Cultural Notes and Products

I just grabbed tickets to see The Decemberists at the Warfield. Was listening to “16 Military Wives” yesterday; I hope they play it. There’s something about the dramatic pause right before “cheer them on to their rivals” that I expect would be awesome in a packed hall. New album is on its way from Amazon.

On Tuesday I had the pleasure of joining a handful of other Googlers for lunch with noted blogger Neil Gaiman. He’s a brilliant guy and was very friendly. We chatted about Blogger features and some problems he’s having with text encoding.

I’ve started on Neil’s new collection of short stories and poems (which I am reading!). I’m liking it, and it’s been worth it for the first story alone (itself a 2004 Hugo Award Winner): quite literally a mashup of Arthur Conan Doyle and H.P. Lovecraft.

Also, I hung out a bit with Neil’s son Michael, who’s finishing up his CS degree at Brown. Rawk!