Page Four: 46-60
Idiom Fun
Too Quiet
Episode 2 and Real World Politics
Thingies: The Kitchen Wars
Gaiman, I Choose You!
Exotic Animal Knowledge
Missing Sock Theory
Do You Wear A Lot of Black?
These Are Not My Scary Trousers
Buffy Episodes of Questionable Reality
Squinty Eye of Doom
Entirely Peopled With Criminals
Stalking Cities
The Real Pam
Favours Owed
Idiom Fun - Loz, Christine Marie, Daniel Reid & Cassie
L: Yeah, but those pot plants won't talk if they know what's good for them.
CM:You know, that's one of those phrases that means something utterly different in American English.
L: Hey everyone, look what happens when I ask Chris if I can 'bum a fag'!
CM: Huh? Oh, right. Sorry, I don't smoke. I could ask my brother-in-law for you...
L: Bugger.
L: Umm... cabbage crates coming over the briny?
CM: <chortling (I just love that word, don't you?)> OK. You win. I understand briny, I think, but you lost me on cabbage crates. Unless, of course, you're making this up just to give me a hard time, in which case:
CM: <big wet raspberry>
D: You all done munching spotted dick ? It's a bit of a pisser getting tagnuts all over ye doing a table-ender on a Taffy.
D: Cor blimey, it's a fair cop, guv.
D: Dan'l Reid (Orrach ! Awa' wi' ye, sporran !)
C: a friend's (female) irish exchange student learned very quickly upon her arrival in the states that no, she could not blow fags indoors.
Too Quiet - Jinx, Reg & Lady Miss Tree
J: Is it just AOHell, or have I noticed a few tumbleweeds areound here?
R: Nope. It's not just AOL.
R: Things are quiet...Too quiet.
R: <looks around suspiciously>
R: My own excuse for being so reticent about posting is that I am still recovering from a hangover of Apocalyptic proportions induced by Miss Tree's birthday party on Saturday night and more specifically the Lady's namesake cocktail.
R: A few short words about this cocktail: "Oh my gods!"
R: A long word about it: "polycacodaemonic".
R: So deceptive, so tasty, so easy to drink. And the, when you are halfway through your third one, the first one kicks in and you are channelling Dylan Thomas, W.C. Fields and Dean Martin all at once. I imagine that a fourth would have you in "Hello Oliver Reed." mode.
R: Don't try this at home kids.
LMT: The 'Lady Miss Tree'. Sweet, deceptively powerful and incredibly intoxicating. Appropriate, non?
R: No. Not entirely appropriate.Whilst all the above are true, the real Lady Miss Tree has never tried to renovate the inside of my skull with a ten pound sledge hammer on a Sunday morning.
Episode 2 and Real World Politics - Garry & Reg
G: <sounds of light saber swinging>
R: <wvorp>
R: <Reg's rather fun scimitar handled Count Dooku lightsabre blocks Gaz's swing>
R: See I would be hurling things at the screen if that was the ultimate plot twist. I think the whole Palpatine/Sidious thing works best as an illustration of the banality of evil. Palpatine is just a politician who wants to be top of the heap. Alright, he is fairly uncompromising in pursuing this goal, but I really think that, in the spirit of historical revisionism, the question has to be asked: Is the Empire really that bad?
G: You're a Republican aren't you?
R: Smile when you call me that, pilgrim.
R: And easy on the capital R.
R: There seems to be far less evidence of beaurocratic corruption under the Empire, there is no mention of slavery and it seems to have a fairly laissez faire attitude to independent businesses such as those of Jabba the Hutt and Lando Calrissian, (at least until he starts harbouring terrorists,) whilst cartels like the Trade Federation seem to have been broken up, people like the Lars' seem to be perfectly content and indeed prospering under the Empire's "yoke". In fact the only people who seem to feel that the Empire is oppressive are the Rebel Alliance, against whose attacks the Death Star could be argued in the current world political climate as a neccessary deterrent. Yes, there is the destruction of Alderaan, but in any war against terrorism, there is going to be collatoral damage and we are not told how many innocents have been killed in past Rebel attacks. Apart from being surrounding himself with English character actors instead of attractive young Americans and having a fondness for younger blondes, what does the Emperor really do that is so evil apart from running the Galaxy efficiently?
G: And what is so wrong with surrounding oneself with British character actors precisely..? I liked Nixon as Pres. too (I bet the trains run on time!) And besides who says it wasn't a terrorist atrocity in the first place that requires the development of some super-weapon to bring them in line
R: <gently reaches out with a napkin and wipes the foam away from Gaz's mouth>
R: That was rather my point old chap. No need to get all Hungarian about it.
R: And this is where the banality comes in. He wants power, but when he gets it, he doesn't actually do much with it. As far as we know, he has not hidden away gazillions of Imperial credits in foreign banks while the populace starves,
G: <heh> visions of the Emperor with a *big* goucho moustache...
R: no one seems to be particularly disenfranchised, apart from a small group of religious fanatics and their political supporters. The Emperor himself seems to lead a fairly ascetic existence and does not seem to have succumbed to the temptations of absolute power.
G: And those temptations would be what precisely - more like Ming in Flash Gordon perhaps, raining fire on a peace-loving Earth and laughing maniacally as he does so...
R: Well I was thinking more along the lines of maybe getting a nice Armani wardrobe and possibly a troupe of attractive and scantily clad young ladies of easy virtue, but I guess I'd be a pretty mediocre galactic overlord,
R: So all this evil, all this sinister plotting, death and destruction, seems purely driven by one man's need for efficient government and nothing more. It is almost classic Shakespearean tragedy.
G: Hmmm (if it's classic tragedy where are his character flaws and the argument within self - he seems pretty universally bad; not a lot of internal dialogue going on there (tho' I must confess I haven't exactly seen the 2nd one yet)
R: His character flaw is hubris. He believes he can run things better and he will go to any lengths to prove it.
R: The alternative is pure Star Trek.
G: Agh no, say it isn't so
R: Well, actually, the alternative Loz suggested was pure "Forbidden Planet" but I couldn't say that since "Forbidden Planet" was actually loosely based on "The Tempest" and that would have made my argument look pretty stupid.
Thingies: The Kitchen Wars - anon, culfin, Anna Begins, Loz, Reg, Sheri, Lady Miss Tree, Jenny Jo, margret
anon: Do you think several of us can work in a kitchen together without getting in each other's way and hair, on each other's nerves, and out the sharp n' pointies? I would like to think so, but you know how tempermental us chef-types can be. <grin>
c: As a complete kitchen tyrant, I understand the concern. I was thinking about some sort shift system, until we can work out who can actually wield sabbatier without any resultant trips to A&E.
A: Pah, if I see any one using Sabatier (spit!) I'll send them to A & Ebmyself...
c: Oh, aye?
c: (shring! shring! as a molybdenum stainless edge is honed on a Richardson's steel... )
A: Molybedenum/vanadium steel should really be sharped using a diamond steel or a ceramic sharpener, you know :P
c: I detect a sharp and pointy based conflict moment approaching...
c: I use a 9 inch Sab, mainly for herbs, but my weapon of choice is a Victorinox 7 inch, a really nice knife for the money, backed up by a short paring knife. They're light and thin, and keep a good edge.
L: <sigh> Thingies and their toys... size isn't everything you know.
R: Exactly. It's all in the skill of the user. The sixteenth century Toledo salamanca I use as my standard kitchen knife has no bearing on the quality of the food prepared in my kitchen, particularly since food preparation in my kitchen usually involves opening take-away packages which usually requires the skien dhu, which has been in the family since one of my English ancestors pried it from the fingers of a Jacobite he'd shot in the back at Culloden, (two weeks after the
Battle,) and which I find much more useful for delicate work.R: <sigh> Thingies and their toys... size isn't everything you know.
S: Sez you! I use my 8-inch Schinken Messer for just about everything, kept in fine form with an old-fashioned whetstone (none o' yer wussy steel sharpening rods for me.) I do, however, miss my Old Hickory carbon set (the ex got custody). They could rust if not dried completely and were a real bitch to sharpen, but they held one hell of an edge when freshly sharpened.
S: Next on my kitchen toy wish list is a big ol' Chinese cleaver. <grin>
S: Sheri, today I shall mostly not be being Lizzie Borden....
c: I actually have enough kitchen tat, to the extent I was forced at beer point to sign a declaration a few years back committing me to replacement only procurement.
c: Good thing I negotiated an exemption clause for presents...
LMT: That's what my baby brother and I do each Christmas. Useless kitchen tat for the second drawer down. No idea what the hell I'm going to do with a square boiled egg maker, but if you ever feel the need...
LMT(?): Yes, but do you have a device for removing the tops from soft boiled eggs?
anon: Ah, but do you have a little gadget that puts a hole in your egg before you boil it (to stop it cracking)? :)
c: What, like a pin? <g>
c: Nope.
JJ: Um...no. Cracked eggs are okay, as long as you're not going to dye them...and if you are going to dye your eggs, you get to eat the cracked ones!
JJ: The fanciest egg gadget I ever had was one of those little slicer things with the wires that cuts a whole eggs up instantly (kind of like with that horse in The Cell)
JJ: Jenny Jo (Spreading happy images wherever she goes!)
m: I have one of those that has two sets of wire. One straight, and one wavy for fancy sliced eggs.
c: But I do have a porridge spurtle...(Basically, a turned stick for, uh, porridge stirring. Possibly the most ridiculous kitchen thing I own...)
c: Anyone got an apple lathe?
Gaiman, I Choose You! - MarkWCats, Binaryeyes, JeremyL, Jenny Jo, Simon Jester, Loz
3. In 20 words or less, why is Neil the Chosen One?
M: "Gaiman, I choose you!"
B: Do you keep him in a little red and white ball?
J: Would it be a "Gaimon" then?
JJ: Oh jeez...now I'm picturing him bouncing around going "gaimon, gaimon, gaiii...mon," in, like super-deformed anime mode.... I wonder what his attacks are...
S: The ability to vanish in a coal-bunker?
JJ: Well, I do think he must be one of those "shadow" Pokemon such as Team Rocket are always trying to employ...y'know, all psychic and stuff.
JJ: Okay, wait, inspiration is striking here...
JJ: No. No, I will not do it. I will not...I REFUSE to compose the afng version of the team rocket "here comes trouble" speech. Such unholy genre-mixing is an abomination against all that is good and pure.
JJ: --Jenny Jo (at least unless someone else goes first.)
L: Super-black-light attack which makes everyone look like they're wearing black clothes (probably not that much of a big deal for Thingies) And probably some kind of eye-beam attack when ever he takes his Poke-Shades off...
Exotic Animal Knowledge - Jenny Jo, Sally, Reg, Morgana
JJ: Did you know that possums are the only animals besides Polar Bears that have hollow hairs?
JJ:And giraffes have blue tongues.
S: And polar bears have black skin.
S: And baby echindnas are called puggles!!
R: And speaking of monotremes, the platypus is the only mammal which produces venom.
R: The weakest muscle in a crocodile's body is the muscle it uses to open its jaws and the strongest is the one it uses to close its jaws, hence the trick of crocodile wrestling is to hold its mouth shut, which can be done with the fingers of one hand.
R: The hyena is the only animal whose front and back legs are equal in strength.
M: *ahem*
M: An elephant's back foot will always step in precisely the same spot as its front foot. So if the front foot steps over you, there's no need to worry. *grin*
The Missing Sock Theory - Sascha, Juho, Karen, Pam, Rachel, Reg
S: PS: Neil, if everthing was an incarnation of our dreams, thus from your dreamland, why for god sake did you come up with a Sock Monster eating only one sock? And why did it have to live in *my* washing machine?
J: It is my firm belief that what we recognize as "washing machines" are actually alien organisms, disguised in this fashion to ensure a steady supply of their primary source of nourishment, socks.
K: And, disturbingly, mine occasionally regurgitates a spare.
P: Ah, *you're* the one at the other end of the wormhole, then.
P: Do you suppose it was Sascha's?
R: The sock monster doesn't actually eat socks. It is a small wormohole, which connects up to roadsides everywhere. Seeing manky looking socks on the side of the road is fairly common, but there's always only one of them, never a pair.
P: That's freaky. I hadn't read your response before I posted my little wormhole theory. I bow to your superior theory. ;-)
Reg: Ahh, you see they are the ones who missed out on the Wormhole and are making their way overland. The reason they all look a bit manky is that they have been sleeping rough for a few weeks, travelling furtively by night.
P: I've seen those socks sneaking off the Muir trail in the deepest dusk at Yosemite.
Reg: There is only ever one because all pairs of socks have a dual nature.
P: Socks are ruled by Gemini? Who knew? No wonder I collect them so fetishively.
Reg: One sock is by its nature, very conservative, docile and home oriented, whilst the other is rebellious, headstrong and yearns for freedom.
P: Um, if *I* were a sock, I know which one I'd be...
Reg: This is the sock which surreptitiously tries to remove itself by relaxing its elastic and creeping down into your shoe and, if it does not escape the servitude it finds intolerable, it will eventually become morbidly morose and develop holes and lose its elastic altogether.
P:...and spend its time draped over the armchair, next to the remote control, lost in lurid, mechanically impossible fantasies about multi-striped toe socks...
Reg: The destination of these wayward woollen wanderers? Well I don't want to encourage fanciful speculation, but the town of Fort Payne, Alabama does promote itself as the "Official Sock Capital of the World". Coincidence? I think not.
P: *Alabama*?!? *shudder*
P: Not *my* inner wayward sock self.
Do You Wear A Lot of Black? - Simon Jester, Reg, Gothpat, Lady Miss Tree, JAC
S: Do they wear a lot of black? ;)
R: Hey! I resemble that remark. I only wear as much black as I need to.
R: It's slimming.
R: It co-ordinates very well with black.
R: And pastels don't suit me.
R: Besides, despite what the fashion designers think, black is this season's black.
G: GOTH!!!!!! ;P
R: I deny the allegation and defy the alligators.:-P
R: I'm more, like, a beatnik, man. Like, me and Jack and Neal are soul brothers. One unified spirit seeking the big why, the now, the Ow fuck! Just burned my fingers stubbing my cigarette out. Cold water! Soothing! stream of consciousness that flows where it needs to be and is what it is and is like profoundly yeah.
R: Err..would you believe I'm a ninja?
R: Yeah. That's it. I spent many years in my youth training with The Brotherhood of the Poisoned Pen learning the secret arts of character assasination; standing backward leaps to a second story typewriter, the nine disciplines of sarcasm, the ritual maintenance of disingenuity, colour co-ordination for an all black wardrobe and a good many secrets that I am sworn not to disclose. Beware of me, for I am a coiled spring of invective just waiting to become the black-clad slinky of contempt descending the stairs of your self-respect.
R: Err...Would you believe that I'm just lazy and it's easier to dress when nearly all your clothes are the same colour?
R: Reg "Because I couldn't find a darker colour."
LMT: And I came this close --> <-- to buying Neil a t-shirt that said that very thing.
LMT: Lady Miss Tree, Who bought the 'Pissy' and 'Make Me Purr' t-shirts instead. Er, for herself, not for Mr Gaiman.
JAC: oh suuuure. just because he made a funny face at you when you showed him. *grin*
These Are Not My Scary Trousers - Alan Moore, as quoted by Lady Miss Tree
"Neil and some other friends were visiting me in Northampton, and we all went out to dinner. We hadn't seen each other for a while, so we spent the meal catching up on what each of us had been doing. When it was my turn, I began telling everyone about the story I was doing for From Hell, my comic about Jack the Ripper. I'm a man who loves his work, and I do tend to give all I've got when I'm describing a scene.
"So I was just describing a ritual disembowelment of a women in London and the almost supernatural aura surrounding it, and Neil suddenly got up and said, 'Excuse me, I'm just going to go outside a minute.' And he went outside, overcome by the sheer demonic power of my presentation.
"When he came back in, I forgot which organ was being removed at that point in my narrative; but Neil caught a few words, did a complete U-turn, and walked straight back out.
"When we went searching for him later, Neil was sitting in the gutter outside the restaurant, head in his hands, looking absolutely wretched. And he was being mothered by a bag lady. It was a very Neil Gaiman moment; the lady almost could've been Mad Hettie from his Sandman stories emerged to persecute him.
"I remember looking down, with no sympathy for him whatsoever, and just chuckling and saying, 'Neil Scary Trousers Gaiman, Master of Modern Terror.'"
Buffy Episodes of Questionable Reality - Sally, Lady Miss Tree, Loz
S: I'm not sure if it's the same in the AFL states, but in Brisbane they have been showing repeats firstly to get the shows in synch for the crossover episodes and then to get them back into synch in time for the season finale.
S: It's in the viewers interests, I promise!
LMT: Hrm. Seven has had a long history of faffing around with the Buffster and her friends, often without so much as a "And Buffy will return in two weeks time. Next week we will be screening the World Champion Hamster Tormenting Series. Next on Seven..."
L: Well, it's very strange over here, because regularly each season there are a couple of episodes where Buffy gets turned into a man, somewhere between the age of twenty and forty. The MOTW is a very unconvincing similar style man, normally wearing a ghastly waistcoat. All the other regular cast members are gone except Giles, who turns into a man in his fifties. The episode is much longer than usual, and there is no trademark bantering, or fighting, instead Buffy and the MOTW take turns to knock balls into pockets on a large gaize table. Sometimes Buffy wins, sometimes the MOTW but it seems to have absolutely no ramifications in that years arc.
L: Last year I did write to Joss suggesting he could dump these somewhat 'experimental' episodes as they seemed to rather adversly affect the effect of the season. I got no reply but noticed the episodes were quietly dropped from the video and DVD sets, which I think is a good thing...
Squinty Eye of Doom - squeaks, Janny Jo, Christine Marie, Lady Miss Tree
s: Then they usually just give me the squinty eye of doom.)
JJ: Speaking of the Squinty Eye of Doom, can anyone use this? Does it require special tutoring, or is it just a gift, or what? Do I have to ask permission? 'Cause now I'm kind of a position of authority with a school group and I need a way to make people do my bidding...uh, I mean cooperate.
JJ: Yeah, cooperation, that's it...
JJ: --Jenny Jo
Hoping it would work better than my current Puppy Eyes of Entreaty...C: Well, when dealing with my wholly adorable but somewhat spoiled nephew, I usually have better luck with the Hard Glare of Implacability. Used only rarely, of course. All those doom-y looks work best when they're hardly ever used, otherwise they get too familiar and not scary anymore.
s: The boy suggests the Spinny Eyes of Coersion, but notes that this only works if they're spinning along the Z axis (not the Y). Little spirals would help too, but that's optional. Sounds kind of complicated if you ask me, but if you can do it, I would only imagine that it would work.
LMT: Oh, that happened to me last time I had an inner ear infection...
LMT: Lady Miss Tree
Who does not recommend driving or editing film with spinny eyes. The results are somewhat disturbing.
Entirely Peopled With Criminals - Reg & squeaks
R: Reg(who recently discovered that he is not sixth generation Australian, as hitherto thought, and may in fact be eighth or ninth generation, and still not a single convict in the family tree anywhere)
s: What the heck kind of Australian are you? You're putting William Goldman to shame there, mister.
R: Hey, I didn't say there were no criminals in the family tree. The English branch of the family is littered with them.
R: My great, great grandfather was sent to Australia and paid to stay here by his family for undisclosed misbehaviors so heinous that they were still sending my grandfather an annual allowance until the day he died, on condition that he never return to England.
R: My great^the power 14 grandfather, Thomas Osborne embezzled a goodly chunk of the Royal Treasury in his role as Chancellor of the Exchequer and was eventually removed from the position for "massive corruption". Rather than sending him to jail, they made him a Duke of Leeds.
R: The first mention of my family name is in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle from the ninth century where Osbeorn is listed as one of a group of Saxon nobles who double-crossed Alfred the Great in a secret deal with the Danes.
R: It's just that my Irish ancestors, who would have been the convicts, were all terribly honest and hard-working and came here by choice because they were sick to death of sitting around in the rain eating bloody potatos.
R: Reg(proud to be descended from a long line of creative thinkiers)
Stalking Cities - squeaks, tyg, Reg
s: Can you just see the bay area pride oozing out of the keyboard and onto the screen here? That's our tyg, the next best thing to knowing Jon Singer personally. ;P
t: Of course, I've known Jon since the mid-80s, long before I knew Neil. :-)
L: Well of course. Any other possibility would have suggested a bizarre, unspoken division in US society between Singer people and Galloway people.
R: If there were no other reasons for me to want to visit the Bay Area someday, the chance to meet Tom would be enough to draw me there.
t: I think Michelle now has competition as a "Bay Area stalker". :-)
R: Nah. I'm not stalking the Bay Area. I mean sure, I know where it lives and I know the cities it hangs out with, but I don't keep track of its day to day movements.
R: I think it is time for me to go on the record about some of those often repeated stories.
R: There is no truth in the rumour that any time I visit the US I have to land in LA because the City of Oakland has taken out a court order forbidding me from coming within 100 miles of it.
R: I was not the anonymous party hawking those unflattering telephoto lens photographs of the Bay Bridge topless around the tabloid news services.
R: I have never been apprehended with a pair of binoculars by the staff of Alcatraz.
R: And I did not make threats of violence against property developers in Portland, Oregon when I thought it was getting too close to the Bay Area.
R: I admit that I publicly accused Karl Malden of infidelity to San Francisco, but he was flaunting it in the media by being regularly seen with other cities in those American Express commercials.
R: Yes, I did make that false advertising complaint against Tony Bennett, but it was a joke. I didn't really expect the court to order him to have transplant surgery so his own heart could be kept on display in a small refrigerator in Golden Gate Park.
R: The fact that I offered to teach Michael Douglas how to pick up teeth with broken fingers if he ever went near the Bay Area again was just my way of making sure that no-one could make a sequel to "Basic Instinct" and had nothing to do with psychotic jealousy.
R: Yes, I phoned in a bomb threat to the Academy Awards ceremony the year that "You Can't Stop The Music" wasn't nominated for Best Picture, but I think it helped the Academy drum up interest in what was otherwise a fairly lacklustre year for films.
R: Who among you wouldn't have done the same if you'd had the chance?
The Real Pam - Pamela Basham & Reg
P: (wrt 1602) Question: Will I enjoy it as a Neil story, even though I'll probably miss most of the Marvel crossovers (since I'm a limited comics reader)?
R: Yes. I can't give an ironclad guarantee, but there is definitely enough Neil in it to make it a very enjoyable read.
P: That's what I was hoping. That I could enjoy it early on for its innate Neilness, and rely on everybody else to tell me all the subtext I missed, and then reread it later with all that in mind.
R: I'm not a big Marvel fan myself, (although Fury and Strange are two characters who have always appealed to me,)
P: Care to give me some background?
R: Certainly. (nb: what follows are both Reg's original post *and* Pam's response to it, which were originally set into two posts, but are here spliced together for brevity, beginning with Pam's response to the background)
P: I... I... I'm stunned. You've delved my very soul. I feel naked--exposed, humbled, and veritably stitch-free in the wind of your insight. *sniff* All my life, I *knew* there was something wrong with the story of my life. And here it is, after all this time... the truth.
P: Please accept my inadequate annotations as the smallest token of my gratitude.
R: Pamela Basham was the result of three hundred years of carefully monitored breeding by a secret organisation of scientific experimenters, free thinkers, eugenicists and prominent horse-racing identities which was established in Paris at the dawn of the Age of Reason. Alleged members of this society included Voltaire, Junius, Lord Byron, Ben Franklin, the Comte St. Germain, Chico Marx, HG Wells, Aldous Huxley and Thomas Edison.
P: Oh, those poor, poor men. Imagine their terrible disappointment when everything went awry, and they ended up with a fey, right-brained, squirrelish little girl, instead.
R: The carefully planned eugenic experiment went awry when the infant Pamela was kidnapped and raised by squirrels until the age of eight.
P: I always *knew* I was abducted, and placed in the wrong life. I must have blocked this from my memory. But this explains everything! Why I drew squirrels on every art piece in my childhood. And why one of my favorite childhood books was about a squirrel. And that whole climbing trees and hanging by my feet from branches 15 feet up thing. The trouble it caused everyone!
R: She spent the five years after her being rediscovered as a sideshow exhibit with various circuses touring the rural areas of the United States.
P: Ah... the good old days. All the spangly costumes my heart could desire. Free nuts day and night. And the ability to bite obnoxious people with impunity.
R: At age 13, she was rescued from her life as "the amazing squirrel girl" by the famed audioligist Dr Aratosthenes Basham who noticed her ability to sing in the four octaves above high C.
P: Well, I suppose a few of the very kind and tone-deaf might have called it singing. He really found me when I was screaming at the seamstress because I wanted more sparklies on my costume.
R: She was the basis of Dr Basham's ground-breaking book "Interesting Things I've Found At Carnivals" and was later adopted by the good doctor as his own child.
P: *sigh* Dear kindly Dr. Basham. It was a doomed relationship from the start. I'm afraid it was much too late to tame me. After the squirrels and the circus, there seemed no more world to conquer. So of course I ran away to join politics. He never recovered from the disappointment.
R: At age nineteen Pamela announced that she was in fact a sovreign state and, after a long legal battle during which the US government went so far as to threaten military intervention, she was recognised by the UN and given a seat in the General assembly.
P: Where I frequently interrupted long, boring discourses on meaningless topics with the suggestion that we all take a break and run over to feed the squirrels at Central Park. You'd be surprised at who took me up on it, and how often a breath of fresh air and a good squirrel-feeding can break a deadlock.
R: She has since then become one of the most globally recognised spokespersons for the International Peach Movement.
P: Well, I thought they'd done such a bang-up job with civic engineering in Atlanta. You know: take Peachtree Street to Peachtree Avenue, then turn right on Peachtree Boulevard, until you see the stoplight at Peachtree Lane.* The beautiful simplicity and utter chaos of it inspired me.
R: Pamela speaks four languages fluently. (Three of them dead languages.)
P: Hells bells! When did Norwegian die? And why didn't anyone call me for the funeral?!?
R: She is afraid of penguins.
P: Here, sir, you have outdone yourself. The razor-edge of this perception took my breath away. Because I'd always thought that I'd loved penguins. But you've forced me to look deeper, to see that I *am* truly afraid of penguins... afraid of the intensity of my adoration for them. Afraid that it might overtake me completely, and I'll be lost... lost as I was as a wee girl among the squirrels, who were then so cruelly taken from me.
P: I can't tell you how much this will help me in my future relationships.
R: How's that for a background?
P: Your gift is beyond compare.
R: Reg(who is always happy to provide a background for anyone)
P: * Byways named from Gone With The Wind. All 82 of them.
P: -Pam
who really did adore squirrels as a girl and is still known to occasionally take a break and go feed them
To Entertainment Weekly, and whomever else might be listening to such things:
First off, thank you for writing what is on the whole a really neat article about a really neat author. However, if we readers are going to have to put up with that silly picture in every Time Warner based press thingie for the next decade, I believe that you owe us two favors.
Favor Number One.
The idea of this being a cult author could probably be dropped now, especially after features in Publishers Weekly, USA Today, and your fine publication within a six month period. Ditto the idea of this being an author no one has heard of, for the same reasons.Favor Number Two
Please in future reporting try to more accurately reflect the diversity of types in the signing line rather than using the handful of "goths" (or people wearing black who are the nearest approximation your reporter can spot) amongst the crowd as a blanket stereotype to cover the eclectic mix.There's room for everyone to read Neil's stuff, and they should do so if it catches their fancy. And there's room amongst the readers for all types. Even the occasional zaftig bluestocking such as myself.
Thank you for your kind attention.