Item, the first :: CBS Sunday Morning has moved the segment on Mr. G from this Sunday, November 1 to (tentatively) Sunday, November 8. More as it develops.
Item, the second :: Thanks to reader Tony McFee and Audible.com's director of direct marketing, we have the NYC subway ad!
Item, the third :: Reader Aurora RuPert carved Death into a pumpkin:
And then there was the mailbag:
In honor of the many Graveyard Book Halloween parties being thrown this weekend, Emily P. submits her own goblin variation, journal as an algorithms problem set:
Between the hours of 11pm on Friday October 30th and 11pm Sunday November 1st, 15 bookstores will be hosting Graveyard Book Halloween parties. Mr. G would like to visit as many as he can in these four hours. Assume you can model these bookstores as a connected graph G(V,E) where each vertex v corresponds to a bookstore. Positive edge weights w(u,v) denote the time (in minutes) it takes to travel between bookstores u and v.
a. Give an algorithm to calculate the maximum number of bookstores Mr. G can visit in four hours by traveling along the edges of this graph.
b. Give the run time of this algorithm.
c. Assume each bookstore also has a weight B(v) which tells you how long you can stay at that bookstore. Mr. G does not want to play favorites so on a given path p of n bookstores, he will stay k minutes at each bookstore where k = min(B(v1),B(v2),...,B(vn)). Given this constraint, give an algorithm to determine how many bookstores Mr. G can visit in four hours.
If anyone manages to provide a suitable answer set, they shall have an imaginary cookie.
Brittany H. writes:
Hi Lorraine!
I just wanted to say thanks for the link to BDFAR in Durham! I've lived in the area my whole life, but somehow how I had never heard of it. I am G-mapping directions there as we speak and now have a fruitful occupation for my afternoon.
1.) I'm not Lorraine. (She's far more fabulous.) 2.) You're welcome! I hope you liked it. I picked up some incredible used books there over the years, as well as the comics and music.
Teresa J. writes:
Any chance of you posting a photo of yourself before you hand the reins back? I'm sure the ladies would appreciate seeing another staggeringly good-looking, funny, and smart gentleman over whom they can swoon. :)
I'm sure they would, but I thought you were asking for a picture of me? *rim shot*
I like my quasi-anonymity. The closest you're going to get is this:
This is Eben, my spirit animal.
Apropos of nothing, except that Mr. G has been known to mention his Android phones, I'm playing with the Motorola CLIQ this evening. It's fun and cute, but I don't think I'll be trading my (deliciously modified, optimized) G1 in for anything short of a significant upgrade in processor and RAM.
I am feeling serious gadget lust for both the Motorola Droid and the Nokia N900, but the former is only on Verizon (and possibly, next quarter, AT&T), and the latter has a great deal going for it (including, but not limited to, my love for my N810 and the superiority of Maemo judged purely on the bases of openness and linux-completeness), but I've become rather partial to Android and its Google apps. I can only hope that T-Mobile quickly gets on the ball and announces something on par with either. (Surely Google won't bring out an inferior ADP2, or switch carriers?)
National Novel Writing Month begins Sunday. I've been participating successfully since 2005, and recommend doing it at least once if you have any sort of writerly ambition. It's a good deal of fun, and completely mad.
I've received several queries about where else I may be found online. I'm willing to go as far as re-stating that I have a largely neglected livejournal.
Home again, to sad convalescent dog who cannot go upstairs, and a bed set up in the posh front room downstairs that I never use, where I'm going to be sleeping for a few weeks.
Twittered a lot over the last few days -- would have been a lot more likely to have blogged instead if there was an easy blogging app for the G1, or if the mobile blogging thing register thing worked, which is still doesn't. (The Blogger team wrote to me pointing out that I can blog by email from the G1, which I suppose I can, but I don't -- it adds just enough complexity that I'd rather just open twitdroid, type something and let it go.)
Starting to get an idea of the shape of the end of this month. I'll be travelling around a lot for the Coraline movie, and finally attending the premiere in Portland, Oregon. I love that they aren't having the premiere in LA. They made the movie in Portland, after all...
I just got an invite to the Dublin film festival for the Coraline screening there, which I hope I can do. Then March the 7th is a signing at Books of Wonder in New York with Charles Vess.
A basic CBLDF membership is $25. http://www.cbldf.com/SearchResults.asp?Cat=44 and there are people who really would like them as gifts. Honest. You get a membership card and everything.
And seeing I'm now recommending gifts -- Todd Klein documents the end of the story of his Alex Ross print at http://kleinletters.com/Blog/?p=2295 (and it's fascinating watching how something goes from not quite right to really very right), and then tells you how to order it -- or the third printing of Alan Moore's print or the second printing of my print (all signed in dark green ink) at http://kleinletters.com/Blog/?p=2385.
Well, it is if you love the macabrely funny, or the funnily macabre...
...
Meanwhile in another part of the forest, I'm simultaneously more impressed, and sometimes more frustrated with the G1.
No blogger app, yet? Not a problem. According to blogger you just send a text -- no content specified -- to go@blogger.com and it'll send you a code to allow you to claim your blog... so that should be simple. Except that if you send a text message from the G1 to blogger you get a message back telling you that you haven't registered and to send a text message containing the text REGISTER to go@blogger.com. And if you send a text message containing the word REGISTER you get another message back telling you to send a message containing the word REGISTER... You do this a few more time, with no change.
So you give up and log in to Blogger using the G1's browser, and discover that the ability to upload photographs to Blogger has been disabled, and then you give up.
The voice recognition software doesn't always recognise that I've even said anything, and its choices, when it does think I've spoken, aren't just mishearings, they're positively perverse:
Me: Call Mike Gaiman.
Phone: (offers me a choice between) Dial 508 0972 Dial 508 9721 Dial 508 9720
Me: Call Dad Cell Phone: (offers a choice between) Call Hilary Bevan Jones at Work Call Hilary Bevan Jones at Home
...it's not even like there's a match up between the vowels, the consonants, or the number of syllables. Mysterious.
But the things that work work so well. I'm now using it as my bedside clock-alarm and GPS. It's a great phone. I cannot wait for a Slingbox app, or a RealPlayer app so I can use it to stream BBC Radio. The Sky Map app, which shows the night sky and stars and planets and constellations of where you're standing and what you're pointing at, using the GPS system and a compass so that the screen shows what you are seeing, only with stars and planets named and constellations drawn in, is magical...
... And finally, LEEDS UNITED: A musical video by Miss Amanda Palmer.
It's cold here these days. The other night the outside thermometer said it was 7 degrees F, and the wind took it colder -- and winter has not quite started yet. Winter starts in a week, after the weekend that follows Thanksgiving, when the hunters get back into their cars and go home.
The gunshots start at first light on the weekends. I can hear them now. Bam. Bam. Bam.
The dog is now wearing his fluorescent orange cape at all times, and if I'm walking with him or alone I'll put an orange cap or a fluorescent orange knitted headthingummy on: too many people are out in the woods right now, loaded with beer and weapons, shooting loudly and enthusiastically at anything that moves that isn't orange.
We get local news stories at this time of year that range from the comic to the nightmarish and tragic about overenthusiastic hunters mistakenly shooting and killing horses, cows, goats, members of their families, each other, and, normally unintentionally, themselves. (And a few years ago, a lady inside a house, who got hit while indoors by a hunter who was outdoors (she survived).)
There was a farmer round here who took to painting the word COW in bright orange lettering on the side of his cows.
I've got NO HUNTING signs posted on my land, hoping it'll lower the odds on anyone here wandering off for a morning walk being accidentally shot, but most years I'll find one or two hides built at the edges of the land, if not on it.
So the dog looks like Krypto when we we go walking, and I look like a fluorescent orange version of Where's Wally/Waldo.
Only a week to go. Bam. Bam.
...
Hi Neil,
Love the new Coraline website. While the other girls are crazy over Twilight, I'm just as crazy for the upcoming movie! What I would really like to do is walk in the movie theatre with a Coraline t-shirt, maybe some tubesocks covered in buttons, and if I can fit all my hair into one - a blue wig, well maybe not that. Anyway do you think any merchandise will be made? I'm thinking a couple of t-shirts...one with a quote from the book on it or that G.K. Chesterton quote. Thanks for the inspiration for aspiring writers like me, making stuff up forever.
Hoo-lee-ah from Tejas.
I don't know. I'll ask.
Hello Neil. I have a question that may only be due to some basic misunderstanding on my part, but I've searched and can't seem to find an explanation anywhere. Hopefully I'm not the only one confused by this.
In Stardust, at the beginning of the book, the Fair is described as being every nine years. But Tristran leaves during one such Fair, and returns one year later for another. Doesn't he?
Nope. He leaves before the fair and returns during it.
Neil,
As much as I enjoy your blogging, I'm always pleased when Maddy guest blogs. I remember fairly clearly Maddy's blogging during your visit to the Hellboy II set. It seemed to be hinted (or maybe I'm insane) that Maddy might appear in a DVD extra somewhere. For this reason, I went out and bought the three-disc version of Hellboy II (otherwise, I probably would have bought the single-disc edition). At any rate, I haven't plowed through all of the DVD extras yet (there seem to be kind of a lot of them), but I was hoping you could let me know... is Maddy an international superstar? Did she make a cameo on the Hellboy special features, or get mentioned in the commentary or something? Or did I get my hopes up for nothing? I'm a big fan of Maddy's guest-blogging and the Maddy anecdotes, so I was looking forward to this. At any rate, you should tell Maddy she has adoring fans.
Thanks, Sandra Seaman.
I heard from Maddy that she's on the DVD being shown Wink (she was emailed this information by her friend Javier the extras director). I think the interviews with her are probably still in the Hellboy vaults.
Hello Mr. Gaiman~
An interesting thought just struck me...you know how they maintain houses of famous people eg. Bertrand Russell, Jane Austen, do you think they'll have one for you too when you die? Sorry about the morbidity...but I just found the idea quite amusing, and I do think people would flock to your house after your death. ^_^
Deborah
Oh god. Does that mean I have to tidy the place up?
Just seen this on the BBC website when they interviewed Joseph Paterson about Dr Who....
“My favourite character was the Marquis de Carabas from Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere.
"I love that character because he's so flamboyant but also darkly dangerous - and he's also 200 years old.
Paterson's an amazing actor, and I loved working with him on Neverwhere. There were a lot of things I didn't like about the BBC Neverwhere, but he was always marvellous -- he got it and ran with it (here's the first few minutes of him on screen).
Whether he'll get to be the next Doctor Who... well, I know no more than you do. But I'd give him the job in a trice, if it was mine to give.
Still playing with the G1. Starting to get more enthusiastic as I play with more and more apps -- there's a strange delight in going to Instamapper and looking at the patterns I make as I walk around, for example. Maddy keeps borrowing it to play Pacman and a game called AMAZED where you have to maneuver a ball around the screen by tipping it one way and another. I'm impressed with the bar code reader that tells me where I can buy anything cheaper locally, and would be even more impressed if it wasn't convinced I could buy Ellen Klages books at my local Walmart.
The iSkoot Skype app is fairly wonderful, iMeem is great (but the phone's okay-but-not-great speaker quality means I'll probably never actually use iMeem on the road, now I've tried it out... better sound reproduction and a speaker jack would be on my list of must-haves. Along with better battery life if you're actually using any of the things that make the G1 more than just a cell phone). Now I'm just waiting for the iris recognition software... ("Oh no! Not only have they cut my eyes out but now I can't get to my address book!")
And finally, I'm thrilled that The Graveyard Book made it into another end of year round up -- Michael Berry's in SF Chronicle:
The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins; 312 pages; $17.99; ages 12 and up) On the night a mysterious stranger kills his parents and sister, a toddler escapes from the house and finds sanctuary in a cemetery. There he is adopted by a ghostly couple, accepted by the other revenants in residence and given the name Nobody Owens, or Bod, for short. Bod's coming-of-age has its moments of wonder, terror and tenderness, and Gaiman hits exactly the right notes every time. This is a book that should be passed from brother to sister, child to parent.
It's out in English, but this version of it is it in Italian. Because everything sounds better in Italian.
A few of you have written in asking if I'd done an Alan Moore and taken my name off the film, or if I'd had a falling out with the studio, as my name isn't mentioned in this trailer, just Henry Selick's -- and no, not at all. Nobody's name except Henry's is mentioned in the trailer, and that has more to do with Focus wanting to make sure that if they invoked The Nightmare Before Xmas, people wouldn't then assume this was a Tim Burton film, and go and see it -- or stay away -- based on that. (On the international poster -- above -- you won't find my name or Henry's.) I suppose it's a marketing decision.
I chatted to Henry today, and am really looking forward to seeing a finished film -- the last twenty minutes of the thing weren't done the last time I was sent anything. And it has music...
Incidentally, the Coraline Movie edition is now out, with an essay by me in the back, and another by Henry Selick...
I've started playing with the T-mobile G1. First reactions -- I like it, mostly. It feels good in your hand. It's reasonably intuitive. (Bizarrely, when it isn't intuitive and I've had to head into manual land, the phone's software and the PDF of the manual do not always agree with each other.) I've had fun making ring tones, creating galleries. The way that your contacts list is also your Gmail contacts is mostly terrific (although it won't let me create entries that have the same email address as someone already on the list).
The things I don't like about it so far seem huge and obvious: no Blogger app (when there's a LiveJournal app and several others) seems a huge omission, seeing it's from Google; it can't read or open PDF files yet; you can send it pictures and watch them as a slideshow, but you can't save them; the built in Gmail app can't do anywhere near the things that the gmail program on my N73 can do; the camera is about the same standard as the iPhone's, which is to say, a bit meh. I like having a real keyboard but wish it was a tiny bit bigger -- I find myself typing with fingernails. Battery life is fine unless you've got Wifi on.
More reactions after it's been on the road with me and been used for a bit.
...
Hi Neil,
I just had a quick question on the Who Killed Amanda Palmer book. I have the album already (and have listened to it countless times. It's beautiful).
I was going to go and order the book, but when I went to the site, I found that the book seems to only be in packages. I was wondering if there are any plans to sell the book alone, or whether I should buy one of the packages. The extra CD could make a nice gift.
Thanks, Nate
Let's see... the book is being designed right now, then it goes off to the printers. The people who bought the package version will get theirs first. Depending on where in the world it's printed, this could be a couple of months before anyone else. Then, when copies come in from the printer, they'll go on sale -- probably in the early Spring. I think.
Neil!
I'm re-reading American Gods, and I'm at the point where Shadow first meets Sam. At the diner, Shadow reads a newspaper story saying "local farmers wanted to hang dead crows around the town to frighten the others away; ornithologists said it wouldn't work, that the living crows would simply eat the dead ones. The locals were implacable. 'When they see the corpses of their friends,' said a spokesman, 'they'll know we don't want them here.'"
Neil, I don't have Time Enough for Love here at school, but wasn't there something very similar to that in that story? Was your dead crow story a little Heinlein homage?
And OMG - just realized that Sam's last name is Black Crow, and that story was about crows. Wow. Sneaky of you.
Chris
When I'm driving through small-town America I make a point of buying local papers in towns where I stop, and reading them, preferably in local coffee shops. I read that in a small town as I went, and thought "It belongs in my book". So I put it there.
Dear Mr Gaiman, I recently finished reading M is For Magic, and I have a question about the story Chivalry. Sir Galahad was considered the holiest of Arthur's knights; so, how coul he have obtained an apple from the garden of the Hespiredes? The Hespiredes were a part of greek mythology which was actually a religeon based on monotheism. So, how could he get something that his religeon said didn't exist? I am sorry to bother you with this question, but it has sparked my interest.
- a young and curious reader
He had to travel a long way.
I don't think that the existence of mythical things would have been a problem for a mythical early Christian, of whom Galaad would have been one, or even a huge problem for real early Christians: in The Golden Legend, which was the most popular book of stories about saints, collected in the thirteenth century, Saint Nicholas (the one who became Santa Claus) went up against the Goddess Diana.
Then again, Narnia, a most monotheistic world, had, in addition to a Leonine Son of God, more than its share of nymphs (just like the Hesperides) not to mention such gods as Bacchus and Silenus (and Santa Claus again) wandering around. So I would not worry about it, were I you.
I loved the link to the Sandman Death 20th Anniversary Bookends you put up. When should they be coming out and how much of a dent will they put on my wallet, please?
According to a quick Google, http://www.toymania.com/news/messages/9960.shtml says they came out in September, and they will cost a wallet-twinging $295. (Ouch.) There are only a thousand of them.
This one has almost nothing to do with you Neil, but since his website is still in the makings I thought you could perhaps forward this to him. I was very sad (like a child whose told there won't be a Christmas this year) to learn that Dave McKean's appearance this weekend in BuenosAires was canceled. In the event's blog they posted Dave's email in which he mentioned he couldn't make it because a date was changed (which sounds reasonable). But it remained unclear if it was the date of ANIMATE (the BuenosAires event) which was changed, or if it was one of Dave's previous engagements.
Dave McKean said...
Hi Neil,
Please post this, as I certainly do feel very bad letting people down:
I agreed to go to Animate in the summer and had to organize a military operation of friends and family to take care of our son Liam during the proposed week, as he is appearing as Gavroche in Les Miserables in London and has to be accompanied to and from the theatre each day he's on, and also be available on 12 hours notice every day in case another actor drops out. We managed this, so both Clare and I could make the trip to Buenos Aires, a city we've always wanted to visit. Unfortunately, the date was changed by the organizers, and so we had to re-arrange. More importantly, it became obvious that the festival was now colliding with a variety of previous commitments falling in the latter half of November, so I decided with great sadness to withdraw this year. I hate letting people down, and I was really looking forward to the trip (though not the 24 hours travelling each way, I admit!).
Hopefully there will be another event, an animation or film festival, that will allow me to visit the city in the future. Or maybe we'll just go for a holiday, and do a signing in a bookstore.
Thanks, Dave
(I think it's worth pointing out that ten-year old Liam McKean -- owner of the original Pig Puppet -- is in Les Miserables in London. If you happen to go and see it, check if he's in your performance. Get his autograph. Mention pigs. Make his day.) And that reminds me...
Hi Neil,
I thought you might like to let people know that Dave McKean is on the BBC4 programme "Picture Book" talking about his illustations for David Almond's 'The Savage' and how he was inspired by Comic Book's art. The programme is airing (again) at 19.10 on Saturday and 3.30 on Sunday, and is also currently available on the BBC i-player. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00fhnb6/comingup
Thank you again for all the stories,
Marjorie
You're welcome.
Hi,
Just read that you completed "the Dying Earth story." Huh? Is there a new collection of Dying Earth stories coming out? Is it an homage to Jack Vance's work, or what?
Did a search for "dying earth" on your website and saw no other mention of it.
