When geekeries collide

I should probably be saying something about Christmas and how lovely it was. It was.

But this has it all. Neil Gaiman, "Firefly" and academic freedom. 7 minutes of glorious liberal self-righteousness. (With added Nathan Fillion and plastic dinosaurs.)

Portmanteau post...

Well, all that NaBloPoMo stuff went out of the window last week, what with the Inauguration brouhaha, and being completely knackered, and all that - and then this weekend Sue and I went to Hove (actually) to see Jan. Sue brought the weather on Saturday

so it was fine and lovely (I had my usual WeatherGoddess effect on Sunday and it hurled it down all day); and after lunch at Hove Museum we went off to the seafront for a walk. The sun descended pretty quickly as we did so, and I got this photo

which has also been stuntblogged at the Hove Daily Photo site today!

In other news - Neil Gaiman has won the Newbery Medal for the wonderful Graveyard Book! This is just about the best award you can win for fiction for young people - and he's in extremely good company. [And any author who tags a blog post GOD I LOVE LIBRARIANS needs a mention on any librarian's blog]... Definitely one of the best books, if not the best book, I read last year - Terry Pratchett's Nation might just have edged it out at the time, but I find myself remembering more snippets from The Graveyard Book. Interesting that they're both YA titles.

I also got my copy of the new Springsteen CD through the post today - haven't listened to it yet because that'll be a treat for tomorrow morning's train journey... I don't know, a new US administration, a new Springsteen production and a new Newbery winner in one week - it's all seriously testing my British sense of moderation... And there's knitting tomorrow night at the Blue; my cup runneth over.

Finally got the prizes out in the post today to those people who won things in the blog contest. That was another reason for not blogging - I really needed to spend the small amount of time I had at home packing parcels etc. - but instead I did Bad Things like sleeping and feeding the cat instead...

And now I know...

... why Mr Gaiman has always seemed so eerily familiar.
ETA: The second "conversation" in the comments bears reading... I can almost hear the tone of amused tolerance...

But back to I Knit tonight - I think they'll just bar me from there soon on the grounds that I have no home to go to and they're scared I'll be camping out on their one remaining sofa... Actually, I didn't intend to go this evening; but it was demolition and suggested reconstruction on a colleague's cardigan/hoodie time, and there was no time at work. Didn't get a lot of knitting done myself, but I did finish the last pair from the year's Socks That Rock yarn from the Rockin' Sock Club (looks like they're all signed up for next year...) on the train home. And they are lovely. They're in the Mediumweight, which is beautiful stuff.

Blogger is, however, unhappy with the idea of uploading photos. Or at least, this photo. So you'll just have to believe me that this is a nice pair of socks.

I'm intending to have a line-up of all the club socks for a post this weekend, at which point I'll hope Blogger is a bit happier...

Tomorrow night I'm hoping to get to the group at Ely (promiscuous with the knit, moi??)...

File under Miscellaneous...

As a taxonomer (and intermittent tagger of blogs), I'm a natural enemy of "miscellaneous". But some random things ...

First, the picture - the Clock Tower and buses (one bendy, one not) in Parliament Square on December 10. Christmas connection: you can just see the star on the top of the Parliamentary Christmas Tree between the two buses...

Next up, Neil Gaiman's lovely Christmas memoir from today's Independent. The only thing which would have improved it would be having an accompanying audio file of the man himself reading it...

Found that just after hearing my personal dream-team of Bill Paterson and Richard Thompson reviewing the papers on Broadcasting House (after a brief discussion about Jimmy Shand) and questioning the merits of a university education or home-ownership - they didn't actually come out and say 'and another thing, capitalism is a bit rubbish' but you felt it was only a matter of time... If they'd had Mark Steel as the third man, that would have made the trifecta but might have reconfigured the universe as we know it. However, they were on with Kirstie Allsopp, who I gather is Something off those housing-ladder programmes on the Telly. She is (sigh) going to be doing some series about making things by hand and has 'rediscovered craft'. Another one, eh. The only "helpful tip" given (NOT by Ms Allsopp, to be fair) was that you teach left-handers to knit by sitting opposite them. AARRGGGHH. (Yes, I mailed in; and was calmed down by the lovely David Tennant interview).

And the best LOLCat of the festive season so far is here....

Later, some exciting (to me) Christmas knitting news. Better go and make a shawl-pin (for reasons I'll explain later) and wrap some presents.

Macabre

Went to see the very splendid Neil Gaiman read at the LSE last night - my photos of the event are all a bit rubbish, but this was the best one...

We got a whole chapter of The Graveyard Book - Chapter 5, Danse macabre - which was an entirely appropriate chapter for Halloween. His reading and comic timing are great.

And the Q&A session afterwards was hilarious. He ran through a stack of questions on cards submitted by the audience, including on NaNoWriMo (strangely, he won't be doing it), Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand (idiots, but surely not worth this amount of coverage and outrage), McCain v. Obama (told an interesting story from a White House/Pentagon insider about the chaos in McCain's senatorial office), writing a musical with Mitch Benn and the quality of haircuts in China.

The audience was also quite exciting - many people dressed up as ghouls and so on - and also the entire cast of Dr Horrible... Evidently more people dressed up than he was expecting - he commented twice on this...

I originally intended to stand in line for as long as necessary to get a book signed, but then did some quick calculations of the number of people in the room/the general level of fanaticism/the speed he'd be able to sign at/the time of the last train home; and picked up one of the copies he'd thoughtfully pre-signed... I'd only have said something idiotic if I'd actually met him, anyway!

Edited to add: Mr G has blogged about the evening. It seems he felt he was grumpy. I didn't think either someone's mobile phone going off or someone taking huge numbers of noisy photos was grounds for grumpiness; I should probably have commended his restraint, frankly...

Don't miss this...

Neil Gaiman is reading his new book, The Graveyard Book, online via a series of videos; he's currently travelling the US reading one chapter a night. (And signing God-knows-how-many books with a broken middle finger on his writing hand. Ow...).

The main site is here:
http://www.mousecircus.com/videotour.aspx
There's also a mirror site here:
I've used a mixture of both - but apparently the first site has increased its capacity to cope with the numbers; I'm thoroughly enjoying the book, and the reading.

Also; I'm going to the reading/signing at the LSE on October 31 - anyone else interested? They still had tickets last Sunday...

2008

I wasn't going to do a retrospective on 2007, although there were some very good things in there - or a 'new year's resolution' thing for 2008, because I keep my resolutions to myself, in general...

But then I saw this over at Neil Gaiman's blog, and yet again he says it perfectly... Hope all that comes true for everyone reading in the year to come!

Week 1

Well, I did the first week, I survived and I enjoyed it. Even the commute, mostly. The fifteen minutes on the Victoria Line in the morning, not so much, but I got a seat on the train every day, and the people I sat next to were either nice and smiley, or just asleep... Here's a picture of a thing I found at the end of the road by work on the way to the Tube...*



Saw Yvonne and Sue at Libertys on Thursday night - Yvonne knitting the most gorgeous scarf of many colours, Sue ploughing round an endless frill... I took the Unbloggable Project which is, thanks to the increased train-knitting time, Off the Needles.

Otherwise the knitting's not been quite as successful! Took the second Serpentine Mitt off the needle, to discover




Not so much a ta-da!! moment as a ta-doh!! moment... Actually, this photo also makes one look much longer than the other, which isn't the case - but I have, indeed, knitted two left mitts by the simple expedient of following the instructions re: the gusset but also working the pattern over the opposite two needles, which has the result of creating two identical mitts (apart from the centre cable which I thoughfully twisted in the opposite direction for the second mitt)... Thankfully a) the yarn will make 4 mitts b) I already had a taker for a second pair... So all was not lost...


Still plugging away on the Tahoe cardigan - halfway up the second front, at which point I'll do all the finishing and give it a try-on with one sleeve...


I also forgot to blog my personal trifecta in charity-shop books, found in the British Heart Foundation in King's Lynn last Saturday - total cost £6.

From the left, a book of stories I nearly bought at full price the week before, as I'm currently enjoying Mr Gaiman's Fragile Things collection (I'm not normally a fan of short stories but these are great; more a series of little atmospheres...); a knitting book with actual content as well as the 1980s interpretations of the sweaters); and a cookbook which is both retro and practical. It's relatively unfaffy Delia (she does, for instance, assume her readers know how to make pastry), and very 70s in its nutritional values (I can't imagine today's Delia suggesting a recipe comprising six eggs and 12oz cheese to feed three people); it is, however, a great combination of the basic, the quick and the traditional, and I suspect it'll be used and re-used in the same way as my extremely battered copy of Fay Maschler's Eating In, also a collection of Evening Standard cookery columns but from the 1980s.

*Generally things found on the way home from work in the old job were interesting leaves, or completely bizarre pieces of litter...