Literal Barrage

On this, the day of the latest Harry Potter film's release, I stumbled across Cracked.com' Top 6 Reasons Harry Potter Isn't For Kids.
For instance, from Reason #3, "Welcome to the Wonderful World of White Supremacy":

[...]
Rowling, on the other hand, takes the Law & Order approach, lifting the most evil things she could find in history [...]

I recently stumbled across a wonderful thread on the Straight Dope message board posing the following question: What if Lord of the Rings Had Been Written By Someone Else?
Some quick examples, starting with an adaptation that would make Theodor Geisel proud:

"Gandalf, Gandalf! Take the ring!
I am too small to carry this thing!"
"I can not, will [...]

The original helpdesk employees, apparently, were not brought about by the advent of the computer as previously thought. Instead, a far earlier invention spawned an entire industry:

I bet those Gutenberg rollouts were a real bear at monasteries Europe-wide.

Glenn Reynolds pointed out the following highly interesting story over at SciFi.com today:

Diamond Age, based on Neal Stephenson's best-selling novel The Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, is a six-hour miniseries from Clooney and fellow executive producer Grant Heslov of Smokehouse Productions.
When a prominent member of society concludes that the futuristic civilization in [...]

I was extremely surprised to find out that Fox News was readying an interview with O.J. Simpson in advance of his "hypothetical" book's release. I was even more surprised to find out that they not only backed off the interview but also canceled the book itself. I wouldn't have pegged Fox to be [...]

Title: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: A Novel
Author: Susanna Clarke
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Genre: Fiction
Available From: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
Jonathan Strange is an odd book. Its premise is simple: it's the early 19th century and the Napoleonic wars are raging in Europe. England, once the proud seat of European magic and magicians, has all but [...]

In the wake of the Stephen Colbert Whitehouse Correspondents dinner kerfuffle, I was cruising the Internet[s] looking for prior precedent for comedians excoriating a sitting president to his face when I stumbled across a draft version of Al Franken's routine at the 1996 WHC dinner. As I perused the speech, I noted with interest [...]