Went to the National Book Festival with a friend on Saturday. It was pretty fun, if hard on my feet.

Highlights:

Listened to Neil Gaiman speak for several minutes, and sat down to listen to George R. R. Martin speak as well. Neil was a much better orator, but Martin wasn't bad.

Bought Neil Gaiman's new book Anansi Boys and the first Sandman comicbook for signing.

Walked over to get my two Neil Gaiman purchases signed. Horrified to see that the line was easily three times longer than any other, including popular authors like Tom Wolfe or John Irving. My friend went on that line, while I...

Stood on another line for a good two hours to get my copy of A Clash of Kings to be signed by Martin. During that period I read some of Sandman as well as listening to the people on line talk. There was one guy in front of me who had bought the first print of A Game of Thrones for somewhere around $500. When Martin signed it, he mentioned that the book could probably go for $1000 on ebay. Wow. Also listened to several people talk about Robert Jordan, and a (male) nerdy teenager chat up a (female) college student. Both teenager and college student had ponytails. The male teenager's was longer.

After having Martin sign my book, stumbled off to find my friend still on a ridiculously long line. And then we waited. And waited. And waited some more for good measure. We were still on line when the book festival was supposed to end. Some fear of standing in line for naught arose, until good tidings came from a messenger, Neil Gaiman would stay and sign our books. Nice guy. And thus, somewhere around 5:30 P.M. I was done with the book festival. Having a nifty digital clock, I was shocked to see that I had been standing in lines for a total of three hours. I've probably gone longer once or twice in my life, but certainly for something more significant than to glimpse one of my idols and have some ink on a page.

After the book festival saw some people holding hands and dancing around in a circle. Assumed that it was part of the anti-war protest going on Saturday. Horribly, horribly wrong. A man was waving a flag, and my friend tried to read it, even though it was facing the wrong direction. And then he tells me to just read the very first word. Pagan. We couldn't quite figure out what they were doing, and settled on citing possible summoning of pagan deities as good reason to go somewhere else.