The gifts that keep on giving (even after I lose them)

While I have no idea why the thought occurred to me, the fact remains that earlier I was thinking that almost all of the gifts I’ve gotten from people over the years that I would consider to be the coolest gifts have been things written by Neil Gaiman.
(As a totally unrelated aside, I just have to mention that as I write this, my TV is providing background noise in the form of a really bad soft-core porn called “The Mummy’s Kiss.” There was just a scene in which the heroine, a young college student, has just stopped in to visit her uncle, a professor at the college. Her uncle is, in fact, an Egyptologist. She tells him that she stopped by to see if he had any books she could borrow on, of all things, Ancient Egypt. She says it in such a way that it seems like she thinks it’s a long shot that he would have such a thing. Oy.)
By “coolest” I mean gifts that I most appreciate, as they are things that I was really happy to receive and which I enjoyed a great deal.
The first such was a birthday present from my friend Jennifer several years ago. It was a copy of the second “Death” mini-series, “The Time of Your Life,” collected in a trade paperback. I always remember her telling me, before it arrived in the mail, that the gift she had gotten me had “two parts” to it, one of which wasn’t really tangible.
The “intangible” part was the fact that she had actually read it, which was pretty cool, since I know how hard it can be for non-comic book geeks to take a comic book seriously enough to even consider reading it.
(As another aside, this movie was made so cheaply that they couldn’t even afford blanks for the scene when someone has to fire a gun. They added the gunfire effects digitally, and did so very poorly at that.)
When I moved away to Minnesota, though, I forgot that I had loaned the book to a friend, and when I moved back to Michigan…well, I had other things on my mind. I haven’t seen or talked to that friend in years, and I’m not too likely to, so it’s probably lost to me. Still, especially for the intangible aspect, it was a very cool present.
(The villain of the piece, the mummy of an Egyptian sorceress who’s come back to life, has just introduced herself to the heroine’s boyfriend. In her guise as “Ramsey Amon,” she mentions that she’s Egyptian. The heroine bursts into the room, saying, “Did I hear someone say something about being Egyptian?” Apparently she has some sort of responsibility for cataloguing the presence of Egyptians in this country. At least, ever since she read that book on mummies her uncle gave her.)
Earlier this year when I went to Tucson to visit my parents while they were there for the winter my friend “Zalfiro,” as he refers to himself when commenting on this blog, gave me a copy of “Endless Nights,” Gaiman’s first new set of Sandman-related stories in several years, as a belated Christmas present.
Again, very cool.
Finally, for my birthday this year, Scott, his wife Stacy, and Jamie and her husband Casey, all pitched in to get me “Neverwhere” on DVD.
“Neverwhere” was a mini-series that Gaiman developed for the BBC. After it aired, he wrote a novelization of the story.
Which, come to think of it, is what led to this train of thought in the first place, as I was actually re-reading my copy of “Neverwhere,” which made me think about the DVDs, which…
And so we ended up here.
(At 11:00 I switched to Cartoon Network to put on “Family Guy,” so there won’t be any more asides about “The Mummy’s Kiss” and its terrible acting and special effects, though I will say that the tits of the actress playing the Mummy are the best visual effect in the movie. They put in much more believable performance than the rest of the cast, too.)
In any event, if you hadn’t already guessed, there’s no real point to any of this, but I should think that by now that would hardly be surprising.
I think we’ll put an end to this entry there, though. Maybe tomorrow I’ll actually write something with a point, though I would advise against holding your breath…