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J.K., You Devious Fiend!
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…
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Making Lord Of The Rings Accessible To All Literary Palates
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!”…
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…Or Else, My Brother, I Might Have To Get Medieval On Your Heiney!
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.
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Stephenson’s Work On The Small Screen? Hooray! Diamond Age! Eh. George Clooney! …Wha?
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…
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Good Taste Wins Out, For Once
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 the network…
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Magic, Mystery, Mayhem And Murder: It’s Book Review Time.
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,…
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Scalzi Beaten To The Punch By… Al Franken?
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 the…
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I Think I Broke Amazon…
Amazon will occasionally send me email with recommendations for me to check out. Apparently, I have been confusing the heck out of their suggestions system, as the above email is the result. Yes, they simultaneously recommended War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race and What to Expect When You’re…
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Hey Nobrainer, I Think You’re Due A Royalty Check…
You’ll slap yourself over this one, as you too could have traded your disdain for OPEC in for a phat book deal. Looks like your anti-OPEC arguments are represented fairly substantially in Learsy’s Over a Barrell. *grin*