Our annual winter trip to Boskone and New York City is coming steadily closer, and with it the soon-to-be-infamous pizza crawl in New Haven. Time to get organized.

My last post about this (two down, under the HBO news) drew a lot of comments. Others responded by private email. Sounds as though lots of folks want to be a part of our crawl, and try the famous slices of New Haven.

How many, though? I’m not sure. Some of those responding were interested but indefinite. Others said, “I’m in,” but they were posting anonymously, so I have no idea WHO is “in.” Others used their Live Journal handles and avatars… which is better than Anonymous, but in many cases I still don’t know who you are. Please, guys and gals, use your names, at least for this. Otherwise we may end up with twenty people standing outside of Pepe’s waiting for Billy the Mountain, none of them realizing that Billy the Mountain is really that quiet guy called Fred who turned up twenty minutes ago.

We do need to get a better notion of whether there are going to be ten of us, twenty, fifty, or a hundred (too many, I fear, and we may have logistical problems).

We could also use a volunteer on location in New Haven to help coordinate all this, someone to double check that all the pizza places are open, make reservations where reservations are accepted, and generally get our ducks in a row.

So let’s make it official now. Who’s in? Not maybe, or I’d love to, or I’d-be-in-except-I-live-in-Istanbul, but definitely going-to-be-there-on-February-20 in. And is there anyone there local who can take charge of organizing some of this?

I’ll start. Parris and I are in. That’s 2.

Oh, and please… only pizza crawl comments on this thread. If you want to talk about the HBO deal, go down to my previous post and comment there. I want this particular discussion to stay focused, thank you very much.

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Yes, it’s true.

Yes, this is the Big News that I have been hinting at.

No, the Big News was not the pizza crawl, or the delivery of the new WILD CARDS book, though of course I’m excited about those as well.

VARIETY broke the story this morning. Instead of rehashing what they said, let me just point all of you toward:

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117957532.html?categoryid=14&cs=1

I’ve already gotten close to a hundred emails this morning, just off the VARIETY article. I expect that number will have swollen to several hundred before the day is out. I appreciate all the good wishes and congratulations, but I am NOT going to be able to respond to all of you individually.

I will be making my own announcement on my news page, of course, and that may answer some of your questions, but I haven’t actually written it yet, so please be patient.

I appreciate all the casting suggestions too, but guys, you’re getting way way WAY ahead of yourselves. Developing a television series is a long and time-consuming process, and we’re just getting started here. We only closed the deal a couple of days ago.

I will do my best to keep everyone informed as the project progresses, but this is not something you will be telling TIVO to record next week.

This might be a great time to subscribe to HBO, however. Regardless of what happens with A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, HBO still has the best shows on television, shows like DEADWOOD, THE WIRE, and THE SOPRANOS that stand head and shoulders above anything on the networks. The second season of ROME just started last Sunday, and it’s fabulous; the look of it, the writing, the directing, the acting, all of it is first rate. That’s why I have been saying for years that HBO was the perfect place for A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE.

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Now, this journal entry is mostly intended for readers from Connecticut. If you’re not from Connecticut, there’s probably not going to be a lot here to interest you, so go and talk amongst yourselves.

A few posts back, I wondered whether or not I had any fans in New Haven. Turns out I do. Some of them spoke up in replies to that LJ entry, and others sent me email. Here’s why I asked —

Next month Parris and I will be making our annual visit to Boston for Boskone (a great convention, I urge you all to attend). After the con, we’ll be making our annual post-Boskone visit to New York City. We usually take the train down from Boston to NYC’s Penn Station (soon to be renamed Moynihan Station, I hope, in honor of Parris’s Uncle Pat), and that’s what we plan to do this year… but this year, we’re planning on getting off at New Haven on the way, to try out the pizza.

Some of you may have read my “What I’m Reading” page, and may remember my 2005 review of Ed Levine’s book about pizza, A SLICE OF HEAVEN. If so, you’ll know that I am a huge fan of classic NYC style thin crust pizza pie (“real pizza,” I call it, and don’t talk to me about that Chicago deep-dish tomato and bread casserole thing). Well, Levine’s book claims that the best pizza in the world comes from New Haven. Since that time, I’ve also seen a special on the Food Channel that makes the same claim. Two specific places are mentioned — Frank Pepe’s and Sally’s.

OK. Out here in New Mexico, I live thousands of miles from great pizza (some of the local pies are adequate, but that’s all, and they don’t even call ’em “pies,” which is a dead clue that the pizza is going to be second rate). I can’t stand the thought of riding right past what may be the best pizza places in the world without trying. Ergo…

You’ve all heard of pub crawls. Well, I’m up for a pizza crawl. I want to try BOTH of these famous pizza places, and see how their pie stacks up. And maybe some place called Modern too. I see from my webcrawling that there are some New Havenites who rate that one even higher than Sally’s and Frank Pepe’s.

So here’s the plan. Parris and I leave leave Boston by train on Tuesday, February 20. It will only take us a few hours to New Haven. We’ll check into a hotel, stay overnight, and check out a few slices before departing again for NYC on Wednesday, February 21.

If any of my Connecticut readers want to join us for a slice or three… hey, the more the merrier, I always say. Some local guides would be most welcome… and who knows? If the pizza is as good as advertised, I might even be convinced to make a few knights…

So speak up, New Haven! Who’s game for a pizza crawl?

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Here’s a suggestion for all those complaining about my football posts — DON’T READ THEM.

That’s what I do, when I visit the Live Journal of one of my Friends and discover that the latest post concerns something that doesn’t interest me. I don’t feel the need to add a comment berating them just because their interests are not my interests.

This is my Not A Blog, and I’ll post about whatever the hell I want, thank you.

This past weekend was two solid days of NFL football, the divisional round of the playoffs. With both the Giants and the Jets eliminated, I no longer had a strong rooting interest, but I’m enough of a football fan so that I still watched all four games. (And I do like some teams better than others, so I usually found someone to pull for, or against). Chris Berman and Tom Jackson at ESPN like to say this is the best weekend of the year for an NFL fan, and I think they’re on to something… all four games were tense and exciting, with the verdicts in doubt right down to the end, and there were plenty of terrific plays and memorable moments. My congratulations to the winning teams and their fans, and my condolences to the losers. You can join us Giants and Jets fans in a chorus of, “Wait till next year.”

The biggest postgame controversy came out of the Patriots – Chargers game, where some of the Patriots celebrated their upset victory by dancing on the Chargers logo at midfield, making choking motions, and mocking the sack dance of Charger defensive star Shawn “Lights Out” Merriman. Needless to say, all this public gloating and taunting upset some of the Chargers and their fans, and led to bad feelings and harsh words afterwards. I can understand why. Rubbing salt in the wound, especially when the wound is fresh and raw, is pretty classless. If it had been one of my teams that had lost and was being mocked, I would have been pretty honked off too… and, indeed, during the season, it did anger me whenever I saw a member of an opposing team mocking the Giants’ “ballin'” celebratory lay-up shot gesture after doing something against the Giants (a sack, a TD, whatever).

I really wish the NFL would have the guts to put an end to all these goddamned dances and celebrations and other nonsense. They add nothing to the game, in my opinion. There are rules against “taunting,” yes, but they are narrowly defined and selectively enforced. The league should go much further.

It was one of my own who started all this, I know — Mark Gastineau, a pass rusher for the New York Jets in the 1980s, was the first guy to become famous for a “sack dance.” Early on, I think, it was just an expression of Gastineau’s natural exuberence at making a sack, but when the cameras started focusing on it and commentators started commenting, Gastineau made it his trademark… until the NFL outlawed it. The “Gastineau Rule,” as they called it, defined Mark’s sack dance as taunting and made it subject to a 15-yard unsportsmanlike conduct penalty. As a Jets fan, I will admit, I did not like the rule (maybe because Gastineau was never the same after they prohibited his dance). These days, however, I find myself wondering what the hell ever happened to the Gastineau Rule, and why it is no longer enforced. We need it now more than we ever did in the 80s. These days, gloating, taunting, and bad sportsmanship have become so common that no one even seems to see them any longer.

Plenty of that was on display this weekend. The postgame celebrations of the Patriots were the most flagrant examples, yes… but you know, mocking Shawn Merriman’s “Lights Out” dance is only marginally more offensive than Shawn Merriman’s “Lights Out” dance itself. They both have the same purpose — to rub the other guy’s nose in it.

Every time the NFL tries to crack down on this crap, some idiot sportswriters and TV commentators are sure to start making noises about how that makes ’em the “No Fun League.” Says who? None of this stuff is fun as far as I’m concerned. Not even when it’s my own team. When Michael Strahan makes a sack, it’s the sack itself that I enjoy, not the phantom basketball shot afterward. When one of my teams scores a touchdown, it’s the play that excites me, not some silly dance that the receiver does in the end zone. If I wanted to see dancing, I’d go to the goddamned ballet.

I say, outlaw all of it. The sack dances, the end zone celebrations, the receivers who signal “first down” when catching a ball for a first down (that’s a job for the zebras), the receivers who mime throwing a flag when they think they have been interfered with (never works anyway). Fifteen yards unsportsmanlike conduct for all of it, I say.

The networks could help put an end to all the stuff as well, if they would only stop putting it on camera. When the networks stopped showing the drunken fans running across the field being pursued by security, the drunks stopped running across the field. They should do the same for the TOs and Shawn Merrimans and… yes… Michael Strahans of the league. Show their touchdowns and their sacks, and then CUT AWAY as they go into their chicken dances and “look at me” celebrations, and let us get back to football. That’s what we came for.

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The Giants did not fire Tom Coughlin. Instead they gave him a one-year extension, to ensure “stability” and prevent him from being a lame duck.

Sigh. Personally, if “stability” means collapsing after a 5-2 start, as Coughlin’s teams have done three years in a row, I vote for unstable.

I hope Tom will at least have the sense to make some staff changes, and the courage to declare an open competition for starting QB next year in training camp.

On other fronts… there has been some exciting news this week, but I can’t talk about it yet. Do keep an eye on my news page, however. Big announcement coming soon.

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The good news is, I finally managed to recover my emails and bookmarks. The “how” of it is long and boring, so I won’t go into that. Suffice it to say that while the various fixes suggested by the AOL customer service people in India did not work, I did kinda sorta grasp what they were trying to do, and a couple of days later I finally located a backup file and was able to move it to where it needed to be, and… voila!… I had a filing cabinet and bunch of favorite places again.

It is sort of a Pyrrhic victory, however. The rub here is that the most recent usable backup I was able to find dates from Thanksgiving 2005. So now all I have lost is the last year’s worth of emails… which, of course, contained almost everything that was important. Much of the older mail is no doubt very stale by now… but all the same, there are a few letters in there that I really regret having lost, and I’m glad to have them back.

Anyway, it has been a sobering experience, and I remain resolved to change the way I handle these things. For starts, I am going to clean out all these thousands of unanswered fan mails. Let’s face it, if the letter has been sitting in my queue since 2001 and I haven’t gotten around to giving it the thoughtful, substantive answer it deserved, I will probably never get around to it. I’m going to draft a very simple form reply, send it out to everyone, and clean my inbox. So if you wrote me back four years ago and have been holding your breath ever since… hey, you may get to exhale soon.

At least my bookmarks are back. They hadn’t changed much during the past year, so my losses there were minimal.

I appreciate all the suggestions about other email services I might use, and I likely will make some sort of switch in the near future. The problem is, there are so many suggestions that sorting out which one would actually suit me best would be cumbersome. For all its problems, I have come to appreciate the simplicity of AOL. I do not have the time, the energy, or the expertise to deal with a lot of computer stuff.

Oh, and yes, thanks to everyone who sent condolences on the results of the Jets and Giants games this past weekend. Despite what one might conclude from the scores, I thought the Jets played much better than the Giants did. The Jets hung in there for three quarters with a much more talented opponent, and only truly started to fall apart after that freak lateral. The Giants just proved again that they are talented but undisciplined. The defense stuffed the Eagles three-and-out three times in the first quarter, and three times the G-Men got the ball at midfield… and failed to get a point. Tiki ran brilliantly, of course, and Shockey played like the mad berserker that he is, but the rest of the team…. no, I’m not convinced, and I still want Tom Coughlin fired.

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Well, I spent several hours on the phone yesterday, talking with my local computer guru, my Australian computer guru, and two different service consultants at AOL (from India or Bangladesh would be my guess, judging from their accents). We tried many different things, some several times, but in the end nothing worked. My emails and bookmarks are still gone. It is now starting to look pretty certain that they are lost for good, although there are a few last-ditch things I want to try before I give up completely.

In a way this is a sort of liberation, as I said in my last post here… but it still has me bummed out. Every time I think I have started to put it behind me, I remember another particular bit of email — incoming, out-going, or waiting to be finished — that is now lost to me, and I get morose all over again. It’s a rotten way to start the year.

I am doing a lot of thinking, however. I have to make some serious changes in the ways I handle email. As traumatic as this loss has been, it was ridiculous that I ever allowed myself to get into a position where I HAD more than three thousand unanswered emails in my filing cabinet. Some of them dated as far back as 1998 (the last time AOL treated me to one of these crashes, and wiped out my files). I kept them because, well… many of them were long, thoughtful, moving emails from my readers than I felt deserved replies, and I kept telling myself that one day I would reply to them, but then…

The problem did not occur overnight, of course. There must have been a time in 1998 when I had only ten unanswered emails. And that night I answered five of them, and the next day ten new ones came in, and… well, I did my best to keep up, by fits and starts, but I could never quite do it, even when I resorted to half a dozen different form letters, so over the years I just started falling further and further behind. At one point in 2004, I recall, the number had climbed to over 2500, and I got alarmed and girded up my loins (painful, that) and by hook and by crook got it down under 1600 in less than a month. Then I went away on a trip, and by the time I came back it was over 2500 again.

Of course, I shouldn’t give the impression that all of the mails I lost were fan letters. Far from it. I also had personal correspondence in there, hobby stuff, and lots and lots of business emails. I need a better way to handle those as well.

Right now the thing is too fresh and I don’t know what I am going to do, but I do feel that I have to make changes. If nothing else, the psychological pressure of an ever-increasing amount of accumulating email is enormous… even on nights where I answered fifty letters, I would go away feeling guilty because I knew damn well that another month would pass before I found the energy to answer the next fifty, and during that month I’d fall another three or four hundred emails behind.

There were times early in my career when it felt as if I was publishing my books only to check them down a well. Months and years would pass without me getting a single fan letter of any sort. Maybe it’s the memory of those days that has made me so appreciative of all the readers who have taken the time to write me about my books.

Even so, I can’t go on the way that I was going.

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/>”Gleep” is a word from my distant past, from my college days in the chess club at Northwestern University. It’s what you say when you suddenly realize that you have have just made a very bad move, your opponent has just made a very good move, and/or your position is hopelessly lost. Started as the favorite expression of one guy, but the whole club soon picked it up and started using it, and GLEEP actually became the name of our NU chess club newsletter.

I hadn’t uttered a “gleep” in decades, but one escaped my lips this morning, when I sat down and logged on to AOL and suffered some sort of strange computer hiccup… after which, suddenly, my Personal Filing Cabinet and Favorite Places were both completely empty.

More than three thousand emails and a couple of hundred bookmarks wiped out in the blink of an eye.

Gleep.

This sort of thing used to happen every six months or so with the early versions of AOL, but the more recent versions seemed to have fixed the problem, and I haven’t had my bookmarks or filing cabinet vanish on me since 1998. I thought the system was finally stable, and got a bit complacent, I guess.

Of course, there are now automatic backups built in to the system, and of course I have been trying to use them all morning, to see if I can get anything back. So far, no good. In the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe, as I was still trying to figure out what had happened, four new emails arrived in about a minute. I deleted them and went back to troubleshooting. Unfortunately now, when I try the restore function, it just seems to restore the four post-gleep emails, and not the thousands of older ones that were sitting in my filing cabinet last night.

I haven’t given up yet, but I am starting to feel glum.

Some days I truly hate computers.

Lest anyone have a heart attack, let me hasten to add that this has NOT affected A DANCE WITH DRAGONS or any of my other work-in-progress. I do my writing on a completely different computer than the one I use for email and the internet, in part to guard against viruses, worms, and nightmares like this. My work machine does not even use Windows (which I loathe). I write with WordStar 4.0 on a pure DOS-based machine. Mock if you must… but WordStar and DOS are both stable as rocks, and never give me the sort of headaches I get from Windows. (I won’t even talk about Microsoft Word, about which I have nothing printable to say).

So my novel is safe. It’s just my emails that are lost.

I suppose, if I can’t fix this, I could try to look at it as a sort of liberation. Last night I had more than three thousand emails awaiting answers. This morning I have none.

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Well, okay, the chances are remote… for but one week, at least, I can entertain myself with the possibility, faint as it may be. The Giants and the Jets are both in the playoffs.

The Jets got in yesterday, when they defeated the woeful Raiders in the Meadowlands. (Sorry about that, Lodey). Oakland was 2-13 coming in, so Gang Green was heavily favored… but I have been a Jets fan for a long, line time, and when you’re a Jets fan you learn never to take anything for granted. The Same Old Jets of years past would have found a way to blow this game, and the playoffs with it. They do seem to have turned a corner under the kid coach Eric Mangini, however. For once, they are beating teams they ought to beat. To their credit, the Raiders did not roll over, although their own season ended months ago. They played hard, especially their tough young defense, and made a tight game of it until the fourth quarter. The Jets wanted it more, however. Chad Pennington played a smart, careful, efficient game, and finished the first full sixteen-game season of his career with a convincing win. And Leon Washington, the rookie the Jets picked with the draft choice they got for former coach Herman Edwards, sealed the win with another nifty, darting run.

On paper, the Jets are probably the least talented of the twelve teams to make the playoffs. In fact, they have less talent than several teams that will be staying home in January (the Panthers, Bengals, and Broncos all come to mind). They play tough and smart, however, and unlike the Same Old Jets of yore, they seldom shoot themselves in the foot. That’s what I like so much about them. I have a soft spot for underdogs and overachievers.

As for the Giants, their playoff berth was not certain until a few of Sunday’s games fell out in certain ways, but they had largely assured themselves of a berth the night before when they defeated the Washington Redskins to finish the season at 8-8. That’s after starting the season at 6-2, mind you. The victory over the Redskins was anything but convincing. It wasn’t the Giants that beat the ‘Skins as much as it was Tiki Barber. Last season, Tiki set a franchise rushing record in a game against the Kansas City Chiefs (I blogged about it at the time). On Saturday he broke his own record, rushing for 234 yards and 3 touchdowns. It was another amazing performance from a great player, and had me high-fiving Parris and shouting TIKI! TIKI! TIKI! at the television set. Even so, the Giants barely held on to win. Some “experts” claim that Eli Manning played much better, but I don’t know what game they were watching. In the game I watched, Eli completed less than half his throws and passed for only a hundred yards and change. And some of his misses were just as errant as in past weeks. (One of them actually hit a Redskins DB in the ass).

Tom Coughlin did actually take my advice (posted here last week) and insert Jared Lorenzon in the game… but only for a quarterback sneak, alas. The Hefty Lefty got the first down, but then left the game again. Ah, well. At least he took a snap.

The Giants defense looked as bad as Eli. Time and time again, Tiki would deliver what should have been the crushing blow, only to have the defense let Washington answer with a score of their own, and put the issue in doubt again. The young Redskins QB Jason Campbell looked like the second coming of Vince Young at times. Yes, the defense has suffered on a lot of injuries, but still… they should be much better than this. New York Giants football has always meant DEFENSIVE football. Even in their worst years, the Giants have always fielded a tough defense. It makes me sick to see them getting pushed around this way.

The Giants are the mirror image of the Jets. On paper, they have as much talent as any team in the NFL, and should be able to beat anyone. On paper, there’s no reason why they should not be able to go all the way to the SuperBowl. Alas, the games are not played on paper. It all comes down to coaching, which is why I still want Tom Coughlin fired, playoffs or no playoffs. Eric Mangini has the Jets giving 200 per cent of themselves, while Coughlin is getting maybe 50 per cent out of the Giants (except for Tiki, of course. I am going to miss him so much next season).

So now I have one week to savor the playoffs before Wild Card Weekend will be upon us. Both of my teams play on Sunday. The Jets will be going up to Boston to play the Patriots, the Giants down to Philadelphia to play the Eagles. Bitter archrivals and division foes, in both cases, and in both cases this will be the third meeting of the season — a rubber game, since both regular season series were split 1-1. The home teams will be favored in both games, and rightfully so. Next weekend could see both my teams eliminated. Until and unless that happens, however, I will go on clinging to my hopes. Maybe the Jets will continue to surprise the pundits… maybe the G-Men will finally wake up and play at their talent level… maybe this will be the year we get that Subway Superbowl.

(So says my heart. My head keep telling me it will be the Chargers and the Saints in the Superbowl this year).

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