no jeans?

What are the odds that, if I was sent a box of clean clothes to wear, a box that was waiting for me in New York, I would somehow manage to pack most of the clothes that were inside back up in the box along with the awards and books and CDs I'd been given, not to mention the already-worn UK-trip clothes, and then send that box with my clean clothes in it home, and that I would only discover the awful reason why my suitcase was so light on a Sunday morning in San Francisco?

No, it's okay. You don't have to work it out. As of this tour, the odds that I would accidentally send my clean clothes home again unworn are 100%, but if you spread it out over all the tours I've ever done it's nowhere near as bad as that, because I've never done it before. Probably around 3% or less. But I had better buy new black jeans and another tee shirt tomorrow morning, or I will have nothing to wear on Tuesday.

I'm here in San Francisco and know that I need to get caught up on the blog and things -- many of you have sent useful things that I ought to have posted, but I've been on the road and you know how it is. (Actually you probably don't. But mostly it's about trying to grab sleep instead of blogging.)

Still, a couple of things I should post.... http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/article1772294.ece is John Clute's obituary for Mike Ford. It's good, although I think that Theatre was probably the driving engine of Mike's work, rather than the American Dream. And that all of the great bon mots really did just come tumbling straight out -- they were always replies to something, with never a hint of "here's one I prepared earlier" about them. Good to see 110 Stories mentioned as an important poem.

(Here are some DDB photos of Mike.) (Yes, those were his own eyebrows.)

I'm now listening to the Gothic Archies Tragic Treasury, with occasional breaks for Nouvelle Vague (a gift at the Washington event, and a CD, I realised when I put it on, I'd already heard a couple of tracks of and enjoyed)

(At the bottom of the Guardian article there are two Gothic Archies songs -- http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,,1872149,00.html)

...

Tomorrow's event at Cody's should be fun -- lots of reading and a fair amount of Q&A. Other than that it's all going to be from Fragile Things I haven't decided what to read yet, so if you've got requests, send them in on the FAQ line...

(I won't be reading the introduction, although you can hear the first 5 minutes of it from the audiobook up at http://www.neilgaiman.com/works/books/fragilethings/fragile_things_excerpt.mp3/view)