Was it God?

no, don't think so. but one of the early figures. noah or someone. can't remember. i last did this in first year, which was 8 years back and i wasn't interested at the time, so this is good going....

The thing about the shoes is intresting. In his book "The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries" Carlo Ginzburg pointed out something about heroes who visit the realms of the dead and come back usually having some peculiarity regarding shoes or legs/feet, in most mythologies. Unfortunately I won't have access to his book, nor to AG, for about 2 months, so I won't be able to check...

regarding feet and footwear - from my understanding of the feet and taking shoes off before entering into any sacred place (of which the lake or water area would be also me imagines..) is the fact that feet touching the earth is a communication with the ground - cf Sandman's angels Duma and Remiel (?) whose feet do not 'touch the base clay of Man' in S.O.Mists.
Also, god walking in genesis, feet touching earth there - something about our mortality and our connection with the earth we live from.
In regards to the lake, also practical measure of shoes being a clothing item, and a dream self would want to keep your dream self warm?!*grin*

this is kinda a side point but I'm a theatre studies student and we were recently talking about performances and ways of showing character.

One of the most binding thing you can wear on stage are a pair of shoes (I don't mean actually physically, in that sense a load of skirts and a corset does the trick) but shoes anchor your character. If you are wearing trainers to portray a gym goer you cant really jump into playing a corporate investor. I recently saw a play -'Shuteye' where half the time the characters were in a dream and when they were they took off their shoes. This meant that their characters were more flexible and harder to categorise.

I doubt that the reason Shadow has no shoes is really anything to do with that but its a nice idea that ties into where he is in the book.

Sorry for wasting time but I'm putting off going to bed

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Originally posted by marymac:
totally irrelevant, but - the 'person a long time ago' is a biblical character, whose name i've now forgotten. anyway, trivia for the day.

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Psalms 90:10, attributed to Moses: "The days of our years are three-score years and ten, ..." The earliest cite in my Shorter OED for "score" meaning "20" is 15thC, but I think that's far enough for practical purposes.

I think the UK edition is just wrong. No doubt there are also dead children in (luggage) trunks and big old wardrobes and other such containers, half buried in the lake mud, but not in 100+ cars. (In any other town there might be more than 100 cars down there -- easily; I know that kind of country, too, and it's not at all amazing to anyone what finds its way into lakes, old mine diggings, and any natural ground fault -- but in Lakeside there's only one per year, with a child in it.)

I agree that it's probably a copyeditor's error. I don't have any paperback editions to check; I wonder if it's been corrected there?

Knew it was biblical.

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Originally posted by Dweller in Darkness:
That's just odd. and the country who wouldn't know a "score" if it fell on its collective noggin doesn't get an explanation.

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I can assure you that I, as well as most people my age in the U.S., know what "score" means.

"That which is dreamed can never be lost, can never be undreamed."

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Originally posted by malintencionado:

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Originally posted by Dweller in Darkness:
That's just odd. and the country who wouldn't know a "score" if it fell on its collective noggin doesn't get an explanation.

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I can assure you that I, as well as most people my age in the U.S., know what "score" means.

"That which is dreamed can never be lost, can never be undreamed."

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In all American defitions, as a unit of measure, "score" means either 20, generally when after a cardinal number (as in "fourscore") or an indefinitely large number. As a result, a score is basically a fancy way saying "lots."

As a result, if I were to pelt your noggin with a score of foam rubber balls, you wouldn't know whether I'd hit you with 20 of them or just lots of them.

My initial understanding was that in the UK, "score" as a unit of measure rather clearly meant "20," as explained to me by my grandfather. In the interim, it seems, that absolute definition has been watered down, to the point where "scores" now simply means "lots" as well. So, yes, I was wrong in the comparison, but you still don't know how many foam rubber balls I'm about to pelt you with.

* throws scores of foam rubber balls at malintencionado *

Oh, I'm going to the special Hell.
-Captain Malcolm Reynolds

LOL! You have too much time on your hands!

"That which is dreamed can never be lost, can never be undreamed."

I'm surprised someone hasnt pointed this out yet. Neil generally doesnt give us any more information than Shadow himself receives (ignore the huge sidetracks and that one Sam & Mr. Town incident). So, imagine you've just discovered a dead girl in the trunk of a car, and you and the car and the body have all just fallen into nigh-on-freezing water and are trapped beneath the ice. Do you think Shadow really cared about getting the number exactly right? Also, if the lake is covered in ice, the ice is probably covered in snow, and its got to be mighty murky down there. It would be impossible to see a hundred cars, even if there were thousands. He was just impressed with the amount, is all. dont get all picky!

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Originally posted by thatbox:
I'm surprised someone hasnt pointed this out yet. Neil generally doesnt give us any more information than Shadow himself receives (ignore the huge sidetracks and that one Sam & Mr. Town incident). So, imagine you've just discovered a dead girl in the trunk of a car, and you and the car and the body have all just fallen into nigh-on-freezing water and are trapped beneath the ice. Do you think Shadow really cared about getting the number exactly right? Also, if the lake is covered in ice, the ice is probably covered in snow, and its got to be mighty murky down there. It would be impossible to see a hundred cars, even if there were thousands. He was just impressed with the amount, is all. dont get all picky!

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Just a warning, I'm going to get picky. Snow usually doesn't pile up on frozen lakes. They are flat areas, so the wind usually whips across them, pushing the snow off to one side or the other. (I live near one, and we get a lot of snow over the winter.) Also, much of the activity that churns up the muck at the bottom of a lake settles down during the winter, so the water is probably pretty clear. A fair amount of light should make it through the ice, making the contents of the lake fairly visible. Of course, if a person is freezing, suffocating, and has just confirmed that a dead little girl is in the trunk of a car, I doubt they have enough time to make an exact count. Can't think of any examples were Shadow showed an unusual ability to count large numbers of objects at a glance, so I'm going to have to go with the rough estimation thing. Any references to Shadow being a big fan of Judge Wapner? (sp?)