profile/profile.php?sku=10-267 -Fred

Well, I've been here since the beginning and I can't remember if I've linked to them or not either.

Hi Neil, This isn't really a question I just wanted to share a picture of the doll I'm in the process of making for auction at Fiddler's Green. He's not completely finished yet but I'm just so excited about how it's turning out I wanted to share it with you. I'll be taking a slightly more finished picture tonight to send off to the folks running the auction so they can put it up on their website. His hair's only oily looking because I'd just rinsed it, dry it looks much more authenticly flyaway. Thanks for the encouragement!http://www.chingas.org/livejournal/lminprogress6.jpg
Amanda P.S. I get to come to the convention after all! Some friends of mine decided it was just wrong for me to send the doll off alone and helped me get plane tickets.

You're welcome. And you just made me think of something that I could donate to the auction. Hmmm...

Mr. Gaiman,At my college I am working on a Departmental Honors Project. For my project I decided to write a 30-60 page paper on the importance of Graphic Novels. I was wondering if you happen to know of any great scholarly journal articles or just articles in general that you could suggest? Thanks for any kind of help you can give.P.S. Over the summer my girlfriend and I went to The House on The Rock for the first time and we absolutely FELL IN LOVE with it!~Justin

Well, I've linked to lots of papers, theses, articles and resources in this journal over the years (you could use the search function to find them). But I don't know of any central repository of this stuff, so I'm posting this in case anyone has any brilliant suggestions.

Thanks to whoever it was that sent me the link to the story on how Hallowe'en is being banned at a Washington school because it's disrespectful to witches.

Right. I was up at 6:00am this morning, and I have to be up at 5:00am tomorrow, and I am not a morning person (in much the same way that the stars are not fruit-bats) so I think it best if I simply stop writing just like