Fortunetelling, Mouse Guard ... and Stephen King

Everything's coming up mouses today!

Myomancy: Divination by means of mice. This Balderdash-worthy word comes to you compliments of my friend Kevin C., who recycles old page-a-day calendars for note paper and found it on a page from a Forgotten English calendar. Wikipedia seems to think it had something to do with the little buggers chewing on things; I prefer that to digging around in mus mus entrails.

One of the pop culture sites I check into on a regular basis mentioned Mouse Guard: Fall 1152, a hardcover collection of the Mouse Guard comics. I am new to the world of comics/graphic novels, but there's a good local store and so I picked up a copy today. I haven't started it yet but it looks gorgeous! Pluswhich, it's all about tough little mice fighting evil snakes with swords ... how can I lose?

And finally, I just read Stephen King's newest novella, The Gingerbread Girl, available only in the July issue of Esquire (the one with a mostly naked Angelina Jolie on the cover). I read it really quickly (I have a bad habit of rushing through reading materials that I'm excited about - I just can't wait to see what happens) and I'll go back and read it again in the next day or so; it's a thriller rather than a horror story since the monster is a man with nothing supernatural about him. I did notice one peculiar thing, however: the bad guy's name is "Pickering" which is fine ... except that in King's novel Insomnia, one of the bad guys' names is also "Pickering." There's no alt-verse crossover between the novel and the new novella, so these are two separate individuals. I don't mean to cast aspersions on SK - I love his stuff and have dozens of his books - but surely he could have come up with a new name. Ah well, recycling is all the rage these days, I guess.