Our friend Dan Meyer, professional sword swallower and winner of the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize in medicine, is … well, really, where do you go after that? Of course he’s an unforgettable character. In addition to swallowing swords, Dan has a passion for collecting languages and exotic animals. From a recent Facebook exchange:

All together now! “Watch me wallaby’s feed, mate, watch me wallaby’s feed! They’re a dangerous breed, mate, so watch me wallaby’s feed!”

Here’s a fun thing: I dumped the introductory chapter of my book into Wordle. Wordle … um, it’s kind of hard to explain what it does, so I’ll use the site’s own words:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

Yeah, that. Anyway, here’s the intro to MCMoM:

It’s a book about people.

The life of an author in the 21st century. My publisher had me do a homemade promotional video that she could shop around to television shows. I did two–one on financial etiquette, one on pet etiquette (co-starring Milo, of course!) Here’s the first. It’s very homemade, but it was good enough to get me on the “Today Show,” so hey!