Sunday, July 15, 2007
Secrets of the last Harry Potter book
My exposure to Harry Potter is limited to the 5 films to date — I just saw Order of the Phoenix an hour ago — plus maybe 20 pages of reading, but I’m going to lay in my predictions for the Big Reveal in book #7 right now. These may be completely off base, but they are based on standard story cycle tropes — lots of mythology and comics and soap operas in my past.
Here are things we know:
• Voldemort couldn’t kill Harry when he was an infant. Or at least couldn’t bring himself to kill Harry.
• In all the scenes we see of Harry’s parents’ deaths, it is only his mother we see being killed. We don't see Harry’s father actually bite it.
• There are any number of wise and powerful people always looking after Harry. And always seeming to keep secrets from him. If they’ve known stuff and kept it from him thus far, they probably still do.
• Per the flashback with Snape in movie #5, Harry’s father had a bit of a mean streak in him.
What always happens to a group like the Order of the Phoenix? (Or like Harry's group of student wizards and witches?) Why, they get taken down by a traitor in their midst. Ergo, I predict that Voldemort is Harry’s father, who succumbed to the Dark Side and became the student of Darth Sidious.
Well, maybe not quite that last bit. But it captures the gist.
Updated on December 16, 2009
Saturday, July 14, 2007
New blog
I’ve finally buckled down and done it. Started a formal blog, using real blogging software (as opposed to maintaining it all by hand).
I have had two blog-like sites in the past, both manually constructed and maintained. The first, from 1999–2000, was called “An Opinion About Everything” — so-named because someone in a mailing list flamewar once accused me of having an opinion about everything, as though that were a bad thing. The second, from 2003–2006, was called “Bouncing Off the Walls” — it was at the site attached to my personal e-mail address, “rubberize”.
This blogging software allows me to backdate posts — perhaps controversial, but less so than with stock options — which I am using to bring in my posts from those other two pseudo-blogs and repost them here, in chronological order, while still being able to post new items as well. (Some of the original posts themselves got updated at some point, so as best I can, I am posting them with their original dates, and adding notes at the bottom indicating updates.)
Despite backdating the entries to put them in the right context, I am not going to rewrite the entries. What I originally wrote and posted for all the world to see (if they happened to trip over my site) should still be something I’m happy to have people read today. (I had better be okay with it, since the web never forgets. Anything I ever posted is archived somewhere.) There are exceptions to that, though: (1) if I spot a typo or puncutation error or HTML coding gaffe, I will fix it; (2) if I had links to websites and those links are no longer valid, I will fix the links or remove them; and (3) if a removed link means that an entire paragraph no longer has valid content, I will remove the paragraph.
Enjoy, and please add comments where you like.
(Oh yeah, and comments: a few of the original posts had manually inserted comments added to them. I’ll do something like that here, when I get to those posts.)
Updated on July 22, 2007
I’ve now completed bringing over the posts from “An Opinion About Everything”. The other blog will take a lot longer to port across.Updated on July 29, 2007
As I’m starting to move through the old blog post, I see some items that are notes about pages I added to the other website, or “Hey, this is my 100th entry!” posts, which don’t have any content worth preserving. I’ve decided to not bring those across into this blog.Updated on December 15, 2009
I’m slowly reposting everything another time following the re-creation of the blog. This time around, I am allowing myself to make a few more adjustments to the content. Entries posted years ago are still a product of their time, but I’m doing a few in-place edits for clarity, and sometimes adding new notes to the end of an entry. I am also unifying the format for the update notes.
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Explosive Decompression
On the radio this morning (KVI, conservative talk radio [now defunct]), Andrew Napolitano was filling in for Tony Snow. And he was (almost) arguing in favor of allowing guns on planes.
Actually, what he said was this (not an exact quote, but damn close):
If the passengers on those planes had had… had been able to exercise their Second Amendment Rights, then September 11 would never have happened.(Note that almost said “had had guns” or something similar, and then backtracked to the PC and gun-absent phrase about the Second Amendment. He said this same phrase at least twice during the broadcast, which tells me that it was a very intentional phrasing, not an “Oops, almost said something on air that I shouldn’t” accident. It gives him plausible deniability: he didn’t actually advocate for guns on planes, and he can’t help it if people mistakenly think he said that he did.)
You’ve got to be kidding me. Anyone out there actually want other passengers to be able to bring handguns on airplanes? Picture the scene: unruly passenger has had one too many — maybe even before getting on board — and the flight attendant won’t serve him, so he pulls out a gun and demands another little bottle of vodka. Or a little bit of “air rage”: one passenger takes the last overhead space, so the next guy’s bag will have to be checked, so he gets angry and shoots the guy. Or a kid pulls out his mother’s gun in the middle of the flight to play with it, and it goes off… and blows a hole in the side of the plane, 30,000 feet over Wichita.
To be sure, there are cases where our freedoms have been impinged or taken away by overly aggressive laws and politicians unwilling to defend them. But this ain’t one. No way do I want anyone — perhaps including an undercover Air Marshall — having a gun on a flight that I’m on. Boxcutters be damned: if someone had had a gun on one of those 9/11 flights, and had used it, it might well have ripped through the cockpit door and hit the pilot, crashing the plane in the process. (And then where would be be? With an airliner crashed into a skyscraper, that’s where.)
Updated on October 5, 2011
Friday, March 11, 2005
God Bless Chris LeDoux
Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap.
Chris LeDoux, one of my favorite country-western singers, died on Wednesday.
I just bought his final album, Horsepower. It arrived in the mail — you guessed it — on Wednesday. I haven’t even opened it yet. (Sorry, Loretta, but you’re getting the boot from iTunes right now.)
Now there’s one less tornado in TexasGuess I’ll be making a special request at the Timberline tonight.
And a saddle that’s empty tonight
There’s one hell of a cowboy in heaven
At that big rodeo in the sky
At that big rodeo in the sky
— “One Less Tornado”, from the album Horsepower
(by Aaron Barker and John Rich; sung by Chris LeDoux)
Updated on October 6, 2011
Wednesday, March 2, 2005
College Bowl for Kids, and the Triumph of Comics
My partner, Rusty, has an 11-year old adopted son from his second marriage. Josh spends about every second weekend at our house.
Today, he and some of his schoolmates competed in “Battle of the Books” (or something like that). The kids had six months to read a set of sixteen books, and then they competed to answer questions based on what they had read.
According to Rusty, Josh’s team won, beating out nine other teams, and they will advance to a regional competition. Further, Josh was the only one of the kids who had read all the books. (I’m not sure if this was just on his team or amongst all the kids.) Further, until Josh started coming to our house, he didn’t read much at all.
The cause? Comic books. Since I’ve been reading them for 25 years, I’ve got a lot of them around, with an increasing number of collected volumes which are on bookshelves, easy to access. I buy a few titles specifically for Josh every month (but I read them, too) — Teen Titans, Teen Titans Go!, Justice League Unlimited, and the now-cancelled Hardy Boys series — and he reads my copies of a few other books every time he is at the house, especially Usagi Yojimbo and most recently, Adam Strange. Josh has also read the likes of Impulse and Scion, and he really liked the new Bone color volume and can’t wait for the next one.
(In contrast, Rusty’s daughter Sarah almost never reads — and certainly not for pleasure — saying that she has no imagination. Personally, I think her imagination has been muted by TV and movies and loud music; who needs to work your own imagination when stuff is pre-imagined for you? But even then, we got her to read Mystic, and she pulled Blankets off the shelf of her own accord.)
If it gets kids to read at all, comics are a good thing. Even more so if gets them to read stuff other than comics!
Added links on October 7, 2011
Sunday, February 20, 2005
What Were They Thinking?
— You Put Your Right Foot In…
“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.
Look closely at the labels on the box that the foot model has stepped in. She put her left foot in the side marked “RIGHT FOOT” and vice-versa. (Maybe her legs were crossed because
she had to pee really bad?) Those may be some painful shoe inserts she gets back.
Updated on March 15, 2005
I’ve since seen one of these ads in another catalog — Hammacher-Schlemmer, I think — which fortunately used a different, correct picture.Updated on October 11, 2011
Stupid, Stupid Ads!
— Will Work for Whiteout
“Stupid, Stupid Ads!” dissects ads that try to do something underhanded or just plain stupid.
This is from a United Way bus shelter ad out around Christmas 2004, maybe a couple weeks later.
Remedial English Lesson
In this sentence, the subject is “One in five homeless people” and the predicate is “are employed”. The subject is composed of a pronoun, “One” (standing in for “A homeless person”), and a prepositional phrase, “in five homeless people.” The plurality of the subject’s noun and the predicate’s verb must match; this sentence is incorrect because “One” is singular while “are” is plural. (The prepositional phrase is excess gravy. It modifies and describes the noun/pronoun, but it does not affect the plurality of the subject. That is controlled solely by the noun or pronoun.) Ergo, the correct sentence should read “One in five homeless people is employed.”I might forgive a homeless person who used bad grammar on his sign, but I certainly won’t forgive the United Way for producing a poorly designed ad. Bad charity, no donation.
Updated on October 10, 2011
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