Scintilla Tales

When the Stars are Right

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 14:08:55 GMT

My daughter was born on H.P. Lovecraft's birthday.

I haz no cell!

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:55:33 GMT

I am less than an amoeba.

I am without mobile phone for the forseeable. Hates it.

Don't text me.

Sad.

Taylor May

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 18:59:22 GMT

A daughter. I has it.

So, Taylor May Kelly was born 9.52am on the morning of August 20th, 2009, a girl of 8lbs and 12oz. All fingers, toes, eyeballs and earlobes being where they should be, she still spent her first day and night away from us because of fluid on her lungs in ICU, which was traumatic on us but bothered her none. She is a very good baby, slept through the night from the first week and is still doing it, though she likes a long run up to bed in the last hours of the day. She's thriving and so are we. The knowledge that pathdoc will be here for six months this time gives every day a sunny disposition that simply makes anything manageable and stress has been rare in the three weeks since life changed utterly in the KD household. The biggest change is the sheer volumes of knitwear this house now contains that had never been a feature of the lives of anyone in it before.

People like the name and ask if we're fans of Taylor Swift. We are not fans of Taylor Swift, though she has a nice voice and seems a very amiable young woman. We have nothing against Taylor Swift but no, we did not name our child after her.
Taylor is pathdoc's maternal great-grandmother's surname and features as a middle name in a number of family members. May was her maternal grandmother's first name. These were our references all along and no other connections occurred to us.
So when our friend Ammerins noted on Facebook in comment upon the announcement of the name that her hubby Steve (the puckish soul who put me and the pathdoc together in the first place) had "got the name" immediately, I didn't "get" what he "got", not at first. Then I thought about it.
And then I got it.

pathdoc, lifelong frothing devotee of Queen, has named her daughter - inadvertently - after Roger Taylor and Brian May.

Taylor May Kelly.
Best. Name. Ever.

Nine days

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:24:19 GMT

There are nine days to baby day.

pathdoc is so over being pregnant. It is a world of pain and sleeplessness and sentimental remarks about how well being pregnant suits her are proving counter-productive. Yes, she's glowing - and she hopes it blinds you to oncoming traffic. I'm ready for her not to be pregnant as well. Obviously I want her to be more comfortable, but I also miss sleeping beside her (she can't lie in bed) and frankly, I'm quite over carrying all this sympathy weight.

We are well prepared, certainly more than the first time round. No matter the gender, size, feeding habits, weather, location, transportation, dress code or colour of the walls, we have made a provision. Whatever goes awry now is gonna be as left-field as a Martian invasion, so nine days from now - watch the skies.

My kids will be seven years apart in age. I'm hoping this means that my son will be so doting on this new sibling that they'll have this excellent relationship in their adult years when pathdoc and I are safely in our respective beds of dirt and mantle jars. I am, however, also fearful that this means they'll never really be all that interested in one another growing up and later struggle to ensure they call one another once a week after we're gone, and only out of some weary sense of duty.

Possibly I should be more concerned with the more immediate issues of having a baby in the house again.

We have no carpets. Nor even the vague flexibility of wooden floors. Every floor in this house, upstairs and down is vitrified porcelain. If this child falls it's going to break like an egg. Therefore, I must retain a vice-like grip on this child at all times, until such time as he or she can withstand any kind of impact. I'm thinking age 22 is a useful benchmark for this.

Accordingly, if I do not post again in the near future you will know why. I am holding a baby. At last.

Charideeee!

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 12:39:20 GMT

My cousin Richard has become a middle-aged hippy and is cycling for Charity and Peace and Reconciliation and tree-hugging. Now, I'm not generally in favour of 'forming a circle and killing it with love', but I am generally in favour of Richard. So, he's seeking sponsorship and if you've a spare coin then cough up, coz I know a lot of you are right-on hippies yourselves and people like you need your resources stripped from you sharpish. You'd only be spending it otherwise on hemp clothing and joss sticks.

Richard says,
"Basically I am doing this because Co-operation Ireland are the main body actively working on reconciliation projects in Northern Ireland. They are totally non-political (I would not get involved otherwise) and do some very unsung but vital work in building the peace in Northern Ireland. The terrorists have gone but the sectarian attitudes that underpinned the violence there still remains."

The URL for any donations is http://www.justgiving.com/richardlogue

Damo says stories...

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:35:51 GMT

I had a few short stories up at the start of this lj which, naturally, slid away into time. Inspired by fluffworld and her new columns at An Irishwoman Abroad, I've snatched them back from history and shifted them to a different site. Also there are some little picture stories which take seconds to consume and won't spoil your lunch.

If you haven't before and would like to read any of my short short stories, they're over at http://damokelly.blogspot.com

...but when the sun shines...

Wed, 20 May 2009 18:03:51 GMT

On many days, living in Donegal isn't a whole lot of fun, for a great number of reasons.

But today, sitting in the office reading, three windows surrounding me, and the sun shining...

Having a tea party.

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 13:26:55 GMT

Off to Boston tomorrow. Gonna sit in Copps Hill on a lopsided gravestone, read 'Pickman's Model' and see if I can't finally get a Great Old One to pay the slightest bit of heed. They had a mega-storm hit the east coast last week and snow is expected at some, maybe all points during our stay, but I'm still going reading in the cemetery, dammit. And then, once pathdoc and her follows are done passing round the corpses, I might bring my unborn child to the Athenæm, see if we can't get a look at the deathbed confessions of James Allen, alias George Walton, alias Jonas Pierce, alias James H. York, alias Burley Grove-The Highwayman, bound in his own skin. They also serve tea. And if they raise a glass to Poe, 200 hundred years done and dusted, I will certainly imbibe, and if Dante and Longfellow meet as shades in Harvard Square, thanking each other for all the other has done for them, I will thank them too.

And if they sell Hershey's peanut cups or Rocky Mountain chocolates anywhere in my vicinity all the gothic horrors and literary finery in the world better get the hell outta this fat ass' way.
God bless Americana.

When in Boston...

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 10:42:50 GMT

So, me and pathdoc are off to Boston in a week or so. She's gonna be at a conference much of the time and I need ideas for things to do with my time. I have a few - Lovecraftian locatios scouting and I'm sure there'll be Poe stuff and there's visiting Harvard - but I'm open to any and all other ideas for diversions. Food, drink, shopping, sightseeing - if you've been, or know someone who's been, help me out eh?

Thank you interwebs.

Why don't I ever update?

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 15:52:39 GMT

pathdoc complains that I never update this anymore. Seriously.

For those not in the know, I am married to pathdoc. I'm here when she leaves for work in the morning and still here when she makes it home at night. In between these times, I ring her at lunchtime, every day. I rarely leave the house. I live a very uninteresting life, day to day. I hardly ever fight crime or cure a disease, and when I do, I always tell her about it when I call her over lunch.
Every day.

There are folks on my friends list who do fight crime on a daily basis, or who make the interwebs work by digital magic, who insert genius into the craniums of willing drones or who can sing and juggle a flaming snowball while dressed in a full length ballgown if called upon to do so. Hell, pathdoc herself is essentially a character out of a pulp crime, but does she post at all? Not a word.

But I, I am at fault for not providing her with something interesting to read over coffee? Well shame on me.

Fine. A post for pathdoc then.

You're pregnant.

And I'm making an omelete this evening.

Meme

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 09:48:08 GMT

I am a bad lj-er, as I am a bad emailer, bad phoner, all round awful communicator. However, with the shadow of "Leave me alone, I'm psychotically obsessing about my utterly pointless degree!!" now waning for the year, I should get back into the habit of updating. And lo, blackcurrants tags me for a meme, which goes,

A) People who have been tagged are invited to write their answers on their blogs & replace any question that they dislike with a new question they’ve made up.

B) Tag 8 people to do this quiz, but understand that those who are tagged can decline if they so wish. Continue this game by sending it to other people.

01. What is essential for your happiness?
Imagination. Using it to make friends with other imaginative people. Marrying the best one.

02. What clothes are you wearing at the moment?
Blue jeans, green checked shirt, brown shoes. (But my pants are scarlet!)

03. What games did you recently finish?
I don't play computer games; much as I wish I did they leave me cold. I dislike games of chance, coz I dislike chance, so cards leave me likewise. My current roleplaying game is ongoing, for there will always be an England and it will always be plagued with zombies. I like to think I don't much entertain games that feature 'finishing' as an attribute.

04. What is your favourite scent?
Her hair.

05. What books are you reading at the moment?
George RR Martin's, 'A Clash of Kings.'

06. What do you drink the most?
Lucozade.

07. Do you trust easily?
I would like to think not, but in practice I fall for everything.

08. Who was your first big crush?
The girl next door.

09. What did you want to be when you grew up?
Writer.

10. Do you have a good body-image?
I don't have a good body. Too lazy to carry a large distorting lens in front or me, the image it projects is disappointingly accurate.

11. What is your favourite film?
84 Charing Cross Road.

12. What websites do you visit daily?
LJ, Neil Gaiman's blog, Kevin Smith's blog, Facebook for shame, blogs of friends who don't lj, Rule 7, my gaming group's fora, xkcd, wondermark

13. Random pet peeve?
"Yeah, well, that's just the way I am" and all its ridiculous derivatives.

14. What kind of person do you think the person who tagged you is?
Ah, you see, I really don't know blackcurrants, so the 'do you think' part of that question is the most pertinent. I know her fictional alter ego, and would like to think that her author would need to be at least as complicated, tenacious and charming. Flesh and text selves are rarely much of a match, but having only the text version to draw upon, I think she writes with easy fluency, animation and a very wide intellectual sweep. She's outgoing and emotionally demonstrative, for all that she throws up structures and concerns for order all over her narratives - it's like she likes the sea for its power, but possibly imagines with enough expertly captained ships it might be tamed and channelled. In this, she is very English. I think she likes to think she is very English, but in that most Imperial sense where English is a euphemism for the world and all its variation. I think she's the right kind of feminist, who uses the word equality a lot. I think she's damned right about Sarah Palin.

15. What's the last song that got stuck in your head?
Coldplay's 'Viva la Vida' - my six year old is mad for it and demands we play it on repeat in the car.

16. What's your favourite item of clothing?
I have a short sleeved green and white shirt which I rather fancied I looked well in, and then the other day my better half pointed out, unaided, that she thought so too. So now it's my double favourite. Also my Converse All stars.

17. What do you like to give and what do you like to receive?
I give unwitting injury and like to receive second chances, for which I am always grateful.

18. What's the book you've read most times?
'Good Omens', Pratchett and Gaiman.

19. Is there anything you want so bad right now?
Purpose.

20. What should you be doing right now?
Phoning people.

21. What’s the meaning behind your LJ username/name/nicknames you go by?
I always begin with aspirations of saying something very very important, but the results are invariably very small. I think the word 'scintilla' captures that very well. Almost sounds scintillating: isn't.

I do not tag people. Anyone who wants to pick this up again is very welcome to do so.

Book report

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:42:35 GMT

Has anyone else read Matthew Pearl's The Dante Club? Having just finished my mate Brian's Gallow's Lane and intent on going through John Connolly's Charlie "Bird" Parker supernatural crime series (coz his short stories were excellent, as was the YA The Book of Lost Things), I figured the gothic structures of Civil War Boston and the Inferno overtones would make for a nice stepping stone back into the borders of genre. Plus, with its focus on the American poets, I could pretend I was studying at the same time. Anyway, it's a real class act, a thoroughly engaging portrait of a fledgling nation torn apart from within and fearful of the outer world, a love letter to the poets it transforms into reluctant detectives and a really compelling murder mystery with the creeps level turned way up past ten (the very champagne of gore! I defy anyone reading it not to feel things under your skin the next time a fly passes your ear). Has anyone else read it? Has anyone read any more of Pearl?

I need to be reading for the good of my soul again and not just for the good of my assignment marks. When I began, back in 2006, I was enthusiastic and the topics were interesting and my marks were a bit above average. Then I took it into my head that I could genuinely fail because of the OU's system of matching your final course grade to the lower of your two marks from exam and coursework, and I'd not taken an exam in a very long time. So I spent the last months of the first course consuming all details and tearing the problems apart. And from an above average display in the coursework I took a first from the course as a whole. And now I'm possessed. I have to get firsts or they don't count. I've taken a single drop in grade for a single piece of coursework in the last two years now and I was an Antichrist as a result on one of the few holidays pathdoc and I ever get together. I don't even think I enjoy the reading, it's all just problem spaces to be deconstructed and overcome. This process leaves no room for pleasure reading either, as I avoid all reading outside the course texts entirely, so I don't feel as guilty for not reading them every minute of every day. I was a really crap student when I was at university in Belfast, I mean pathologically lazy at worst and skin-of-the-teeth passing-grade-comprehension at my most competent. I took my 2:1 in psychology out of a silk hat with a white rabbit, my masters degree by dint of charm and mother's money and my demonstrator's post at Queen's purely for the incredible irony of being the blind leading the blind. But I was 17 when I went to university and never took it seriously, so this time I really, really want to take it seriously. Still, I disliked psychology, I wasn't very good at it and I ended up happily teaching it. I love English, I'm actually good at it and I'm no longer even sure why I'm doing it. I just know I have to do it. Still, Pearl's book was like all the brain chocolate in the world at once this week; not that it isn't complex and highly poetic in its language, it just made all the silly linguistics models go away. I'd half started it a dozen times before my last project was submitted, reading at the inhumanly slow pace I read everything. I hate people who go on about how they read a couple of books a week: any book, good or bad, takes me weeks to complete at the best of times. But from page 70 on Saturday to 370 yesterday evening, Pearl was like alcopop to my inner teenage slapper. So now I'm looking at his The Poe Shadow. I mean who in their right mind doesn't want to read about Poe? So, one more time, has anyone read him?

It's nice out...

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 23:05:45 GMT

This is the view from our front on an evening so golden, you'd swear Hovis were sponsoring the sky. The photograph really doesn't do it a bit of justice. We walked round the house admiring the kind of manically coloured landscape that only Dali could have done justice to, so hushed and warm from the oven. I genuinely have so much sky, I'm giving it away. Seriously, if you need some, come and help yourself, we'll have a whole new one in the morning. The little table mountain you can see at the bottom of the image is called Muckish, unfortunately, but looks a whole lot more impressive in reality. It's where the sun goes to get its grove on every evening. I don't know what it takes to photograph a sunset with any kind of fidelity, but I'd really need to find out, 'coz it's criminal for us to keep ours to ourselves forever. The air is full of swallows, my garden a terrible riot of purple thistles and outsized clover, with a single statuesque sunflower my little boy has grown lording it over them all. Our first winter here was out and out gothic, but oh, our summers are going to be pure Renaissance.

It's really nice out here.

Last night

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 16:43:41 GMT

Last night at 2am I found myself hanging from the feet of a catholic priest, naked apart from his surgical robe, while he in turn dangled from the runner of a helicopter tilting 20 feet above a hospital roof, its inhabitants engaged in a gun battle, while a crowd of zombies crowded beneath me to catch whatever might fall from the master's table. And the priest needed to pee.

Praise the Lord, I'm gaming again!

Yesterday

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:55:41 GMT

We'd had a more than trying week. And then yesterday...

Over lunch, while trying to teach out little lad the meaning of the word 'recognition', the conversation moved to people we don't recognise, and from there to strangers. So we wordlessly decided to try and talk to him about them.
By the end, after a lifetime of being drilled in good manners towards grown-ups and doing the right thing when asked to, he was so confused and upset about being told to be so naughty towards someone being nice to him, about raising his voice and being cheeky, that he burst into tears.
"Is this a joke?" he asked us half way through. "You'tre telling me a joke."
And when we weren't he wanted to cry, only by this point he was so undermined and turned about, that he thought he'd be in trouble for crying and tried to stop it with this huge unnatural grin, as his face turned redder and redder and the tears slid out.
And all we could say to repair it, to comfort and explain, was that we didn't want bad people to get him, confirming that they were out there.

I have never hated this world so much as I did in that moment.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

When the tears subsided, he showed us the octopus puppet he'd made during the week at school. I asked if he knew what an octopus sounded like.
"No, I don't know anything about octopusses."
"Octopi," I corrected.
"What's an octopi?"
"One octopus. Many octopi."
"Like naevus," his mother added. "One naevus, many - "
"Naevi," answered the pathologist's son, confidently, on firmer ground here.
"One hippopotamus, many - " I continued.
"Hippos," said Dan.
"Well - "
"Oh!" he cut in. "Hippi."

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dressing him for his cousin's birthday party after lunch, pathdoc tells him,
"Put these Levis on for me, please."
"No, mummy," he chides gently. "One Levus, many Levi."
"You're funny," she tells him.
"I'm not funny," he repies. "I am hilarious."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Smoking in my sister-in-law's garage mid party, pathdoc tells me excitedly how they've found ice on Mars. Had to hug her in eternal thanks for being with someone forever who is as pragmatic and girly as she is, but is alsot he kind of person who will tell me how excited she is that there's ice on Mars. She regrets, she told me, that she won't live to see the "Evacuation of Earth!"
How I loved you then.
Had split second worry that she might only be excited to please me. Then realised how that could only make her more of a treasure to me, not less.
We're together 13 years this year.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

It rained so hard in the morning, but was sunny and clear as we drove home last night.

Yesterday.

Preface to the Twisted Wreckage

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 08:45:50 GMT

I am about to leave for my first ever driving lesson. If I don't return, I loved you all. I was 33 and 1/2.

Swithens my a**e

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 10:13:15 GMT

I can't have made this up.

I mean I can, but I'd like to think I apply my creative faculties more usefully.

Irish contingent - when I was little I was told that if it was dry on St. Paddy's, then we'd have a wet summer, and vice versa. Has anyone else heard this?

Please do not wibble back about St. Swithens to me - there was no St. Swithens when I was wee. I was old and grey before I ever heard that name. When I was wee there was only St. Paddy.

Someone else has heard this. You have the whole internets of people at your disposal. Find them.

Mix Tapes

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 14:50:55 GMT

Did you make mix tapes for others?

I'm reckoning my friends pool is all of that certain age that the question still makes sense.

I know that my friends are all notable for their fluency with advancing technology, that you've probably been assembling music selections without a second thought for years. I imagine you, as a sample population, might be notable for the extent to which putting together a soundtrack to your day is a matter of daily course. And you doubtless expose these selections not just to others, but potentially millions of others all the time. I'm not asking any of this. You're old enough to remember - making a mix tape for someone else.

Making mix tapes is, as Nick Hornby's Rob Gordon said, "hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem." I had a limited double tape deck with which to make mine, and an even more limited selection of music from which to draw them. So making such a thing was no minor undertaking, one that I might readily double task with watching TV, or reading or whatever else I would do for myself. It was a task devoted completely to the other. Meditative, midnight work, selfless but utterly self-referent. A gift that gives away some of the dearest things to you but costs you none of them.

I never had luck giving mix tapes to girls. My taste straddled the cultures of mass adherence and mass rejection that you are supposed to choose between, if you want to get girls. But that wasn't the real problem. The real problem is that I made mix tapes that I wanted to listen to. I'd almost go out of my way to leave out anything I thought she might recognise or like, thinking that this would be how I'd bring us closer together, providing her with examples of the kinds of things she might like to "get into," widening our sphere of common interests, giving us more to talk about.

Have we met? Have you been briefed on the smug yet?

So, yeah. Girls hated my mix tapes. And I'd spent so flipping long on them! What the hell was up with that?
I packed it in as a bad job. Quicker with liquor.

Poor pathdoc. She never got a mix tape, times and technologies having left them behind. She never got a mix CD, she never got a mix playlist for her iPod. She got all the equivalents, however. She got "get into roleplaying" and, gods love her, she did. She got "get into drama" and to her eternal credit she made costumes and ran lines and taught pretentious prima donnas in waiting to knit, she learned to rig lights, handle sound desk, put up with piss artists who thought they were DeNiro. She read the books as best she could, watched the genre TV, bought some figures, befriended the comic store guy. And though she never got the mix tape, she had the music pressed on her. She drove the car so I could drive the stereo unfettered.

Pathdoc is in America. She got a nice new Nokia N95 8GB to take with her for contact and music and movies alike, and she asked me to fill it for her.

So I made pathdoc a mix tape. Of stuff, I hope, that she likes. There's some stuff on there makes my ears bleed, personally. And there's some that I really like but has been selected because it's like stuff I know that she likes. It took 2 days, completely taking up the first and about half of the second. It only amounts to four hours of music, under sixty songs in total, but that far outstrips any previous mix tape marathon.

I made the pathdoc a mix tape, to quote Rob again, "Full of stuff she likes. Full of stuff that make her happy. For the first time I can sort of see how that is done." Such are the benefits of true love, true believers.

So, you who love and are loved, you who are looking for love - when did you last make a mix tape for someone? Not give them an album, not share a song you've come across with them, not show them your collection and the clever playlists you've carved it up into, not drag and drop a pile of mp3s onto a device or disk because they need something to listen to in the car, not because you've gotten them the player and you need something on it to show that it works, not music that *you* like. A mix tape.

Why don't you drop whatever you can, as soon as you can and go make someone else a mix tape of stuff that they will like.

Coz it was great.

Have fun in Denver, pathdoc. Miss you.
X

Mon, 24 Dec 2007 18:54:34 GMT

Merry Christmas to each of you, with my undying love and friendship. You're stars, every one. May you never lack, this year or the next.

Damo.

p.s. This is a meme, internet not required. xxx

My initials are DJ, but I'm not one

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 09:46:30 GMT

My brother's new phone has an application called MobileDJ where any chimp with an opposable thumb can overlay samples and waste otherwise productive hours making an object that one hates for going Beep! go Beep! even more. I was at it for a long time. Evil little creep sent me the mp3 file I made in the middle of last night and I've had it on loop for an hour now while I worked.

Have just realised I have what can only be described as the theme tune to a particularly poor daytime medical drama from New Zealand playing permanently in my head.

We hates technology. We hates it to pieces.

I'm BACK!

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:35:48 GMT

Inexplicably, today I have broadband in the new house. No warning. 11 days early.

Teh internets missed me, that's what it is.

So, yes. Have you all been behaving while I've been away? I'm gonna go read the LJ backlog now and see so there's no point trying to be all demure now.

We moved in, with loads of wee things needing doing, and some big 'uns too, but it's getting there. Still no carpets for the top floor and cleaning the tiles post construction is proving a pain, but we're getting there. Pics of the story so far are up on my facebook at:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=12292&l=ab3cb&id=526327842

It'll be finished for Xmas. We think.

On a clear day - hell on an average day - I can see Mount Errigal in the west and then turn and see the town of Buncrana nestled at the end of the valley to the east. That's a span of some 30 miles as the crow flies. At night it is profoundly silent up here, and there's hardly a light to be seen. It's very cool. On the other hand we're on the slope of a gentle valley, and for gentle valley read wind tunnel. The wind comes in from the west like a train, lifts anything that ain't nailed down and at night it screams in the various vents around the house exactly - literally and exactly and uncannily and freakyassed scarily - like a screaming child. Kat loves it, I'm scared of it.

Anyway, I am back. I am once again receiving emails. I am once again on MSN. I am no longer freaking out about when we'll get into the house. I am no longer freaking out about my upcoming exam, it having upcomed and went and the less said about it the better. I am no longer teaching two courses at once and barely keeping head above water. I am no longer dreading my 33rd birthday, that boat having also sailed in the interim. I am settled, once and for all (coz I is never moving again no matter what, they will have to bury me in the garden).

And yes I missed ye and no I didn't bring you back a present.

Moving again

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 18:16:27 GMT

The chaos still reigns, but come hell or high water we move tomorrow into what should be the final home for a bloody shitload of years. Internet access ends tonight, therefore, to be reinstated...sometime. Broadband is only a very remote possibility it seems at new chez nous. Sod. Ireland sucks.

Anyway, I will not be answering emails (like I ever do) except intermittently. When I return, proper regular posting returns with me and pics of the new chez nous in all its hodge podge glory.

Be nice to one another while I'm away. Don't break anything.

The coming Wyrd...

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 12:40:25 GMT

In the heart of Letterkenny, from whence all geekdom had been driven, its exponents exiled to the likes of Dublin and Belfast, and good riddance too...in the very heart of Letterkenny there has opened an honest-to-Gaiman comic shop.

A dedicated comic store: monthlies, graphic novels, manga, collectable figures.
In Letterkenny.
Run by a zealot, an expansively chatty comic zealot, who opens the books and reads them to you enthusiastically from the very second you step inside.
It is small: smaller than a garage, smaller than your average box room.
But it is nonetheless an inexplicable geek anomaly come suddely into my newly restored home town, which - as far as I had ever been given to understand - hated geeks.

I've thought long and hard about how this could have happened and the logical conclusion is that I am warping my immediate reality to make living here forever possible. Thusly, tomorrow I will be blogging from Letterkenny, where the new Harry Potter film is being shot, the site where calorie-free full-fat dairy milk chocolate was first invented and where masked, winged, telekinetic, sometime invisible, fireball wielding, master of disguise and cybernetics genius superhero DMan calls home, true believers.

Nerd test memage

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 10:55:59 GMT

42.857142857142854% of me is a huge nerd! How about you?

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 11:00:19 GMT