Filed under: Playground bureau You want to create a family budget, but aren't sure how to get started. Here's a good place to start: Keep track of your receipts for one month. -- Alpha Mom Same-sex birthday parties are a common way to manage the headcount at birthday parties, especially if you can't...

Remarkably, on its fourth weekend, the well-reviewed Coraline is still hanging in there--it grossed more than $5 million and placed eighth on its way to some $70-million in total domestic gross--even though new opener Jonas Brothers: The 3-D Concert Experience took over its 3-D theaters. Writer-dire...

Many years ago (as the story goes), while singer Tori Amos was still pregs with her first child, the amazing author (and personal friend of Tori) Neil Gaiman composed a poem/prayer for her “bump” that Tori and her husband Mark Hawley said looked like a blueberry (or something along those...

Announcement Initial Publication of Ulysses (Image from Wikipedia ) Yesterday, I inquired about Neil Gaiman's borrowing of what he calls a "Traditional Nursery Rhyme": Rattle his bonesOver the stonesIt's only a pauperWho nobody ownsSpecifically, I wondered if it were truly a nursery rhyme, for it se...

The new Kindle apparently can "read out loud"—that is speech-synthesize—its books. Paul Aiken, director of the Author's Guild, told the Wall Street Journal they can't do that:"They don’t have the right to read a book out loud. ... That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright la...

According to my email from Planned Parenthood this morning, it’s National Condom Week. They sent out a link to their playlist of their favorite condom videos on YouTube, but I found something even better: This is from Neil Gaiman’s “Death Talks About Life,” a PSA comic about ...

Trojan puts the VD in Valentine's Day (Another clever ad from the condom company's "Evolve" campaign) (Ad Age, reg. required) - Young viewers give Grammy ratings a much needed boost (drawn in by the likes of Jennifer Hudson, Miley Cyrus and The Jonas Brothers. Plus teen fave Nick Cannon is set to st...

On starting your own religion Over the last few weeks, I've been watching the BBC's Around the World in 80 Faiths programme, in which a member of the clergy - who looks uncannily like the internet's Neil Gaiman - travels the planet exploring the world's religions. Last week, the anti-Gaiman was in I...

Dreams are fleeting, irrational experiences that distort, compress and bend reality in innumerable ways, often defying their own internal, transitory laws even as they are defined. In spite of these mercurial qualities, dreams can be both a sweet release from the physical world, and a chilling remin...

Before seeing Henry Selick's rather amazing "Coraline," I was convinced that 3-D, be it in movies or television, was simply a gimmick to catch our extremely short attention spans for a few seconds. Now, however, at least when it comes to animation, you can count me as a true believer. Actually, I wa...