Whedon, meet Gaiman. Gaiman, meet Whedon.

That sound you hear is the sound of geeks’ heads exploding all over the world at the news that Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman have interviewed one another for a Time Magazine article.

At least, I hope it’s their heads.

TIME: Neil, you’re a big blogger these days, right?

NG: I’ve been blogging since February of 2001. When I started blogging, it was dinosaur blog. It was me and a handful of tyrannosaurs. We’d be writing blog entries like, ‘the tyrannosaurus is getting grumpy.’

These days there are 1.2 million people reading it. It’s very, very weird. We have this enormous readership, as a result of which now I feel absolutely far too terrified and guilty to stop. I’d love to stop my blog at this point, but there’s this idea that there will be 1.2 million people’s worth of pissed-off-ness that I hadn’t written anything today.

JW: That’s the problem with doing anything. Everybody expects you to keep doing it, no matter what.

NG: For me, it’s always that Mary Poppins thing. I’ll do it until the wind changes. The joy of doing Sandman was doing a comic and telling people, no, it has an end, at a time when nobody thought you could actually get to the end and stop doing a comic that people were still buying just because you’d finished. Probably of all the things I did in Sandman, that was the most unusual and the oddest. That I stopped while we were outselling everybody, because it was done. What everybody wants is more of what they had last time that they liked.

JW: Every other question I get is about the Buffy-verse.

NG: Except the trouble is, as a creator…I saw a lovely analogy recently. Somebody said that writers are like otters. And otters are really hard to train. Dolphins are easy to train. They do a trick, you give them a fish, they do the trick again, you give them a fish. They will keep doing that trick until the end of time. Otters, if they do a trick and you give them a fish, the next time they’ll do a better trick or a different trick because they’d already done that one. And writers tend to be otters. Most of us get pretty bored doing the same trick. We’ve done it, so let’s do something different.

Did Dunst out Spidey 3 villains?

Sam Raimi and company have been maniacal about secrecy about the villains in the next Spider-Man movie, but it sounds like Kirsten Dunst, who plays Mary Jane Watson, may have just let the cat out of the bag:

“We have really great people though as the villains in this film, Thomas Haden Church and Topher Grace — Venom and Sandman,” says Kirsten Dunst while promoting her film “Elizabethtown.”

“Maybe I wasn’t supposed to say that,” she says, checking with her rep, who assures her the information has already been released.

The “Interview with a Vampire” actress is a little shaky on the information at first, saying that Church would play Venom and Grace would take on Sandman, before reversing her claim when a journalist expresses disbelief. “It’s the other way around. You’re right,” she concedes.

Skinny little Topher seems a strange choice for Venom, unless they’re doing him with CGI for the most part, which would make sense.

The Offspring come out and play at BlizzCon

In addition to being able to rub elbows with the great unwashed World of Warcraft playerbase during BlizzCon (and getting a baby murloc pet to follow my character around in the game, making gurgling noises), the Offspring will be playing the final night of BlizzCon. Nice bonus.

I assume the Offspring play on the Horde side.

iSubway

Baffling story of the day: New York’s and San Francisco’s mass transit systems don’t want people putting unofficial maps of the systems on their iPods.

The New York Times reported in June that the MTA has begun registering its colorful route symbols as trademarks and has sent more than 30 cease-and-desist letters to businesses that had been using the route symbols to sell such items as bagels, perfume, T-shirts and tote bags.

The financially strapped MTA has a licensing department that has approved about 25 product lines, including neckties and coffee mugs, the Times reported.

Bright also used a map that became outdated when the BART system extended one of its lines and shortened another, said Jim Allison, a spokesman for BART. “We don’t have a problem with people disseminating information about BART,” Allison said. “We do have a problem with people pirating information that is incorrect,” he said.

Unless this is all an effort to shake down iPodSubwayMaps.com, this is inane. Demanding licensing fees to provide this service — even though BART will be doing the same thing for free shortly, allegedly — really misunderstands how much people are willing to pay for this, and thus how much money BART is losing out on.

And “pirating information that is incorrect?” First off, how massively self-important is it to claim that reprinting a subway map is piracy? That’s neither intellectual property nor is it information that BART has a compelling interest in keeping proprietary. In case they’ve forgotten, their mission is to provide affordable and convenient public transporation in and around San Francisco. And iPodSubwayMaps.com will naturally update their maps when they (rarely) change. That’s an insulting load of BS to pass off as a legitimate reason.

San Franciscans or Oaklanders (like, say, Mom and Dad) might be well-served to give a call to their local council members and ask them to remind BART to focus on their mission instead of picking fights with people who are trying to make using BART easier and more convenient.

Talk Like a Pirate Day!

In honor of September 19 being Talk Like a Pirate Day, me hearties, click here to read this entire site in a more piratical frame of mind.

Thems that clicks will be the lucky ones.