on groats

1. Today was a pretty slow day; class in the morning with Christiane, and then a quick bus trip down the hill to the NBCC to spend an hour (or two, as it turned out) hanging out with Amy and finishing up converting the website to the new template. On Saturday all I'll need to do is update everything to be current, then upload it and do up the e-News. Not so bad. Kate was out sick, which is a shame - as I said, everyone is sick these days. Sean has been getting the spins, but multivitamins seem to be getting rid of them, so hopefully our house will remain disease free.

2. The highlight of today: another job interview! This one is with the UNB library, to be assistant curator for the children's collection. It's tomorrow afternoon, during when I would normally have Latin; Professor Kerr is away, so my weekend begins just a little sooner than usual.

3. Fun quote of the day, from a Neil Gaiman interview:

RU: You’re doing something with Terry Gilliam, who is absolutely one of my favorite directors.

NG: Bless! I hope that it happens. Terry has been working for many years on Good Omens, which is the novel that Terry Pratchett and I co-wrote about the end of the world…

DB: It has just been re-released.

NG: Absolutely. Terry Gilliam has loved the book for years. He has been working on it for awhile. He recently came to us and said, “OK. I’m going to get the rights back to the script that I wrote with this guy called Tony Brusconi a few years ago. What is it going to cost me to get the option for myself?” Terry Pratchett and I put our heads together and thought; well, we really want Terry Gilliam to make it. We want this to be a Terry Gilliam film. We don’t want this to be an anybody-else film. We’ve said no to lots of people who want to make it into a cool big commercial film. We like the idea of it being a Terry Gilliam film. So we put our heads together and we decided that it should cost him a groat. And I don’t believe they’ve actually made groats, which is an old English coin worth about four pence since about the 1780s. Which means he is going to have to go to EBay.

RU: He’s going to have to do some searching… a magical quest.

NG: They’re cheap. I mean frankly they’re really cheap. We figured out we were going to need Farthings to pay the agents — the agent commission on a groat. I went to EBay and picked up a farthing for practically nothing.

For those unaware, Terry Pratchett writes the Discworld novels, being almost Douglas Adams-esque comedy-fantasy; Terry Gilliam acquired fame as a Python and has gone on to direct all manner of very strange movies, including Brazil, Twelve Monkeys, and the Brothers Grimm. He's also the flat out unluckiest director I've ever heard of; things go mysteriously and catastrophically wrong all the time. For example, his current project that is being shot right now? Stars Heath Ledger.