A Bizarre Mixed Bag of Nuts (Human, feline or otherwise).
Okay, this week I'm pushing my luck. These four "Quotes" ar less quotes and more like nearly-full blog-entries. But they are HILARIOUS blog entries, and I'm putting all of them right here together because I'll never have any better way of putting them on here. So enjoy these little mini-stories that Neil has told on his site, and next week I'll try for the shorter, more tradtional quotes.-- RRNN
“I never ever do dinner party things. I'm useless at them. But there I am, in Islington, at a family function, sitting next to someone I don't know at a dinner, trying to make conversation. "So," I say, to the lady on my left, "What do you do?" This is, I learn, the wrong question. She explains that she's terrified of saying the wrong thing to me. Apparently it happens a lot at dinner parties. She's quite sure, you see, that she could say something and I could take it the wrong way. I tell her I don't do that very much. Well, she essays, a bit nervously, that she does things like work on helplines for battered wives (which seems to me something that no-one could possibly take offense at, but she figures that, being male as I am, I might find this deeply dodgy or something) and suchlike useful things. I fail to get upset, so, encouraged and emboldened and pleased to be over the contentious bit of the conversation, she tells me that she writes. She's not yet published, but she writes. Then she decides to guess what I do. She guesses, wrongly, for a while. Eventually she gives up on guessing and I tell her I'm, er a writer actually. She doesn't believe me, and the man sitting opposite says that I certainly am, he's seen my name in airport bookshops. She realises that she has told a writer that she wants to be a writer, and is unable to take it back, and goes off to tell my cousin (who is hosting the event) that she really should have warned her. The conversation, such as it is, never quite recovers, and I remember why it is that I never, ever do dinner partyish things.”
-–Neil Gaiman 11/21/04
“So a hasty late night post, being typed around an asleep-on-my-keyboard medium-sized tabby kitten who rejoices in the name of Captain Morgan. He looks a little like Buddy-who-vanished, being sort of brown and sort of stripy, and was found by Lorraine hanging hungrily and miserably around the house a month or so ago. He and Coconut, Maddy's kitten, immediately became inseparable. Captain Morgan is a sweet-natured kitten, who has only one failing.
He waits until you're asleep, then climbs onto your bed, and tries to insert himself into your nose.
It never works, a hefty kitten being much larger than the interior of a nostril, but he keeps trying until you open up an eye and pick him up and drop him onto the floor. And then he bounces back onto the bed and tries to stick his head into one of your nostrils again. So you sweep him unceremoniously onto the floor, and bury your face in your pillow; and he sneaks back onto the bed and waits patiently while you go back to sleep and roll over, or just come up for air, and all of a sudden there's a small brown cat patiently trying to push its head into your nose.
Sooner or later he'll wake you up enough that you'll get up, carry him into the hall, and shut the door firmly, with him on the other side of it, and go back to sleep for the rest of the night.
I commented on this peculiar habit to my assistant Lorraine today, in the casual way you do when you don't want someone to think you've gone mad. "Er, Captain Morgan the kitten keeps trying to push his way into my nose while I'm asleep," I told her. She looked relieved. "Yes, he does that to me as well," she said. "I think it's because he probably wasn't weaned properly."
It's possible, I suppose, although I thought that misweaning just meant they sucked and chewed on things, not that they had grandiose fantasies about being nasally insertable, small wet muzzle first.
Sometimes I worry that one night I won't wake up, and he'll succeed in his bizarre quest, and in the morning there'll be nothing but the tip of a kitten-tail sticking out of one nostril to tell me he was ever here at all.
Which wasn't what I meant to type when I sat down to do this -- I thought I'd just stick up a bunch of interesting links before bed...”
-– Neil Gaiman 08/26/03
“Blam. That was the sound of someone dropping a brick onto my car.
The problem, I eventually concluded, was the walnuts. Not the nice, wrinkeldy brown nuts you get in Festive Nut Hampers, but the kind that fall from trees, like compact green cricket balls with the nut somewhere inside. The outer covering contains walnut juice, as I find when I pick one up. In fiction, as a boy, people were forever staining their skin with walnut juice in order to pass for Indians or Arabs, and I couldn't understand how the nut gave the juice. It doesn't. It's the yellow goop inside the green case.
So. I'm hiding out in a pretechnological world, with a wood-burning stove and lethal rains of noisy walnuts, getting some writing done between engagements…
Blam.
That was the sound of another exploding walnut crashing down from the heavens onto the roof and rattling down onto the ground.
Snuffle snuffle grurp munch.
That was the sound of a large pot-bellied pig eating walnuts. The pot-bellied pigs live on the farm next door. But they wander. And they like walnuts. I suspect the pig's mouth and chin are stained with Walnut Juice.(I just went and checked. They were.)”
-- Neil Gaiman 10/11/01
“The lady next door runs a home for pigs. I went down each morning to say my hellos to the pigs and the people: cute little wee black piglings and mighty great boars and snufflers. Not for eating:Vietnamese potbellied pigs, pet pigs, some being boarded, some for sale, some for adoption.
The lady who owns it took me around and introduced me to many of the pigs.
"Now this one," she said, pointing to one small and chirpy looking black fellow in a cage "was a pet pig. He was an ungelded boar, who was owned by people with Pomeranians. But they couldn't cope, and we're looking after him until he can be adopted."
"Why couldn't they cope?"
"Ah," she said. "Well, there's no way to put this delicately. I gelded him myself a couple of days ago. But an un-neutered boar needs to ejaculate at least twice a day to remain healthy. And this fellow, not being neutered, was trying to meet his ejaculatory needs with whatever came to hand. Mostly the Pomeranians. And the family, well, they really hadn't bargained for that."
I agreed that they probably hadn't. And then I shook my head, listening to the grunt and snuffle of the pigs, and contemplating the silence of the Pomeranians.”
-- Neil Gaiman 10/11/01
“I never ever do dinner party things. I'm useless at them. But there I am, in Islington, at a family function, sitting next to someone I don't know at a dinner, trying to make conversation. "So," I say, to the lady on my left, "What do you do?" This is, I learn, the wrong question. She explains that she's terrified of saying the wrong thing to me. Apparently it happens a lot at dinner parties. She's quite sure, you see, that she could say something and I could take it the wrong way. I tell her I don't do that very much. Well, she essays, a bit nervously, that she does things like work on helplines for battered wives (which seems to me something that no-one could possibly take offense at, but she figures that, being male as I am, I might find this deeply dodgy or something) and suchlike useful things. I fail to get upset, so, encouraged and emboldened and pleased to be over the contentious bit of the conversation, she tells me that she writes. She's not yet published, but she writes. Then she decides to guess what I do. She guesses, wrongly, for a while. Eventually she gives up on guessing and I tell her I'm, er a writer actually. She doesn't believe me, and the man sitting opposite says that I certainly am, he's seen my name in airport bookshops. She realises that she has told a writer that she wants to be a writer, and is unable to take it back, and goes off to tell my cousin (who is hosting the event) that she really should have warned her. The conversation, such as it is, never quite recovers, and I remember why it is that I never, ever do dinner partyish things.”
-–Neil Gaiman 11/21/04
“So a hasty late night post, being typed around an asleep-on-my-keyboard medium-sized tabby kitten who rejoices in the name of Captain Morgan. He looks a little like Buddy-who-vanished, being sort of brown and sort of stripy, and was found by Lorraine hanging hungrily and miserably around the house a month or so ago. He and Coconut, Maddy's kitten, immediately became inseparable. Captain Morgan is a sweet-natured kitten, who has only one failing.
He waits until you're asleep, then climbs onto your bed, and tries to insert himself into your nose.
It never works, a hefty kitten being much larger than the interior of a nostril, but he keeps trying until you open up an eye and pick him up and drop him onto the floor. And then he bounces back onto the bed and tries to stick his head into one of your nostrils again. So you sweep him unceremoniously onto the floor, and bury your face in your pillow; and he sneaks back onto the bed and waits patiently while you go back to sleep and roll over, or just come up for air, and all of a sudden there's a small brown cat patiently trying to push its head into your nose.
Sooner or later he'll wake you up enough that you'll get up, carry him into the hall, and shut the door firmly, with him on the other side of it, and go back to sleep for the rest of the night.
I commented on this peculiar habit to my assistant Lorraine today, in the casual way you do when you don't want someone to think you've gone mad. "Er, Captain Morgan the kitten keeps trying to push his way into my nose while I'm asleep," I told her. She looked relieved. "Yes, he does that to me as well," she said. "I think it's because he probably wasn't weaned properly."
It's possible, I suppose, although I thought that misweaning just meant they sucked and chewed on things, not that they had grandiose fantasies about being nasally insertable, small wet muzzle first.
Sometimes I worry that one night I won't wake up, and he'll succeed in his bizarre quest, and in the morning there'll be nothing but the tip of a kitten-tail sticking out of one nostril to tell me he was ever here at all.
Which wasn't what I meant to type when I sat down to do this -- I thought I'd just stick up a bunch of interesting links before bed...”
-– Neil Gaiman 08/26/03
“Blam. That was the sound of someone dropping a brick onto my car.
The problem, I eventually concluded, was the walnuts. Not the nice, wrinkeldy brown nuts you get in Festive Nut Hampers, but the kind that fall from trees, like compact green cricket balls with the nut somewhere inside. The outer covering contains walnut juice, as I find when I pick one up. In fiction, as a boy, people were forever staining their skin with walnut juice in order to pass for Indians or Arabs, and I couldn't understand how the nut gave the juice. It doesn't. It's the yellow goop inside the green case.
So. I'm hiding out in a pretechnological world, with a wood-burning stove and lethal rains of noisy walnuts, getting some writing done between engagements…
Blam.
That was the sound of another exploding walnut crashing down from the heavens onto the roof and rattling down onto the ground.
Snuffle snuffle grurp munch.
That was the sound of a large pot-bellied pig eating walnuts. The pot-bellied pigs live on the farm next door. But they wander. And they like walnuts. I suspect the pig's mouth and chin are stained with Walnut Juice.(I just went and checked. They were.)”
-- Neil Gaiman 10/11/01
“The lady next door runs a home for pigs. I went down each morning to say my hellos to the pigs and the people: cute little wee black piglings and mighty great boars and snufflers. Not for eating:Vietnamese potbellied pigs, pet pigs, some being boarded, some for sale, some for adoption.
The lady who owns it took me around and introduced me to many of the pigs.
"Now this one," she said, pointing to one small and chirpy looking black fellow in a cage "was a pet pig. He was an ungelded boar, who was owned by people with Pomeranians. But they couldn't cope, and we're looking after him until he can be adopted."
"Why couldn't they cope?"
"Ah," she said. "Well, there's no way to put this delicately. I gelded him myself a couple of days ago. But an un-neutered boar needs to ejaculate at least twice a day to remain healthy. And this fellow, not being neutered, was trying to meet his ejaculatory needs with whatever came to hand. Mostly the Pomeranians. And the family, well, they really hadn't bargained for that."
I agreed that they probably hadn't. And then I shook my head, listening to the grunt and snuffle of the pigs, and contemplating the silence of the Pomeranians.”
-- Neil Gaiman 10/11/01
posted by Really_Rather_Not_Nice at 4:13 PM
5 Comments:
These entries are very funny, particularly the one about Captain Morgan. Also enjoyed the compilation of Fred stories, many of which I hadn't read somehow. Thank you for doing this!
I absolutely love compiling all these old bits from Neil's Blog. There's so much good stuff in there that's just gathering dust!
Some of my favorites are the cat stories. There's one in there about a cat climbing a mirror that just killed me when I first read it.
I'm glad you like the site, and that Neil both gave me the permission to do this, and that he directs people over here every now and again to check it out.
Thanks for stopping by.
I just made very muffled snickering noises and had tears in my eyes as I read (or tried to read, the print got blurry) Captain Morgan's story. Very hard to explain when I'm meant to be "in charge of the university library..."
Shhh! *snerk*
I found the cutest photo on your site.
How on earth have I not read the story about the walnuts, or the pig and the Pomeranian? A couple of years ago, when I had a very boring job and not enough to do, I read all of Neil's archives. And I can't believe I would have forgotten the last story. Wanted to, maybe.
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