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My daughter Holly's boyfriend Alex is in from the UK, and he came here rather than she went there because he wanted to see snow. Which we normally have in this part of the world in abundance at this time of year (in fact you're normally hard-pushed to see anything else), but this year we've have record high temperatures and record no snows. But finally, as of last night, the world has delivered, and I woke this morning to the sound of a snow plough scraping on the drive, and everything is white and wonderful. Alex is excited and is planning to throw snowballs around, make snowmen, all that.

Several people wrote to me suggesting that I mention here that grapefruit juice can interact with medication. It can -- more details at http://www.healthcentral.com/peoplespharmacy/pp_guides/PDF/gfruit02.pdf

A little bit more science fiction becomes fact as anti-cancer eggs are produced. While black diamonds coming from space isn't just SF, it's 1960s DC Comics style SF ("He was just holding that black diamond and then he turned into... into that!")

I just got an email from Rain Taxi (http://www.raintaxi.com/) who are doing their annual fundraising auction -- lots of signed books and rare books...
http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQsassZraintaxi ; while over at SFsite -- http://www.sfsite.com/home.htm -- they're doing their Readers' Choice Awards for book of the year (first won by Neverwhere in 1997, I just realised, looking at http://www.sfsite.com/yearsbest01.htm).

Over the years I've mentioned here how much I love Tom Phillips' remarkable book A Humument, and I've even mentioned that it has a website. But now the website has the entire book up, available to be read or looked at on line, a page at a time. It's a book I buy in order to give away. It makes me oddly happy. I recommend it.

(Edit to add -- there may be a problem with the files. If there is, they're also up at Tom Phillips' own site, click on the file size beneath each page to show the full-size page -- http://www.tomphillips.co.uk/humument/0/001010/index.html)


Today I'm doing the lettering draft of Eternals 7 (which makes this the first seven issue long six issue mini-series in history), finishing a four page comic about John Romita, and finishing copyediting Interworld (a book that Michael Reaves and I wrote in 1998, because it was easier to write the story as a book than get Hollywood people to understand the treatment, which we finally decided it was time to allow out into the world) and also doing the galleys of the UK Fragile Things.... and I probably won't get a chance to play in the snow.

Still deadlining. Have lost a bunch of weight now, hurrah. I've now got to that place where I'm comfortable with just not eating as much, while eating more veg, using grapefruit as a snack food, drinking more water, all that. Just trying to make up for a year spent eating on the road, really. (There are four tubs of jeans in my closet, each a different waist size. I'd reached the tub at the far end, and they were getting tight. Am now at the next one down from there. And one more size to go before I'm back at my proper BMI wossname. As I learned a couple of years ago, if I get to the jeans in the thinnest tub at the end, people point out that I'm looking gaunt. And this is probably the last post about weight because a) it's boring and b) if you mention losing weight in a blog post people start sending you emails telling you that you're contributing to the current epedemic of Anorexia and ruining the self-image of the young.)

Anyway, this post is about Pan's Labyrinth -- as seen and discussed in http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2006/09/sunday-morning-cinema.html -- and is to congratulate Guillermo on winning the Critics Prize.

Guillermo del Toro's gothic fantasy Pan's Labyrinth has been named the best film of 2006 by the National Society of Film Critics.

Guillermo is the executive producer on the DEATH movie, which appears to be beginning to possibly think about perhaps seeming to come back to life, maybe, so I'll congratulate him soon enough in person.

But it's nice to do it here.

And I know I meant to link to this Charles Vess blog post, showing the stages of the Stardust sculpture he's been working on, but I don't think I did. Lots of pictures... http://greenmanpress.com/news/archives/98