• A sam­ple of the newly remas­tered Absolute Sand­man, Vol­ume One of which inci­den­tally now has a cover and release date (Novem­ber 1).
• Frag­ile Things, a new book and cd of short sto­ries, com­ing on Sep­tem­ber 26.
• The cover and some art from his new comics series, Eter­nals (and more here). For dorks in the know, there’s a stun­ning bit of news at the bot­tom of the page… Mar­vel has agreed to (re?)publish Mir­a­cle­man when the rights clear?! (of course, Gaiman’s been in court over that mat­ter for at least a decade, so I’m not hold­ing my breath)

“The book was found open to a page describ­ing, in Latin script, Psalm 83, in which God hears com­plaints of other nations’ attempts to wipe out the name of Israel.”

“one of the big dif­fer­ences between lib­eral dis­dain for con­ser­v­a­tives and con­ser­v­a­tive dis­dain for lib­er­als is that lib­eral dis­dain for con­ser­v­a­tives tends to be issue ori­ented and con­ser­v­a­tive dis­dain for lib­er­als tends to be jin­go­is­tic.
when lib­er­als com­plain about con­ser­v­a­tives it’s usu­ally focussed on things that con­ser­v­a­tives have done while in power.
when con­ser­v­a­tives com­plain about lib­er­als it’s usually(based on lis­ten­ing to rush lim­baugh and bill o’reilly, etc)focussed on jin­go­is­tic slogans(‘they hate life’, ‘they love sad­dam hus­sein’, etc)that have noth­ing to do with any of the seri­ous issues with which we’re confronted.”

• Big Blue Ball, a near-mythical Peter Gabriel album in the works since 1992, is finally near­ing com­ple­tion.
• Atten­tion DJs (or at least folks who like to play with Garage­Band): remix “Shock the Mon­key” and win a… um, some elec­tronic thingie.
• Peter writes about the label and the stu­dio in The Inde­pen­dent:
  

  “The first release on Real World was Pas­sion — the sound­track for the film The Last Temp­ta­tion of Christ. It was also the first time I had recorded with Nus­rat Fateh Ali Khan, and per­haps the most extra­or­di­nary ses­sions to this day were when we were in the attic stu­dio, which had a raised bal­cony at the back. The Indian vio­lin­ist L Shankar stood up on the bal­cony and Nus­rat was stand­ing just behind the desk on the main floor. I think every­one had hairs stand­ing on the backs of their necks as the music started. Both of them took the melody and made it their own. It was like ten­nis when you think the rally can’t get any bet­ter but each player raises their game and it just goes up and up. Amaz­ingly emo­tional: it was India and Pak­istan work­ing together for a film about Christ”

• At the time of Live 8, Peter Gabriel righly pointed out no one had asked hardly any non-western musi­cians to par­tic­i­pate. Live 8 at Eden: Africa Call­ing, a new live album culled from the Live 8 event put together by Gabriel and Yous­sou N’Dour.

• alpha­bet­iz­ing solo artists by their first names, and any band whose name begins with “The” under “T”
• sup­ports only the extremely unpop­u­lar Win­dows Media DRM, exclud­ing Linux, Macs, iPods, etc.
• no reviews, cred­its, liner notes, or even orig­i­nal release dates

“Experts agree that unless a child learns to speak by the age of five, the brain misses its win­dow of oppor­tu­nity to acquire lan­guage, a defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic of being human.”