Harry News: Rowling (almost) Wronged Ron

January 6, 2012 by 7 Comments

My mother sent me a link to the Guardian newspaper article which reports that JK Rowling once considered killing off Ron Weasley. I had always assumed that there was an unwritten contract between Rowling and her readers that the Big Three of Harry, Hermione, and Ron were all untouchable. From the sounds of it, that was indeed the case, but Rowling contemplated breaking that contract. Rowling says she thought of killing Ron out of spite, because she “wasn’t in a very happy place,” but the article doesn’t delve into that more intriguing backstory.

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Steven Tyler In His Own Words

January 5, 2012 by 2 Comments

Steven Tyler has been in the news this past week for his engagement to his girlfriend of the past seven years, Erin Brady. There have been rumors that his family is upset about the engagement, pictures of the ring, and pictures of a shirtless Tyler strolling the sands of Hawaii.

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Marcus Fights Amazon

January 3, 2012 by Leave a comment

Over the holidays, Marcus Books attempted to fight back against Amazon. The nation’s oldest black-owned bookstore added a Chrome extension called, “Amazon, huh?” which pops up with the following message for those browsing Amazon.com:

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The Truths of Time Travel

January 3, 2012 by 5 Comments

I was thinking about my childhood fascination with the Doctor Who theme song the other night because, well, you’d think about it too if that was one of your childhood highlights, and also because I’ve finally been getting to the new Doctor Who. New. As in 2005.

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Carlos the Jackal, Old School Terrorist

December 21, 2011 by Leave a comment

It’s hard for me to think of cold war terrorists without thinking of either James Bond villains or the novels of Frederick Forsyth. As a child, I read The Day of the Jackal around when Carlos the Jackal was in the news and I figured the novel was a coded re-telling of his exploits.

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Vaclav Havel Dies

December 18, 2011 by 2 Comments

Vaclav Havel has passed away at the age of 75. Here’s the BBC obituary.

Havel was a playwright and, at the start of his writing career, he was a very funny playwright. Plays like The Memorandum were aimed at the Communist bureaucracy but would transfer just as easily to the Office-like idiocies of Capitalist companies. Or The Garden Party, where a clerk tells his progress-obsessed boss that he’s just read Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, to which the enthusiastic boss replies “Soon we’ll be able to read at even greater depths!”

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Sunday Reading: Jillian Lauren

December 18, 2011 by Leave a comment

Marc Maron recently interviewed Jillian Lauren on his podcast WTF. Lauren is the former call girl and current author, of both Some Girls: My Life in a Harem Read more of this post

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E-Book Economy

December 17, 2011 by Leave a comment

The Wall Street Journal has an article up noting that:

The price gap between the print and e-versions of some top sellers has now narrowed to within a few dollars—and in some cases, e-books are more expensive than their printed equivalents.

It’s the anti- Louis CK model. Deliver material at lower cost to the publisher, don’t pass along those savings, and make the media more restrictive. Perhaps they’re counting on the fact that most users don’t know how to pirate e-books, but the current system seems to be begging for readers to learn.

Filed under Books, Entertainment

Twilight of and for the Youth

December 9, 2011 by 1 Comment

In the summer of 2008, I was teaching expository writing to groups of middle school kids, on the campus of a fancy private university. In each of the three two-week sessions, about two thirds of the students were girls. And in each of the three two-week session, approximately one hundred percent of the girls were reading Twilight.

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