call me a scrooge but i have a problem with "goodie bags". the sentiment is there and i appreciate that; you go to a birthday party, bring a gift, have fun, eat cake, play with friends and your child leaves with a party favor.
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Blog: THE ACME SHARING COMPANY (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: acme holiday, global warming, for all ages, birthday project, Add a tag

Blog: THE ACME SHARING COMPANY (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: books, for all ages, cleaning out, birthday project, school project, teaching gratitude, poverty, kindness toward others, Add a tag
well, this week marks the national launch of my other baby, Milk + Bookies. i started this non profit in 2004 and it is just now getting off the ground (good things come to those who wait). if you want a new idea for a birthday party or if you know some teens who are looking for a community service project, this is the place to visit: www.milkandbookies.org

Blog: THE ACME SHARING COMPANY (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: kindness toward others, books, for all ages, at home project, birthday project, food drive, teaching gratitude, poverty, Add a tag
making family time for EXTRAS is a constant uphill battle, i often feel like Sisyphus. but when you see the effects of "extras" like giving, it seems incredibly worthwhile; the kids are engaged, they feel useful and they carry with them a new confidence.

Blog: THE ACME SHARING COMPANY (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: for all ages, at home project, birthday project, school project, teaching gratitude, kindness toward others, Add a tag
today my son celebrated his birthday at school. they have an amazing tradition of making each child a BIRTHDAY APPRECIATION CIRCLE. i bet you could guess that it's where the class sits around while each student says something about the birthday boy (or girl) that they appreciate. but aside from it's obvious name, this was better than any play set from toys r us and something i hope every school does.

Blog: THE ACME SHARING COMPANY (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: for all ages, at home project, birthday project, teaching gratitude, kindness toward others, shopping for a cause, books, global warming, animals, Add a tag
i have come to realize that "birthday party season" is not a season, but rather a euphemism for the over-whelmed to describe what is, in fact, the entire school year.

Blog: THE ACME SHARING COMPANY (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: for all ages, at home project, craft project, birthday project, kindness toward others, Add a tag
there are so many freakin' (forgive use of word freakin') things to remind our kids to do everyday. pick up your socks, put your dishes in the sink, brush your teeth, finish your homework, don't bite your brother (they say it's just a stage, here's hoping), pack your lunch, wash your hands, eat your vegetables. not necessarily in this order.

Blog: THE ACME SHARING COMPANY (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: target age: 6 +, birthday project, teaching gratitude, Add a tag
another idea for giving to charities on the web designed for kids (see "making your mark" on a previous post).

Blog: THE ACME SHARING COMPANY (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: birthday project, target age: 4+, global warming, animals, Add a tag
so each child i know is living in abundance. when the calendar falls on their special day, yes, it's great to get them a gift, but we all know they don't NEED one. here's a real gift - show them that they can make a difference. log onto MARKMAKERS and choose the amount you'd like to spend. an automatic email will be sent to the birthday child or their parents letting them know they have a "gift card" there. that child can log on to the kid-friendly website and shop. they can choose to donate that money toward any cause they like; rainforest, animal rescue, books, food, medicine, the list goes on.

Blog: THE ACME SHARING COMPANY (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: at home project, craft project, target age: 6 +, birthday project, Add a tag
when your child wants to have a slumber party, this is the answer. yes, it will be a LATE night, and yes, they will be CRANKY in the morning, but this party is worth it. have the guests bring (in lieu of gifts) a pair of new pajamas. your child can then donate the lot to the pajama program. kids in need, living in group homes, get new jammies and books to make their bedtimes feel as cozy and safe as ours do.

Blog: Neil Gaiman (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: audio books, Beowulf, Iceland, writers' strike, silly controversies, improbable cliffs, Add a tag

The bit of this that puzzles me most is that elsewhere in the world, the idea that the writers get paid when the work is watched online is one that's been taken for granted. If I wrote a TV series for the UK, I'd get less money upfront (not much less) but I'd be well recompensed for repeats, DVDs, internet downloads and so forth. (For whatever it's worth, I get 125 times as much in royalties on a hardback novel as I'd on an equivalently priced DVD.)
At the very end of this post -- in case they break the various RSS feeds -- I'll put two video summaries of the issues. Partisan, of course.
Hi Neil,
I went to see Beowulf as soon as it came out and I liked though it didn't quite match up to Stardust which blew me away.
Anyway I thought I had found two mistakes in Beowulf.The first was the mountains of Denmark. This is something Denmark is famous for not having and is a major point for jokes by Icelanders as myself about the country which used to rule us. But then somebody pointed out on the imdb.com forums that though this does not conform to reality it does fit the poem which says:
"'......sailors now could see the land, sea-cliffs shining, steep high hills, headlands broad.' "
Oral tradition does these things to poems. The version was probably not written down by anyone who had ever seen Denmark. Somewhere there might have been versions that speak of the great flatness of Denmark but those are forever lost to us. The other point might be a little harder to explain away by the poem. Iceland is mentioned at least twice in the movie which is out of place since it was probably not inhabited at that time nor is it likely that anyone who might have known of it would have called it by this name. Was it just your love of the country that made you mention it or are there other reasons? Or will you take the high road and blame your co-author? Icelanders will probably not be offended as they do like to hear the country mentioned. Anyway, thanks for writing this journal, it is especially fun for me since you tend to mention both folklore (I am a folklorist) and libraries (I am a library and information scientist) a lot and very favorably too.
warm regards from Cork, Ireland,
Óli Gneisti Sóleyjarson
Yes, the cliffs and high hills are from the poem.
In the script the line of dialogue was,
"They sing our shame from the middle sea to the ice-lands of the north."
I'm not sure whether that's what Anthony Hopkins actually says in the film, though. (And I have no idea where the just-as-anachronistic Vinland line from the Skylding's Watch came from, either. Wasn't in any draft by Roger or me.)
Incidentally, I thought I'd mention again that the Beowulf script book has a lot of the answers to this kind of thing in it, and that none of the descriptions of it currently online seem to explain what kind of thing the book is.
I found a review (http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07320/834312-44.stm) which says,
How does a script filled with guts and gore and f-bombs become PG-13 animated fare? Witness "Beowulf: The Script Book" (HarperCollins Entertainment, $16.95), which is actually two scripts, both by graphic novelist/author Neil Gaiman and Oscar-winning screenwriter Roger Avary.
The first script is what you get when you combine the writer of "Pulp Fiction" (Avary) and the writer of "Sandman," "Stardust" and "American Gods" (Gaiman), with no rules or outside interference. The second is their draft of the final studio script.
Avary provides a Foreword and "Middleword" that describe his decades-long obsession with "Beowulf" -- a centuries-old, 3,000-line poem -- and his growing compulsion to re-create it onscreen. He eventually, wrenchingly, gives up on directing "Beowulf" in the face of Steven Bing's big bucks and director Robert Zemeckis' passion for the project. Gaiman gives the Afterword, in which he says of the introduction, "Roger Avary is much too honest about getting the script made. That's because Roger is a Holy Madman."
Gaiman and Avary first huddled in Mexico in 1997 to create the tequila-fueled first draft, in which the monster Grendel's penchant for human flesh knows no censorship. It does, however, follow the timeline of the original Old English poem.
Later, they have Zemeckis' input about taking cinematic liberties, along with his blessing to let their imaginations run wild, as his innovative Performance Capture animation process (as seen in "The Polar Express" film) knows no bounds.
The timeline and the setting is changed in the final draft -- instead of a story in two parts and in two countries, Beowulf begins and ends in King Hrothgar's court. Beowulf is awarded Hrothgar's throne rather than return home. Instead of meeting Beowulf as the strapping dragonslayer he becomes, we first meet old King Beowulf in his court ... and it's apparent you're in for a different experience than in the first script.
Just as intriguing as the script changes are those honest Avary moments. For instance, he finally finds peace with giving up his "baby" to Zemeckis when "Z." agrees to use Crispin Glover to portray the monster Grendel. The director had a contentious relationship with the eccentric actor during "Back to the Future 2," which resulted in Glover suing Zemeckis when the director inserted the actor's image into scenes. "To this day, the verdict protects actors from having their likeness used without their blessing," Avary writes.
Still, Glover got the job, and Zemeckis used his newfangled technology to make him into a monster onscreen, which may have been payback enough.
The book of "Beowulf" scripts also contains artist Stephen Norrington's renderings that were commissioned by Avary when he believed he would be directing his first version, further fueling the question asked by presenting two visions back-to-back: "What if ...?"
(The mention in the song, though, is completely my fault. Sorry.)
Hi Neil, I'm a Swedish fan who was hoping to buy some your books from Audible.com, but apparently Audible doesn't sell them to Swedish people. Can you tell me why this is? As there is no Swedish or even European reseller of your books in audio form, this mean nobody gets my money and I'm stuck listening to Orson Scott Card.
There are lots of rights issues around the world that mean that companies don't always sell everything everywhere. On the audio books, you can always buy the CDs and rip them yourself. And there are even some audio books that come with MP3 CDs so you don't have to rip them, just drag them to your MP3 player. (I just checked and Amazon is curently discounting the ANANSI BOYS MP3 CDs, so it's the cheapest way of buying the Anansi Boys audio.)
Neil, I was wondering what you thought about Philip Pullman's books and and the controversy in the united states about the new movie based on his first book.
Jessica
I like Philip Pullman very much, I like his books ditto, and I think the controversy is stupid. Does that help?
...
And here are the videos:
and here's another,

Blog: educating alice (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Iceland, Add a tag
Spoiler.
If you are planning to go to Iceland ever and want to be surprised don’t look any further.
Or if you find vacation photos boring, please go away too. I won’t be offended.
So, for the rest of you, here’s what happened. I decided, out of the blue, to go last month, and booked a tour that circumnavigated the island. Iceland is way closer to New York than I realized — takes about the same amount of time as the Limoliner to Boston or a flight to Seattle. And the time difference for me right now is four hours. The place is gorgeous, surpassing all I’d heard about it, with tons of great stuff to do. We stayed in very nice hotels and ate quite well (something I had not expected knowing that so much is imported). It was cold which I liked, expensive which I didn’t, but overall it was a grand vacation I highly recommend.
During my time in Iceland I traveled through lava fields of different kinds, walked along remarkable beaches of black sand, passed craters, dormant and dead volcanoes, peered into pseudo craters, wandered up and down sulfur slopes, observed bubbling mud pools, jumped when geysers blew, saw puffins and tons of other birds (but not close enough for me to have bothered with photographs), had a snowball fight on a glacier, went on a whale watch where some people saw a minske whale, rode an adorable horse, went on a magical boat ride in a iceberg filled lagoon, saw countless waterfalls, soaked in the blue lagoon, and did a whole lot more. I’m not much of a photographer, but here are some I did take:
Lava fields with geothermal steam in the distance.
Near where the North American and Eurasian plates meet.
Behind Seiljalandsfoss
A rainbow at Skogafoss
One of many boiling sulfur mud pools at Namaskard.
The view from my hotel window of Lake Myvatn.
At a small village where only one nonogenarian still lives.
His church
Icelandic cows (from which the tasty skyr is made) in front of the enormous Vatnajokull glacier.
On the glacier.
On a boat on the Jökulsárlón glacial lagoon
On an Icelandic horse.
An all around grand and fantastic vacation (when I read and listened to adult books only for a change!).

Blog: educating alice (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Children's Literature, Iceland, Add a tag
Akureyri, in northwestern Iceland, is the birthplace of the Reverend Jón Sveinsson (Nonni), “..one of Iceland’s most famous and best-loved children’s authors.” according to my Lonely Planet guide. (Here’s a 1936 Time Magazine piece about him.) I visited the Nonnahus, his childhood home. It was fun peeking into the recreated (I’m assuming) rooms, but most of all I was fascinated by the evidently worldwide appreciation of the man’s work as I was completely unfamiliar with it or him. Several rooms were filled with translated books and photos of Nonni all over the world. Of particular interest to me was that he was especially admired in Japan, visiting there in 1937, of all times! I asked the young woman at the museum if she’d read his books and she said she had only after beginning to work at the museum as they were more for boys. They looked, I must say, pretty old-fashioned. I passed on buying the English edition as it was rather spartan in look and I couldn’t see ever reading it (and everything in Iceland was just too pricey to a whole lot of impulse shopping anyway). The stories were filmed in 1988 and here is a video that gives you a taste of this and some of what I saw in Iceland (as I recognize many of the settings).

Blog: educating alice (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Iceland, Add a tag
from Newbery, Harry, New York, and this blog.
You see, I’m off to Iceland to see glaciers, geysers, waterfalls, hot springs, puffins, little horses, and volcanoes.
Great post! We've done a few different things at parties in the past: we've given a homemade mix CD (you can see my post about it here: http://remarkablydomestic.com/2010/03/26/signature-baby-gift/ ) and one year, in lieu of gifts, we had everyone bring a wrapped book, and then everyone took a wrapped book (obviously not your own!) at the end of the party. That took care of the no gifts thing AND the party favor in one fell swoop!
Thanks for the link, it looks great.