As I was walking through the Penguin Group booth at BookExpo Saturday afternoon, I noticed a crowd around one of the center tables, and when I realized it was John Hodgman, the author of The Areas of My Expertise, I figured, cool, this would be my chance to finally meet the man I've only ever interviewed by email, time and time again. And it was fun! He very generously signed a copy of the brochure for his forthcoming book, More Information Than You Require, for my wife, and we chatted about our mutual veneration of Galactus, Devourer of Planets. (Because, to paraphrase either Stephen Merritt or Daniel Handler's assessment of Ganesh in the liner notes to 69 Love Songs—I can't find the box set and I'm not spending a half-hour looking for it now—when confronted with an entity like Galactus, Devourer of Planets, veneration would seem to be an appropriate response.)

Anyway, I hadn't realized at the time that it would be Hodgman's birthday today—nor did I know he shared a birthday with Julie Buxbaum, who I'd caught up with earlier that day, signing a copy of her debut novel, The Opposite of Love, for Dennis Lehane and his wife, while their mutual friend (and mine) Diana Faust looked on. (And, really, this sort of juxtaposition, or rather this convergence of all the different sorts of literary threads I follow, is pretty much what BookExpo is all about, at least for me, at least at this point in my trade-show-going life.)