| bios |
[11th November 2009|01:09 pm] |
I realize at some point I'm gonna have to write my damned dance bio (or two, one breif and one more indepthy/resume-ish for those who care) ...and get it translated.
I'm looking over Bhuz and much of the advice is very contradictory. I'w looking at dancer pages and taking it all in.
Wanna make sure I check yours out? Comment with your url please. |
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| A Written Statement |
[11th November 2009|03:19 am] |
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http://randomreality.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2009/11/10/4377409.html I really need to get hold of a proper written statement so that I can make sure the format and language is more realistic, rather than sounding like one of my statements to a coroners court. What this hopefully shows is that the story is not going to be all first person/interviews.
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Personal report of Cpt. P. Almert, Bureau des Impôts 12th March 2011.
On the date in question I was commanding an armed fire-team at Jersey Airport. Our duties for that day were to provide a rapid response to any situation that required a less than lethal/lethal response.
I was initially informed of the incident by officer Tregourny, he had called for general assistance over the radio to the arrivals terminal. As we were nearby I instructed my team that we would provide this assistance.
On arrival to the scene I saw that a number of passengers were bleeding, in the confusion and panic of the public it took me approximately four minutes to reach officer Tregourny. He then indicated two people who seemed to be the cause of the disturbance.
The adult male had gained possession of an asp and was using this to attack member of the public, I later learned that this asp was issued to officer Hawes (deceased).
The adult female was attempting to scratch anyone who approached her, as I watched she removed a shoe and brandished it as a weapon.
At this time I did not see the female child.
As the scene was unsecured with large numbers of the public still present it was my decision to utilise less than lethal options.
Officers Ferruge and Halls advanced upon the two adults and with assistance from the rest of the fire-team subdued the two assailants with incapacitant spray and non-lethal blows and control techniques.
It was then I received a call from our control desk that another attack was happening in the female toilets of the arrival terminal.
As the rest of my team were still dealing with the two adults I made the decision to attend the scene on my own in order to secure the safety of the public. I knew that as soon as the rest of my team were free to assist they would make their way to my location.
I approached the female toilets with my issued incapacitant spray in my hand. From within I could hear the sound of a female screaming.
I entered the toilet and made my way to the end stall. It was there I found the female child biting into an adult female’s stomach. My instant assessment was that the wound that the child had caused was immediately life-threatening.
I shouted a warning at the child and she turned to look at me. Her mouth was covered with blood and in her hands she held viscera of the adult female.
As I prepared to use the incapacitant spray the female child leapt at me and knocked me aside, my spray was also dislodged from my hand.
I was knocked to the ground and the female child turned to attack me again. I was aware that this child had the chance of inflicting serious or life-threatening injuries to me. I was also aware that the attacked female needed immediate medical attention.
I then discharged my pistol into the female child three times, all three rounds striking the child in the chest.
I believe that the female child died immediately from these wounds.
I then radioed my team for assistance and called for immediate, urgent medical assistance for the attacked female.
I later learned that the attacked female died from complications of surgery. |
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| Brain ramblings |
[11th November 2009|10:58 am] |
I'm getting the batches of lessons ready for the third trimester of classes.
Mostly we'll be doing what we did last year:
1st learns a little about animals. 2nd grade plays with colors. 3rd grade runs around messureing things and guessing how many coins are in various bagies (numbers). I've updated those and written the Japanese flow sheets for homeroom teachers that go with them. Those have all been checked for errors and clarity.
Now I am tackling 4th, 5th, and 6th. I'm thinking about creating two lessons per grade for those occasions just to mix things up.
I've updated my beloved 5th grade Egypt lesson (watch Tito with Tatib, What do you know about Egypt? learn greetings in Arabic, review the ABC's via heiroglyphics, write your name in hiragana, romanji, and then heiroglyphs) and I do have an existing follow-up lesson to that about languages of the word/lowercase letters/designing your own alphabet.
The 4th grade lesosn I have is simple (rooms in a house, coloring things in, designing your own dream house) and the 6th grade is flags and flag symbols of the world (colors, countries, meanings of symbols) and deisgning your own flag.
Now I'm starting to kick around a times of day schedule lesson plan. I think this could be for eitehr 4th or 6th depending on complexity.
Random ideas:
start with the usual "what time to you wake up/go to sleep" on weekdays and then weekends.
What does Kathryn do on her weekends? Kids get a worksheet of a schedule and ask "what to you do at 6?" and so on. I explain and (act out) in English and students write, in Japanese, what they think this means. When the schedule if full we ask them what I do at , say, 7pm. Students raise their hands, give their answers and we tell them yes, no, or clarify....can be done in groups with each group guessing what it means and answering on a little white board and holding it up...
Who am I? Quiz Kathryn, homeroom teachers, support staf, and some other teachers (principal) before class. Present (and act out) what a myster teacher does after school/ on a given day and give the students three options for each: (A. Kathryn, B. Homeroom teacher C. Principal). Groups pick, answers revealed, points given, schedule repeated with additional comments and questions. CAN BE DONE with famous characters (Jack Sparrow, Doraemon, dracula) and so on...would need help on Japanese charcter schedules.
Students design a schedule for a dream day off and illsutrate with pictures. Students who want to present their schedule can do so with the help of me making gestures and students guessing what is being done...
Four 4th graders i'd be more likely to use cartoon characters, for 6th graders it'd be adult humiliation FTW.
thinking on page...thinking... |
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| ARSE |
[10th November 2009|10:05 pm] |
Why does everything clash (e.g. have an empty February but now 3 invites for the 20th March)???
Just realised (thankfully before booking) that April JoY clashes with a conference in Washington I might be going to. Submission deadline for conference is 1st of Dec (and my boss will no doubt leave it till then to make final decision) so I'll have to wait until then to know whether I can book JoY or not. |
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| omg omg! oops! |
[10th November 2009|03:23 pm] |
There's a CSI community, did you know?
First off, I'd like to apologize for this announcement coming later than expected. But I'm finally here, ready to announce who won the first weekly contest, which was to ask a question you'd like to have answered by the CSI writing team!
Also, I'd like to mention that you guys made it SO HARD to pick just one as the winner! You all had awesome questions!
The winner of the first weekly contest is...
[info]replyhazy!!!!
Their question was: "Comparing what I read in the news about our local crime scene lab techs with what's shown on CSI, it seems like there is one area that's nowhere near reality on your show: workload. Have you ever thought about adding large backlogs and turnaround times to your plots in order to reflect how overworked many real life CSIs are?"
Congratulations, [info]replyhazy!!
You will be contacted via private message on LJ with further instructions as to how to claim your prize!
Thank you everyone for participating in the first weekly contest and I hope you continue to enter into the future weekly contests!
Well, uh, that's great, except, uh..
The prize is a video game for a platform I don't own. oops! :-D
Well, it would make a good present for somebody, I'm sure. I was just really intrigued by the idea of what one question I would ask the CSI writers. |
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| half a lifetime? |
[10th November 2009|05:49 pm] |
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http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/11/half-lifetime.html posted by Neil
The editor at CBS Sunday Morning asked if I had any photos of my son Mike back at the period when I first had the idea for The Graveyard Book - late 1985. I looked. We really didn't have any. I wandered next door and asked Mary (his mum, my former wife and for these last five years my friend and next-door neighbour) if she had any photos from back then. "No," she said. Then, "Do you mean those transparencies? I have them in an envelope somewhere." She vanished and came back with a large manila envelope from a long time ago. "Here."
Half a lifetime ago -- literally -- I was nearly 25, and working for magazines. Henry Fikret, who photographed a lot of the interviews I did, volunteered to take some photos of me and my family, and he did.A week later the envelope arrived, and I realised that everything he shot was on colour transparencies -- like huge slides -- and I was never sure what do with them, other than being fairly sure I couldn't take them down to Boots the Chemist and have prints knocked out. So they stayed in their envelope, and they kept their secrets, and were forgotten.
Yesterday I had the transparencies scanned, and finally got to see lots of pictures I had never actually seen before of Holly as a baby, Mike at the time that I would have watched him riding his tricycle around the graveyard, and me... at exactly half my age: A young journalist who had sold a very small handful of short stories and two non-fiction books, with dreams of writing fiction and comics. At the time I was dressing in grey, but was getting tired of the way that you would buy something grey and take it home and discover that it was a blueish grey or a brownish grey, and wondering if I'd have the same problem if I just started to dress in black.
And half a lifetime on, it seemed like it might be good to put one up here. I checked, and Mary didn't mind. What odd clothes we wore back then. What big glasses. And look, my hair is practically normal.
So long ago, and it went like the blink of an eye.
...
Birthday wishes are flooding in from around the globe. I wish I could reply to everyone personally, but it would take the next 365 days... so thank you. Thank you all.
... In January I will be part of a free concert for all ages on January 16, 2010, at 7pm, in the World Financial Center Winter Garden, New York. I'll be the narrator for the performance of Peter and the Wolf, performed by the http://www.knickerbocker-orchestra.org (whose website you should visit to get details).
Alan Moore is leaping aboard the Underground magazine bandwagon. Following the success of IT and OZ, Alan's Dodgem Logic is coming out. There's a great interview with Alan at http://www.mustardweb.org/dodgemlogic/
(And enormous congratulations to Alan, who is now a grandfather, and to Leah and John, who are now parents, and Edward Alec Moore-Reppion, who is now, um, born. A Scorpio, like his grandfather and his whatever-exactly-I am, sort of honorary great-uncle or something. Not that we Scorpios believe in that sort of thing, of course.)
Again, thank you all for the birthday wishes... |
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| Jersey |
[10th November 2009|09:38 am] |
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http://randomreality.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2009/11/10/4376741.html Once more I find that I'll be checking some research when I come round to editing this. Right now I'm struggling with SAD. Where I was on schedule two days ago I'm now dropping behind because I'm self-medicating on World of Warcraft which is the only thing that'll get me out of bed at the moment. Maybe I'll get a chunk done later today.
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I got to Gatwick airport for our flight to Jersey with plenty of time, despite my luggage (one carry on and one booked suitcase, plus several pockets full of gadgets) weighing a ton. Judith was waiting for me through security sipping an over priced coffee.
Our flight was due to leave on time so we had time for a breakfast, something light for me while Judith tucked into a plate piled with bacon, sausage and eggs. With more coffee.
The was a joke once upon a time that the safest flight would have an autopilot, a dog and a pilot on the flight deck. The autopilot would fly the plane, the pilot would feed the dog and the dog would bite anyone who tried to turn the autopilot off. It was no longer a joke. Too many planes had crashed when one of the pilots had started showing symptoms of CLBD-7, either the hallucinations or the paranoia. So the new policy for all airlines was three pilots and one autopilot. The autopilot would fly the plane and it would require codes from at least two of the three humans in order to be turned off.
Crashes were now at an all time low.
The few times I’d flown were in the big commercial jetliners, so the little propellor plane that would fly us out to Jersey made me a little nervous, there is something strange about sitting in your seat at the back of the plane, yet being able to see all the way down to the door of the flight deck.
I think that Judith noticed my nervousness and she just grinned and me and told me that we’d no doubt be flying in smaller, and far more rickety planes than this. All I could think of was the comedy films where the hero was flown over mountainous terrain in a plane held together with bailing wire and flown by a crazed lunatic. It didn’t make me feel any better.
The flight was through beautiful weather, looking down and the ground, the cars, the towns, the fields, it all seemed so peaceful - as if there were nothing wrong with the world.
We soon landed at Jersey after Judith took advantage of the duty free to buy a huge bottle of vodka.
The sun was shining and the skies were blue as we cleared customs, it was a scene spoilt by the remnants of the machine gun outposts pointing at the doors of the airport. It was the reason for those that I was here to talk to Ben Slade, who was a Jersey Senator during the early years of the outbreak.
We caught a taxi to his townhouse at St. Heliers.
“We were worried”, he told me after pleasantries were made and tea was served, “We had heard reports of an unusual disease, the same stories we all heard, of people suddenly going crazy, of being overcome with mental problems, of violence and terror. You have got to remember that no-one knew what was happening in those days. We didn’t know that the incubation period was so long. After all we’d just got over the second wave of Swine ‘flu, isolation had worked for us there.”
He was right, in the second wave of Swine ‘flu, Jersey had implemented strict quarantine policies - thermal imaging at airports and docks, reduced internal travel, mandatory health checks for people in certain professions. This had limited the spread of disease in Jersey to minimal levels.
“We thought that we could do the same with this new disease. After all, we’d barely wound down the Swine ‘flu systems so it would be a minimal matter to bring them back into effect. Of course, then we’d had the airport attack.”
“I read the reports after the attack, they said that we were just unlucky, that a family with a predisposition to the disease had all manifested symptoms on the same flight from Russia. I can only imagine what it must have been like, three people running through the terminals, attacking people, biting them. You may ask why our security didn’t shoot them, but can you imagine shooting an eight year old girl just because she is biting people?”
“We weren’t sure that it was the disease at first, but the newspapers got a hold of the story and it was on the front page for several days. That caused panic and the public demanded that we do something. So we got more strict. Tests on people before they could leave the airport. Of course that took time, especially because we didn’t know what we were looking for.”
I interrupted him, “What happened to the people who were bitten?”
“Oh, they were sent to a quarantine camp. Well, the Jersey people were, those bitten who came from other countries were denied entry and sent back to where they had come from. Possibly not a wise idea in retrospect but the officials at the airport were scared, they acted without understanding what had just happened. I think they had seen too many zombie movies”.
“More and more people were being turned away, mostly those with high body temperatures - we didn’t know that this way of screening was useless, and with the frenzy whipped up by the papers about these ‘zombies’, we were forced to do something”.
“And so we closed the ports and the airports to non-commercial traffic.”
“No private citizen would be allowed onto the island, only those with a valid commercial reason, and they would largely be restricted to the ports and terminals. No-one would be allowed to come onto the island to stay. We had been lucky after all, the only cases of CLBD-7 that we had were from those bitten at the airport. There were no cases of infection within Jersey proper”.
“But there were attempts to enter the island, after all, we were famously ‘infection free’, us and Madagascar at least. So people fleeing from France and the UK tried to breach our borders. They would sneak aboard the mail planes, or aboard the container ships brining us supplies. After one or two near misses where someone managed to breach the cordon we put up the machine gun posts.”
“Understand that we didn’t want to do that, we didn’t want to end up shooting people who were just trying to be safe, but you have to remember that we were all scared in those days, we thought that Clubbed was going to end the world, that we’d all be dead, or worse, within ten years. We wanted to to be safe long enough to give the scientists a chance to find a cure.”
“But that day never came. Instead, despite our paranoia, we started to get cases of infection within our borders. We now know that this is because the incubation period was so long, that the infected were already living here before the first symptoms started showing up on the world stage, but that we’d been lucky that in our cases the incubation was very long. I suppose it’s just because we have less people here to be infected.”
“I still remember when the WHO declared Jersey as ‘infected’, all our precautions had been for nothing, the people shot while running for the fences were killed for nothing. The quarantine camps were a waste of time and the endless hours that I and my fellow senators spent trying to protect the people of this island was for nothing”.
I asked him why he stepped down from being a senator.
“You might think that it’s because I was ashamed of what I’d done, the people who we’d killed in an attempt to save ourselves. But it wasn’t, it was much simpler than that - my wife was showing signs of infection and I didn’t want her to go through it on her own, with me away from home for long hours at the States building. So I shucked my duty to the island for the duty of caring for my wife”. |
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| Very good! Now, put the boy down! |
[10th November 2009|03:15 pm] |
I had a good teacher experience today. The school I visited today is one of the two I can walk to from my home. On walking days I get to relax a bit because I don’t have to take the train to city hall first. For once I wouldn’t be getting a ride from the school either and had been requested to find my own way back to city hall. Leisurely walk to the station, Indian curry for lunch, and a train to city hall! Yay! Even time for coffee. This morning Mr. West called and said my support staff worker would be out sick, so I would be working with the homeroom teachers. He also said this meant no pre-class hou-long meeting with the support staff so I could relax and chill for an extra 50 minutes at home. The lesson plans I’ve drafted are for three teachers…although making solo lesson plans would be easier for me, the support staff and homeroom teachers wouldn’t learn from participating if I rolled that way. I also wouldn’t be able to asses their skills and weaknesses if it was all me all the time.When my support staff is out or the schools bring me in on a day when they are not there, the homeroom teachers must play a larger role. My problems and triumphs this week and last were at schools where I don’t present with the support staff. I was slated to teach 4th graders one of my original lessons about seasons ( well: seasons, holidays, months, birthdays and images). It’s pretty easy and the kids enjoy it because it’s fairly easy for them to catch onto how to respond and participate. ( Gestures! )
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| Be A Hero |
[9th November 2009|09:30 pm] |
Requests aren't done, they will be popping up as we go, but honestly I do not need annnyymooreee! I was looking at the Wonder Women that I drew last year and started drawing her again, because she's pretty fun to draw, and surly Wonder Woman here came out. Don't settle for being a tits and tits heroine ladies, be yourself! Poor Nibbles.
Hey Montreal! I'm going to be at Expozine this weekend! You should come.
Store! |
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| For those who read this blog for the articles |
[9th November 2009|06:31 pm] |
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http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/11/for-those-who-read-this-blog-for.html posted by Neil
 (Serena Altschul and some author in July, sitting on the trampoline after two days of interviews. None of which, oddly enough, were done on the trampoline.)
Mr. Neil,
I DVR'd yesterday's installment of Sunday Morning and after zipping through it back and forth multiple times cannot seem to find you, though the description indicated the correct episode. Was it bumped to next week? Have you been sucked into an alternate Neil-less universe?
A concerned reader,
Mary
I'm afraid it was bumped by the Fort Hood Massacre.
I checked: The profile CBS did of me is apparently still going out, probably some time in December, although no-one seems certain when. I was told that we could help ensure that it is broadcast (and possibly make it come out sooner than December) if CBS think people would actually like to see it. Which means that if you do want to see it, you can help the process along if you write or email CBS and (politely) tell them so:
ADDRESS:
CBS News Sunday Morning
Box O (for Osgood)
524 West 57th St.
New York, NY 10019
E-MAIL: sundays@cbsnews.com
...
My friend Steve Brust (a fine and brilliant novelist) wrote to Miss Manners about his financial issues, and what having a Donate button on a website means. She replied to him here. There's a fascinating conversation going on about it at his website that I initially missed because I was in China... Most people disagree with Miss Manners. Even I disagree with Miss Manners, and I don't have a Donate button, or use the Amazon links to generate revenue, or have advertising or anything. (That's because Harper Collins set up this website, and they pay for our bandwidth and such. If they stopped, I'd have to think about ways to make it pay for itself.) ...
Stephen King's UNDER THE DOME was one of my favourite books of the year so far. (R. Crumb's retelling of the Book of Genesis is my very favourite book of the year.) So I was pleased to be sent this link to a really wonderful Stephen King poem:
(It's published by Playboy, which means that for some of you the site may be blocked.)
(Needless to say, I only read the New Yorker for the articles.) ...
Dear Neil Gaiman, I ask for half-a-moment of your time (I would not presume to ask for more). This Spring 2010 I am teaching a Topics in Literature class on YOU at Winona State University (Eng 225: Neil Gaiman). Easy enough to select representative novel (American Gods), short stories (Fragile Things), children and YA (Graveyard Book), but here's the rub: I will likely only assign one Sandman graphic novel to students. I have been debating which is most representative, most worthy of inclusion, most amenable to class discussion and student scholarship. Then I thought I'd ask you. I know you suggest above that, for questions of this sort, we consider you a dead author, but I know you're not. When I came to a similar impasse about which of Ursula Le Guin's works to include in another class, she actually replied and offered her input. I extend the same offer to you: which of the Sandman volumes would you like to see on the syllabus?
Thank you for your time,
Nicholas Ozment, English Instructor
WSU
It's a hard one. I think if I were teaching I'd either go for Season of Mists or Fables and Reflections, because both of them have stuff to teach -- those nice chewy bits that people can like or dislike, argue with or discuss. I know a lot of teachers like to teach Dream Country because a) Midsummer Night's Dream won awards, and b) it's short and c) it has a script in the back. Your call. And good luck.
...
I mentioned recently that there were some beautiful new Polish and Russian book covers for my books that I'd seen at signings, which got me thinking. The International Cover gallery on this website is incredibly out of date.
It's at http://www.neilgaiman.com/p/Neil's_Work/International_Covers.
And though I get a lot of foreign editions in, and will at some point head down to the basement and rummage around and scan some (this week's mail brought the two-volume Japanese edition of Anansi Boys, on the cover of which Fat Charlie is not only Very White, but also Very Thin, and the complex Chinese - ie. Taiwan and Hong Kong - edition of The Graveyard Book) I thought that blog readers, being, as you are, all over the world, might be a better resource for knowing where to look for foreign covers.
So if you have, and want to scan in or link to foreign covers we do not have posted, or are a foreign publisher and would like your books up, there is now a submission page: http://www.neilgaiman.com/extras/covers/ which lets you upload them to the webgoblin, who will put them in the gallery (and on the pages for the books in question). And perhaps we should have them arranged by country as well -- some countries, like the French and the Russians and the Poles, have had so many different covers over the years. (Also, Absolute Death was published this week. It is amazingly beautiful. Yes, I think they overpriced it too and no, pricing decisions at DC Comics are nothing to do with me. And the audio book of Good Omens will be released tomorrow. It's read by Martin Jarvis. People have asked why it is not read by me, and I have to explain that it is because if I read it I would just be doing my Martin Jarvis reading the William storiess impression, so better by far to have the real thing.)
Was your basement finished when you purchased your home or did you have it finished for your basement library? If you finished it yourself, how difficult was it? Also, I thought I saw a dehumidifier in one of the Photosynth pictures. Do you need one because of the books?
I'm asking because we have a full unfinished basement that we would like to have finished. We are running out of room for our books also. I don't think we don't have as many as you do though. :)
Any other suggestions for such a project would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
C.
No, when we got here the basement had a clay floor that puddled when it rained. We hired some nice builders and spent a lot of money finishing it, putting in drainage tiles, underfloor heating and all. There's a dehumidifier there in the summer and a humidifier in the winter, because after the first few years I noticed that binding glue and leather book covers were both cracking and flaking. There's now the equivalent of a large house in basement rooms beneath this house, filled with books and CDs and suchlike stuff.
And finally, a few photos from the China trip, taken by Ian Ford (or in one case, on his camera). Ian's a travel guide who now lives in China who helped organise my travels, and came along with me for part of the journey.
 Amanda and I in the silk clothes that my publisher had given us as a thank you for coming, and because they are terrific.
 Amanda, Ian Ford (in the pale top, also a gift from my publishers) and.. my publishers, SF World -- who will be publishing the mainland Chinese edition of The Graveyard Book very soon, and are very excited.
I'm holding the Galaxy Award for this year, given to the foreign author most popular with Chinese reader-voters. This was my second year of winning it, so I have retired from the competition and said that they have to find a new favourite foreign author now.
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