The Slumbering Lungfish Dybbuk Hostel and All-Night Boulangerie

A comic book artist, eh? Pretty neat. It's not POG illustration, but I'm still pretty impressed by people who manage to get their drawings published. Very cool.

I've always wondered how Sjöberg was pronounced . . . is "Shoberg" a decent jab at it?

Oh. I just looked up your dad on the Web. It looks like he's done lots of work which may have been seen by the public.

Yeah, he's written and illustrated three children's books and done a lot of illustration, including the album art for The Adventures of Panama Red. And that's in addition to his music career.

Oh, and it's pronounced like the first part of "Showboat" and the last part of "Iceberg." That's in English. In Swedish it's a good deal different.

All you Lore junkies out there can hear how his last name is meant to be pronounced, straight from the horse's mouth (so to speak):

http://www.brunching.com/bjorksong.html

Thanks for explaining about your name. I had at one point edited your Wikipedia entry to include the last name Shoberg, but it was edited out. So I put my understanding of the background on the discussion page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Lore_Sj%C3%B6berg

Am I correct in assuming Velcro was referring to you and not your father?

Sure thing, and yes, you're correct.

In fact, the Sj in Sjöberg in Swedish is so difficult to pronounce that the International Phoneticians' Association had to put a special mark in their IPA alphabet just for it. It's a sort of Elder Sign of phonetic writing. It's called a "voiceless palatal-velar fricative" for laughs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_palatal-velar_fricative

(Actually not all Swedes pronounce it as such. And you certainly don't have to, if you are speaking English.)

How very cool. The two Houses were my very favorite comics when I was a kid.

On the barely related subject of older works by people whose name is Lore, I have a question. For reasons I won't get into, I recently decided to look up the Book of Ratings rank on Amazon.com. Rather than sensibly searching for the book title, I searched by author for "Lore Sjöberg", which yielded no results. I correctly deduced that ö/o confusion was the problem, but found two books on a search for "Lore Sjoberg".

One was the expected Book of Ratings by "Lore Fitzgerald Sjoberg" (today's sales rank #366,244, down from yesterday's #320,789, if you're curious). The other, by merely "Lore Sjoberg", is an out of print Prima strategy guide to the game "Devo Presents Adventures of the Smart Patrol".

In so many respects this seems like a project you would take, but in the approximately 7-8 years I've followed your online writings, I cannot recall seeing mention of this book. Is this in fact an example of your early professional writing? If so, is it something worth tracking down? For that matter, is the game?

That's very strange. I signed a contract to write that about ten years ago, but it was cancelled, presumably because of poor sales of the game in question. I don't really remember the details, but the upshot is that the book in question doesn't actually exist. I guess it's some weird by-product of Amazon's catalog system.

Boy, that sounds like something just itching for a score of fake reviews.

This shouldn't stop anyone from writing a nice review for it, however.

I'm probably a little late, but I've always pronouced the begining of your name like the begining of bjork, but without the R. I also took a little German a while ago, so when I see an umlaut O, I read it as an "oi", because of this I pronouce your last name "S(slight y sound) oi - berg". I will correct this now.

I wondered for 30+ years whatever happened to your dad, who I knew in Marin County during the early 70's. I remember him working on the drawings for the Panama Red album. He and Chris Harms ("Toots and Toots") had a get-together in Fairfax for the New Riders. Spencer Dryden made margaritas. You were there, too.