I woke up this morning and had a look at Twitter (as you do). To my surprise, I saw this:

@web_goddess bahh! @neilhimself posted a link to your Dahl site (measles piece)! lol! 🙂

– miftik (@miftik) February 2, 2015

Wait, what? Neil Gaiman tweeted a link to my site? I went in search.

Heartbreaking and wise Roald Dahl letter to his readers about measles and his daughter Olivia. http://t.co/MdgLiLAMlb (via @timminchin)

– Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) February 1, 2015

Wow. He really did! Turns out he got it from Tim Minchin. (Tim, of course, wrote the music for “Matilda”.)

So here’s the very sad #oliviadahl letter again: http://t.co/viSDnWgpWU And now I’m off to have hot chocolate with my vaccinated kids.

– Tim Minchin (@timminchin) February 1, 2015

I discovered pretty quickly that a LOT of other people had picked up the story. They were all linking to this letter from Roald Dahl about why you should immunise your children. His daughter Olivia died from measles encephalitis. I posted that letter on the site about two years ago and then completely forgot about it. I’ve actually been following the story of the recent Disneyland measles outbreak with fascination (don’t even get me started on those stupid, stupid “anti-vaxxers”) and never remembered there was a big tie-in to Dahl. But somehow over the past three days it blew up in a really big way.

See? I’m still not sure who actually started it. People have been tweeting links to the page off and on for the past two years, but the most recent one that could have started the avalanche was from Charles Simmins. On the 30th someone wrote about the issue on Daily Kos. Was that where it picked up steam? Kottke tweeted about it, but it didn’t really go nuts until Tim Minchin and Neil Gaiman picked up on it. It spread to Facebook where it’s still trending. At some point the folks at the official site got wind of it and started emailing and tweeting sites, suggesting they instead link to the page on their site instead. (Fair enough. They contacted my site too so I happily put a note on the page.) Right now lots of sites are still writing about it but most are just reproducing the text themselves. So while my site did get a really big spike – about 10x its normal traffic – I suspect it’s not as big as it could have been. In the end most of my traffic was from Twitter and Facebook, where folks mostly don’t bother to go back and change links to things. And I’m still getting some clicks from sites like Get Off My Internets, Refinery29, Reddit, and even Metafilter.

So there’s my 15 minutes of Internet fame for 2015, I guess!

Checkout Girl: Fantastic Mr Fox Costumes – These made me laugh and laugh. So brilliant. Cross-posting to RDF…

So, this exists. Too bad I can’t link that URL on my site though.

The Snook and I were on a run through Newtown Tuesday morning when I spotted this shirt in a shop window. I stopped in my tracks to take a photo.

Snook: What’s up?
Me: Somebody’s been reading his Roald Dahl.

Long-time readers will recall that last year I gave a Roald Dahl presentation for my nephew’s third-grade class in Willoughby. It went so well that his teacher has asked me to come back again this year. Fun, right? So that’s scheduled for next week. Well, when Amy (who is a librarian, you know) found out, she asked me to come speak at the Abbotsleigh School Literary Festival too. That was last week, and it was pretty hilarious. I mean, the program was full of actual children’s authors and important people — and ME. I gave the same presentation as last year: who I am, how I became a Dahl fan, a bit about Dahl’s life, how I started my website, how I visited Gipsy House, and then some of the more interesting items from my Dahl collection. I had two sessions, first the fourth-graders and then the third-graders. I didn’t realise there was such a huge cognitive leap between those age groups! The fouth-graders were well-behaved and attentive, and they asked lots of good questions about Dahl. They were also strangely obsessed with hearing about his divorce! The third-graders were more fidgety and kept asking the same questions over and over. One of them asked what he died of, and I made the mistake of saying “pneumonia” (among other things). That led to 10 minutes of “What’s pneumonia?!” and “My grandpa had pneumonia but he didn’t die!” Lesson of the day: 9-year-olds go for the soap opera; 8-year-olds go for death and disease.

Patricia Neal has passed away from lung cancer at 84. She was Roald Dahl‘s first wife and the mother of his children. She had an amazing life. (Thanks to Christopher for the tip.)