Dave Mancuso dot Com

From Neil Gaiman’s Journal, a question from a nascent writer:
“My professor for comic book scripting told me once that it is impossible to listen to music and write at the same time.”

Neil replies:
“What an odd thing to tell people.

I’m sure it’s true for him, mind you, but deciding that it’s true for the rest of the world is a leap of faith I wouldn’t have made, much like deciding that everyone in the world needs to write using your lucky brand of pen or it won’t be any good.”

I do find that occasionally it’s hard to write with music playing, but it’s certainly not a rule of thumb for me.

From an interview with Arthur C. Clarke, science fiction writer:

“So you are confident that humanity will survive the current deluge of information?
Undoubtedly. There are many who are genuinely alarmed by the immense amount of information available to us through the Internet, television and other media. To them, I can offer little consolation other than to suggest that they put themselves in the place of their ancestors at the time the printing press was invented. ‘My God,’ they cried, ‘now there could be as many as a thousand books. How will we ever read them all?“

I was skimming the Classmates.com message boards for my old hometown and I came across a thread regarding Munchkinville.

Munchkinville? What the heck is that? It sounded familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. A place in Ridley where the houses were munchkin-sized? Where was this all the time I was growing up?

So I asked my family and had the answer immediately. Munchkinville was a lane behind the houses across the street from me on Swarthmore Avenue. It was an alley with small houses, but the odd thing was that the doors and windows were very small; hobbit-sized, in fact. I walked down the alley once, but I’d forgotten all about it. My father told me that these houses had been built long ago as small vacation cottages for people from Philadelphia. My brother told me that he was in front of the houses once talking about them and a woman came out of a munchkin house yelling at him. “Normal people live here! Go away!”

Munchkinville is gone now, all but a few of the houses, and they have normal doors and windows. Here’s to a unique architectural and historical landmark.

I drove my mom to the Philly airport on Sunday to take her flight back home. As we motored through the Departures lane, I saw a section of the airport made of tan brick with a turqoise control tower. It was the original airport from way back in the ’60s. It looks strange, surrounded by the white concrete of the current airport.

I remember that my dad once said that all the original airport needed in the ’60s was carpeting. It had red brick floors back then. They added the carpet, but they didn’t stop there. They never stopped at all. They kept adding, and adding, and adding. I’ve never seen a structure that grew like this airport–it just swelled piece by piece until it became the huge behemoth that you see now.

Even the terminals speak to the piecemeal construction of this complex. The A terminal was the last to be built, years after terminals B through E. After it was finished, it still wasn’t enough, and they had to add a terminal before A. What do you call the letter before A? Well, in Philly they call it terminal A-East and now terminal A-West. Wow. I realize that it’s one of the largest airports around, but the thing has become massively unwieldy.

Here’s another weird fact. If you work in the part of the airport that’s in Philadelphia, you have city wage tax taken from your pay–three and a half percent or so. However, if your employer is in the part of the airport that’s in Delaware County, you have no city wage tax–it’s almost like a 3.5 percent raise (if you look at the bright side).

http://www.mrpicassohead.com/

Enjoy!