Neil Gaiman!

I got to meet Neil Gaiman on Friday! Tom had said he would probably be sick of signing things cause that's what he's been doing all week, but I was going to bring a copy of Sandman anyway, and then I woke up late and forgot, in that way where you leave the house and think "I know I've forgot something, what is it?" and you realize it's your train ticket and go back and find the ticket, and leave the house again and it's only when you've gotten on the train that you realize that you also forgot the book. Which I guess is better than remembering that you forgot the book, and going back for it, and getting on the train without a ticket and getting kicked off the train for forgetting said ticket, and being late because you have to bike all the way there.

Anyway, even though I didn't get anything signed, I thought it was cool that he hung out and had lunch with us. Not that I managed to say anything intelligent. ("Hey, our English-to-Arabic machine translator whooped the competition in the recent NIST benchmarks. You know, in case you wanted to translate your stuff into Arabic. Isn't this sushi yummy?") We commiserated about the hardships of blogging on the road and generally had a good time. Sadly, it seems that Blogger has eaten some of his posts lately. :(

He spent a lot of time telling us about his new book. I kept hearing the title as Nancy Boys, and I thought that was a pretty funny thing to call a book. Which was maybe the point, on account of it was supposed to be a funny book and all. I figured I'd pick it up on Amazon, but didn't find anything with that title. Later that weekend I went to the bookstore and saw it displayed prominently on the bestseller shelf: Anansi Boys. I picked up a copy and it was a good read.

On Friday night I saw Serenity. I'm not going to say anything about it because Andrew hasn't seen it yet. I'll go see it again this weekend.