Talk about a dream duo! Bishop NT Wright of Durham
and even better, COOKIE MONSTER on the Colbert Report.
I had hoped that Cookie Monster would show back up DURING Wright's interview, but no such luck.
ME LOVE THEOLOGY! SO TASTY!
David+
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June 24, 2008
June 18, 2008
June 07, 2008
Mythopoeic Awards Finalists
PRESS RELEASE: June 6, 2008
2008 Mythopoeic Award Finalists
Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature
Goss, Theodora, In the Forest of Forgetting (Prime Books)
Hopkinson, Nalo, The New Moon’s Arms (Grand Central Publishing)
Kay, Guy Gavriel, Ysabel (Roc)
Valente, Catherynne M., Orphan’s Tales, consisting of In the Night Garden (Spectra) and In the Cities of Coin and Spice (Spectra)
Wright, John C., Chronicles of Chaos, consisting of Orphans of Chaos (Tor); Fugitives of Chaos (Tor); and Titans of Chaos (Tor)
Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature
Black, Holly, Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale (Simon & Schuster); Valiant: A Modern Tale of Faerie (Simon & Schuster); and Ironside: A Modern Faery’s Tale (Margaret K. McElderry)
Landy, Derek, Skulduggery Pleasant (HarperCollins)
Rowling, J.K., The Harry Potter series, consisting of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s [Sorcerer’s] Stone (Bloomsbury); Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Bloomsbury); Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Bloomsbury); Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Bloomsbury); Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Bloomsbury); Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Bloomsbury); and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Bloomsbury)
Springer, Nancy, Dusssie (Walker Books for Young Readers)
Thompson, Kate, The New Policeman (HarperTeen)
Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies
Burns, Marjorie, Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien's Middle-earth (University of Toronto Press, 2005)
Flieger, Verlyn, Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien's Mythology (Kent State University Press, 2005)
Gilliver, Peter, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner, The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 2006)
Glyer, Diana Pavlac; appendix by David Bratman, The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community (Kent State University Press, 2007)
Rateliff, John D., The History of the Hobbit, Part One, Mr Baggins; Part Two, Return to Bag-End (HarperCollins, 2007)
Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies
Butler, Charles, Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Children's Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper (Children's Literature Association & Scarecrow Press, 2006)
O’Donoghue, Heather, From Asgard to Valhalla: The Remarkable History of the Norse Myths (I.B. Tauris, 2007)
Shippey, T.A., editor, The Shadow-Walkers: Jacob Grimm’s Mythology of the Monstrous (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005)
Tuerk, Richard Carl, Oz in Perspective: The Magic and Myth of the L. Frank Baum Books (McFarland & Co., 2007)
Williamson, Milly, The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy (Wallflower, 2006)
The Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature is given to the fantasy novel, multi-volume, or single-author story collection for adults published during 2007 that best exemplifies the spirit of the Inklings. Books are eligible for two years after publication if not selected as a finalist during the first year of eligibility. Books from a series are eligible if they stand on their own; otherwise, the series becomes eligible the year its final volume appears. The Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children's Literature honors books for younger readers (from Young Adults to picture books for beginning readers), in the tradition of The Hobbit or The Chronicles of Narnia. Rules for eligibility are otherwise the same as for the Adult Literature award. The question of which award a borderline book is best suited for will be decided by consensus of the committees.
The Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies is given to books on Tolkien, Lewis, and/or Williams that make significant contributions to Inklings scholarship. For this award, books first published during the last three years (2005–2007) are eligible, including finalists for previous years. The Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies is given to scholarly books on other specific authors in the Inklings tradition, or to more general works on the genres of myth and fantasy. The period of eligibility is three years, as for the Inklings Studies award.
The winners of this year's awards will be announced during Mythcon XXXIX, to be held from August 15-18, 2008, in New Britain, Connecticut. A complete list of Mythopoeic Award winners is available on the Society web site:
http://www.mythsoc.org/awards/
The finalists for the literature awards, text of recent acceptance speeches, and selected book reviews are also listed in this on-line section.
For more information about the Mythopoeic Awards, please contact the Awards Administrator:
David D. Oberhelman, awards@mythsoc.org.
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I serve on the Inklings Studies awards committee, so I have some good reading ahead.
David+
June 06, 2008
Myths about Girl Gamers
A list that the girl gamer in my group passed along....
Girl gamers. Evidently, we’re difficult to figure out. Lucky for you, I’ve compiled this nifty little handbook to give you some hints.
1.We want to control the entire game... and you.
You think we want control of such a rag-tag group of guys? I’d rather go bobbing for apples in a deep fryer. If I wanted to control you, I’d show up at the game with a chair and a whip. Sit and ponder that, friend.
2.We’re there because you’re there.
A girl gamer, a REAL girl gamer, is there because she wants to be. Let me ask you this: Do you think you’re charming enough to make a girl unwillingly spend an entire evening with a bunch of people who get that excited about rolling dice? I thought not.
3.We make an effort to date every gamer in the group.
You got us there. We actually keep lists of the gamers we haven’t dated yet, and we check them off as we go. I got extra Girl Gamer Points (GGPs) because I dated all the eligible guys in our group and then managed to cause a major schism, causing half the people to quit talking to the other half. I traded my GGPs in for some rulebooks and a new dice bag and now I’m on the lookout for new victims… Get real.
4.We should be in charge of dinner and/or cleanup.
The next time you think about saddling the girl gamer with dinner preparations, consider her character first. If she’s playing a bitter extraterrestrial terrorist who hates everyone without provocation and dabbles in torture on the side because it’s fun, it’s probably not a good idea to ask. If her character is primarily engaged in kissing up and crocheting, go ahead. Ask.
5.We’re only interested in playing sex kittens or innocent ingénue-types.
Hello, Pot. I’m Kettle. You’re black.
Sure, girl gamers have schticks. So do you, Mr. Lone Wolf… and you, Mr. Combat Monster. And, while we’re at it, let me ask you a question… How many of your characters wear black trenchcoats? Whose brilliant idea was it to give all the bad-asses black trenches?
6.We are utterly incapable of understanding the rules.
Once, I heard a gamer comment, “Hey, man, she’s a girl. Girls don’t get the rules; it’s like a math thing or something.” Buddy, I’ll out-math you any time… and then I’ll tear you into tiny little pieces and eat you for breakfast. We are quite capable of understanding the rules, if you’d explain them in something that approximates English, or loosen your death-hold on the rulebook and just let us read them for ourselves.
7.We flutter our eyelashes at GMs to get our way.
I did that once. The GM very politely gave me what I wanted and, then, I realized I didn’t want it after all (because, as we all know, a good GM gives you what you want and then makes you regret having ever asked). The end result was that I had to extract my foot from my mouth. If you let girl gamers walk all over you as a player or a GM, more fool you. You need to get out and date more, friend.
8.We hate other girl gamers.
Well, sure! Why not? After all, other girl gamers might hog all the GGPs and then we’d be out some valuable prizes. We have to protect our territory, after all. Get real. If a true girl gamer can’t stand another girl in your group, it’s either a personal thing or maybe that girl is one of those fake-scheming-break-up-the-group types we’ve been discussing.
9.We don’t appreciate a good combat.
Correction: We do appreciate a good combat. What we don’t do is a) get sexually aroused over it or b) spend hours upon hours memorizing the caliber and number of shots for a revolver that was last used with regularity in the 1950s. We’ve got better things to do than memorize gun statistics. Like planning out how to spend out GGPs, for instance.
10.Because we are girls, you cannot hope to understand anything about us, including our roleplaying.
Well… maybe there’s a bit of truth in that one, after all.
