It's hard to believe that we arrived in Spain 8 days ago. Time flows by in a different way, even though we bring work with us. The trip is long, we arrive exhausted, but we have rituals along the way. The trip is more than 24 hours (door to door) and spans two days. We leave Saturday morning, have a long stretch in Dallas/FW Airport, where we have battered and fried green beans and a glass of beer at TGIF, waiting for our next flight. We arrive in Madrid around 10:30 a.m. Sunday, and have a lunch of smoked salmon, bread, and wine, then fight sleep while waiting for our connection to Santiago de Composetela. We arrive in Santiago a little after 5:00 p.m. and collect baggage. Our friends, Terri and David, meet us, drive us back to our house in Trasulfe, where we "turn on the house" (electricity, water, gas-tank connections, etc.), then we all go out to eat at a restaurant in Monforte, called O Pincho, where we split delicious raciones. (Rations are smaller than dinners, bigger than tapas.)
Here's a picture of Terri and David from last summer (we haven't yet gotten around to pictures of friends on this trip.) As soon as we got to O Pincho, we woke up and had a great time catching up on news, eating rations and drinking the house wine. The next morning, waking with the sun (about seven-ish), eating lunch at 2:00 p.m. and dinner around 8:00 or 9:00 p.m., Rajan and I realized we'd fallen into Spanish time right away, with very little jet lag!
Friends and neighbors tell us it was a continually rainy winter, but our first few days were sunny. There was the usual morning mist and intermittent sprinkles through the day that vanished in afternoon heat. Still, we felt free to bring out our patio table and chairs. Then things changed.
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The small pasture across the sheep
path in front of our gate. The thin
tree in the foreground is a volunteer
peach tree that so far doesn't bear. |
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A neighbor's pasture below ours.
See those little fruit trees? The storm
blew all the petals away. No fruit
this year. |
After four beautiful sunshiny days, on Thursday afternoon a fierce hailstorm struck. First thunder rolled and roared for about an hour, and then hail beat down for about thirty minutes. This was the result :
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| These aren't snow drifts. Just lots and lots of hail. |
I wanted to put a video here, with all its great sound effects, but I couldn't get my video to play. (I've sent to Google for help.) But this should give you some idea.
On another note, we've been making a point to walk at least two miles a day. In about a year, I want to walk a portion of the Camino that ends in Santiago. (One item on my bucket list.) I won't be able to make it to Santiago, but a friend informed me that if you walk 100 km, you can get a certificate. That's about sixty miles. Next spring I'd like to do about 30 miles, and then in the fall of 2015 do the second set. So far, a few times we've parked at Gadis, one of the big supermarkets at the edge of Monforte, and walked up to the Parador.
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Here's the Parador, seen from the Gadis parking lot.
Below is Gadis, seen from Parador, to give you and
idea of how far we walk. |
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Gadis, where we parked, seen from the Parador: See the thin pale blue
stripe about two thirds up in the middle? Above the center green? To the
left of that is a teeny yellow sign. That's Gadis.
Other walks have been along country roads. Beautiful nature walks, really. This will give you some
idea: The picture on the left is an example of most of the scenery here.
The picture to the right is of a pretty church in Toiriz. We don't have pictures yet of the stork nests, but on tall posts nearby, there are two separate stork nests, and we sometimes see one of the parent birds feeding the baby birds. All you can see is the upended body, so we aren't quite sure how big those babies get. Hopefully we'll get a good photo sometime soon.
And now, it's time for a walk! But stay tuned, because the next post will be about a wonderful Fado singer we heard Sunday night.
Meanwhile, if you have special items on your bucket list, I'd love to hear what they are.
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By Elvin Lim
The Transportation and Security Administration’s new video screening and pat-down procedures has given new fuel to advocates of racial profiling at airports around the nation. Opponents of racial profiling argue that treating an individual differently simply because of his or her race is wrong because discrimination, even for noble intentions, is just plain wrong. Let’s call this the principle of formal equality.
Oddly enough, this is exactly what opponents of affirmative action say. They typically argue that some other signifier, for example class, can be a more efficient, and less discriminatory way of achieving similar outcomes if affirmative action policies were in place.
This argument is analogous to the one offered by those who are against racial profiling. They suggest that some other signifier, for example behavior, can be a more efficient, and less discriminatory way of achieving similar outcomes if racial profiling policies were in place.
It seems, then, that one can either be for race-based profiling and affirmative action, or against both. What is problematic is if one is for one but not the other. My guess is that most liberals are for race-based affirmative action but against racial profiling, and most conservatives are against race-based affirmative action but for racial profiling. Inconsistency?
The problem is harder to resolve for the conservative who is anti-affirmative action but for racial profiling than it is for the liberal who is pro-affirmative action and anti-racial profiling. Here is why. The liberal can restate his or her philosophy as such: discrimination is wrong only when a historically disadvantaged group bears the brunt of a particular policy (as in racial profiling); discrimination is permissible when historically advantaged groups bear the brunt of a particular policy (as in affirmative action). By moving away from formal equality toward a more substantive conception of equality that incorporates the principle of historical remedy, a liberal can remain consistently pro-affirmative action, and still be anti-racial-profiling.
For the conservative who is against race-based affirmative action but for profiling, the problem is stickier. Almost every anti-affirmative action argument I have come across turns on the principle of formal equality: that discrimination on the basis of race is wrong, no matter what the policy intentions may be.
Suppose, in an effort to reconcile an anti-affirmative action and a pro-profiling position, one argued that discrimination on the basis of race is wrong, unless it was done in the name of some higher good, such as national security.
Well, then in protest, the pro-affirmative action liberal will simply substitute “some higher good” with “diversity,” and the anti-affirmative action conservative would be forced to accept the plausibility of the liberal’s position on affirmative action — or at least the fact that they share similar argumentative forms with no way to adjudicate between one higher good and another (while retaining his or her pro-profiling stance.) The problem is that to admit of any higher principle other than formal equality (the claim that discrimination on the basis of race for any reason is just flat out wrong) to help distinguish the cases decimates the case against affirmative action that was itself built on formal equality.
Profiling on the basis of race, among other characteristics, such as behavior, is likely to become a de facto, if not a de jure, policy in our nation’s airports in the years to come. It is going to inconvenience some innocent people simply because, among other factors, their skin was colored a particular way just as, and the hope is, it will save a lot mor
I knew this was gonna be a pain in the rear, but man... That was a long trip. I have a lot to say about it, and this blog will probably only cover the basics. Then I'll make little separate observations about the details of the trip later, thus avoiding the dreaded Serial Effect that most of my trips have, but still allowing me to ramble and rant like I usually do. That said, this will still have
I'm apparently on a quest to photograph airport art now.
(which is harder to do if your time is tight. Or you are traveling with a destination-oriented husband :-).
I could barely keep up in the 'rainbow corridor' in Chicago!
But spring is in full swing and gorgeous in Georgia. Had a nice, quick! time of visiting and family dinner. (And boiled peanuts for breakfast. Definitely in the South!)
Happy 80
th to the mother-in-law.
posted by Neil
Originally, I was meant to get in to Dublin tomorrow, Sunday, and immediately start doing interviews. Somewhere mid-week I realised that simply wasn't going to work -- I'd burned the candle at both ends and incinerated the middle during the two weeks of Coraline-and-Newbery-Madness in the US, and flying to Dublin, getting off the plane and doing six print, one TV interview and then going to Dundrum to introduce the film and do a Q&A interview afterwards seemed like a recipe for disaster, or at least, for sleeping through my own film.
So everything moved a day earlier, and that was a good thing. The flight was easy and pleasant (I sat next to one of the Original Fathers of the Internet, and he wanted to know about writing and I wanted to know about The Internet, so we chatted cheerfully over the meal service, which almost never happens). On landing I was whisked magically from the jetway to a little VIP place where I was given a cup of tea and put in a car with a lady from Universal, and I dreamed that all international airport exits could be as smooth and as graceful and as queue-free.
My loverly Android G1 doesn't work here -- it was, as you may remember, a gift from Google, and is, until one day it won't be, free, but its very freeness meant that it won't connect to any foreign phone service, as someone would have to be billed for the connection. At the point it informed me that it was now just a thing with photos and music on, I discovered how much I miss it (memo to self, tapping on the screen of the Nokia N73 does nothing at all). My elderly and eccentric Nokia N73, which turns itself off from time to time a bit randomly, sometimes mid phone-call, is now my phone while I am in Ireland. And I discovered the problems I was having with its predictive text function could mostly be traced to fact that it had decided in the last month or so that it would rather predict words in Dutch.
Anyway. Happy Valentine's Day from someone in a suspiciously empty and unValentiny sort of Dublin hotel room.
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The Graveyard Book won a Cybil Award -- which is the children's book award from the blogging community. I was thrilled. All of the Cybil nominees and winners looked good this year, and I'm proud to be among them, and congratulations to everyone involved.
Monica Edinger
reviews The Graveyard Book at The New York Times. Her review finishes,
I read the last of “The Graveyard Book” to my class on a gloomy day. For close to an hour there were the sounds of only rain and story. In this novel of wonder, Neil Gaiman follows in the footsteps of long-ago storytellers, weaving a tale of unforgettable enchantment.
Which made me really happy. The sounds of rain and story. Yes, that's what it's all for.
...
(About a month ago I'd told my Editor at HarperChildrens that I would send cupcakes for everyone at HarperChildrens if
The Graveyard Book ever went back to Number One on the Childrens' list at the NYT. So last week, I sent an enormous number of cupcakes over to HarperChildren's [although ten percent of the cupcakes were paid for by my agent]. I've told them if we ever get to be Number One five weeks in a row,
more cupcakes.)
http://dankrall.blogspot.com/
They're all awesome artists, but Dan Krall's work actually made me wish that he'd actually illustrated an edition of
Coraline. Anyway, go and look at their art: you'll see illustrations for scenes that didn't make it into the finished movie. Like the Dan Krall drawing above.
I really hope there will be an actual
Art of Coraline book, to collect all of this stuff, along with the other things you can look at on the videos at
http://thinkinganimationbook.blogspot.com/2009/02/coraline.html. At the time of Steve Jones's
Coraline: A Visual Companion book (you can browse it here) Laika and Focus weren't able to provide anything much in the way of art as, they explained, very sensibly, they were madly trying to finish a movie (they even cancelled the book at one point, pointing out that they didn't have anyone available to go through the art, as everyone was working on the film, and it took Henry Selick's intervention to get them to provide stills and bring it back from the dead).
(Most of the above links taken from
http://www.gallerynucleus.com/event/180)
Incidentally, if you are confused about which edition of Coraline to get, the ever-terrific School Library Journal has a round up of stuff about me
here, and a round-up of all things Coraline
here.
You want to know how to make 200,000 puppet-faces?
You need a 3D printer.
Just wanna make a quick comment on Marcel's question, I watched Coraline yesterday here in Brazil and I watched it in 3D. Gotta say the dubbing is awesome. They're all great in what they do, really.And it's, y'know, puppets.
(Did I mention that I ran into Althea Crome in the airport on the way home from Portland last week? Or that just as were about to get off the plane she gave Maddy and me a tiny pair of gloves -- not from the film -- that I treasure, and have to figure out where to keep so they can be safely displayed?)
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(Can you tell I'm closing Tabs here?)
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And my own Valentine's Day wossname for the world -- you can hear Claudia Gonson singing "Bloody Sunrise", arranged and instrumentated by Michael Hearst, over at
http://hypem.com/track/672071/Neil+Gaiman-Bloody+Sunrise -- the link doesn't work, but if you click the play triangle, it'll play.
- A.B.C. = Airport Bookstore Commentary
- I have visited (and revisited) several bookstores throughout my travels. Mostly in the Denver, Minneapolis and Salt Lake City airports... Anyway, airport bookstores are my favorite type of bookstore in the world (excepting only indie children's bookstores). So I thought I'd share some commentary on each one that I visit.
Bookstore #1: This one's in the Salt Lake City airport. Unfortunately I can't tell you a whole lot about their book selection, browsing comfort, or any of that, because I wasn't able to spend any time in it. It was after I landed in Salt Lake City (earlier this month on the latter part of a trip I took; you know, the one where
I met Tony DiTerlizzi in CA?). I was excited to see my cousins and also tired from my long day of traveling, thus I didn't take the time to browse here.
HOWEVER - I simply had to share this bookstore with you, because it boasted a very special feature. Lining the walls above the shelves were some purely brilliant quotes from some of
the most famous authors in all of history.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, or, "Fitzy," as I have taken to calling him thanks to
Little Willow:
J.K. Rowling:
Stephen King:
J.R.R. Tolkien:
Shakespeare:
Truman Capote:
C.S. Lewis:
Just beautiful!
My trip home was derailed (well, deplaned, but that seems to mean "getting off the plane" rather than the plane trip home turning into a little expedition to hades) by an extreme snowfall in Minneapolis. So the trip home took 36 hours and left me a bit out of sorts. Still, this was waiting for me when I finally got home -- snowdrops in the snow. A small perfect thing.
There's a reason why I made the magical flower in Stardust a snowdrop, after all.
My first snowdrop resolutions -- I need to get back into shape (eat sensibly; find a new trainer; go for longer, more energetic walks with dog; do some nice stretchy yoga even). This last trip left me aching all over, and I've moved up a tub in jeans sizes (long term readers of this blog may remember that there are five tubs of jeans of different sizes in my closet. If ever I have to wear the ones in the tub at the far right -- mostly bought by accident or in fits of optimism -- I'll know I've got some kind of eating disorder or wasting disease, and when I only fit into the ones at the far left I know I've been not-moving for too long. And I've moved one tub to the left. It's time to slim down a little, but mostly it's just time to get fit again after a very, very long winter.
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I sent Newly-Stoker-Award-Winning Author Joe Hill The Graveyard Book when I finished it, because he has small sons, and I was hoping he would read to them.
(He did. They liked it. He said, "It's a great one for reading aloud. You should really hear me call for help in NightGaunt sometime," and then when I said I would like to, he e-mailed me a sound file. I was impressed.)
And he talks about the book a little on his blog -- http://joehillfiction.com/?p=163 in terms that I would use as a blurb if I hadn't said nice things about Heart Shaped Box, and would fear accusations of log-rolling.
...
My assistant Lorraine just passed this on from the conference organisers in Melbourne --
Hi Lorraine,
It's good to see all the details of Neil's trip up on the website -
now I can finally believe it's happening! I wonder if you could
arrange for there to be a link to the conference website
http://www.iceaustralia.com/cbca2008/ on the Sunday date when Neil's
keynote is open to the general public so that people will find it easy to book.
Thanks, Sian
So there's the link, and we'll put another up at WHERE'S NEIL. Come and see me talk. Come and see Shaun Tan, who is nominated for a Hugo for The Arrival, a book I tend to force people to read. (This is a link to pages from The Arrival and an essay about it on Shaun's site.)
If I hadn't been on the road I would have remembered to post something about pre-selling tickets at MIT to the first Julie Schwartz Memorial Lecture, but it looks like the pre-sold tickets are now sold, and it's now going to be tickets on the day for people in the Boston area.
New York Times bestselling author, screenwriter and comics luminary Neil Gaiman (The Sandman, Beowulf, Stardust) is scheduled to present the first Julius Schwartz Lecture in Kresge Auditorium at 7PM on May 23rd, 2008. Doors will open at 6PM.
Pre-Ticket Sales will occur on March 31st and April 1st in Lobby 10 from 9AM until 4PM. Tickets are $8 apiece, no limit. CASH ONLY, GENERAL ADMISSION, NO RESERVATIONS. Tickets will also be available at the door the evening of the event
tadpoles just rush right outta there...afraid of being stepped on, i guess.
oh OH! i flipped it. that ok or am i in trouble?
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I'm getting to where I like cereal. Just not a big fan of the serial. However, I have no choice but to endure.
I'm glad you got that car thing all figured out! It sounds like a special version of hell.<br />And, reunion with pets??!??! What's better?!??!?!