Sunday, August 31, 2003

The silence of the hamsters...

I never knew how to say Michael Chabon's last name. I always said "Chuh-bonne". According to The Village Voice ( it's pronounced Ka-BONE. I doubt whether that's really true because they say Updike is really pronounced Oop-decay (which makes me think they're taking the piss).

You know Michael, so when you introduce him to someone else, you said, "Hello, this is Michael ------."


It's probably worth pointing out that the entire Village Voice article is a joke.

Incidentally,Entertainment Weekly liked the first issue of 1602 a lot, according to a mini review quoted over at The Dreaming.

I don't think I've ever mentioned Maddy's dwarf hamster, Creepy, here before. This is partly because much of the time he barely exists -- he just sleeps. And it's partly because the hamster wheel in his cage didn't work until recently. Now it's been fixed, he's making up for lost time, during his nocturnal waking hours working out on what must be the loudest hamster wheel in creation.

You know that noise that the TARDIS makes, when it's materialising somewhere? It's a noise an awful lot like that. It's a noise that can, I am discovering, be heard through thick brick walls and through several closed doors. A grinding, graunching, rattling, continual noise that sits at the threshold of perception like a toothache and only stops, for a minute or so, if you're actually starting to get used to it enough to begin to tune it out.

No, I'm not asleep, yet. Why do you ask?