EXCLUSIVE (but fabricated) Harry Potter spoilers
 Scholastic, the publisher of the "Harry Potter" books, printed 12 million copies of "Harry Potter And the Deathly Hallows", one of which arrived at our door, personally delivered by the mailman, last Saturday.
"I never leave them at the door because people steal them," he said.
(This guy is an improvement over our last mailman, who wouldn't leave anything except a trail of incompetence.)
I am currently 550 pages in, and can reveal a couple of spoilers:
- Voldemort is a girl
- Wizards do not produce saliva
- The action takes place in Salt Lake City
- Cthulhu is involved, and Mitt Romney
- The whole series is revealed to have been a dream
It is interesting to note that this book has already broken many retailers' one-day sales records, having moved in excess of eight million copies Saturday.
I looked for the top-selling novels of all time and, though sales figures are disputed, the following titles are believed to have sold over 10 million copies in hardcover and paperback:
* Jonathan Livingstone Seagull - Richard Bach
* The Exorcist - William Peter Blatty
* Jaws - Peter Benchley
* God's Little Acre - Erskine Caldwell
* Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
* To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
* The Thorn Birds - Colleen McCullough
* Peyton Place - Grace Metalious
* Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell (estimated 28 million copies)
* 1984 and Animal Farm - George Orwell
* The Godfather - Mario Puzo
* The Carepetbaggers - Harold Robbins
* The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
According to many, the bestselling novel of all time is Jacqueline Susann's "Valley of the Dolls". Growing up, I knew a bunch of older ladies who owned that book, but I remember my late Aunt Grace telling me that she'd read the first page and then quit reading it.
In other media, last month's "Sopranos" finale was watched - at the time it first aired - by 11.9 million people, which was over a million people fewer than watched "America's Got Talent" on NBC at the same time. Conclusion: you can't treat books like TV.
I couldn't help thinking that commercial events are second only to world events in getting everyone on the same page at the same time.
Everyone remembers 9/11, but a great many people also remember June 29, 2007 when the iPhone was released as well as July 21 when the final "Harry Potter" showed up. It is nice to think that if upwards of ten million people (by now) are doing the same thing, that that thing is reading a book.
Previously: Potter familias
See also: The Internet Public Library, Amazon.com Harry Potter storeLabels: books
The Faunz reimagined
 I watched Pan's Labyrinth the other night and was a little upset by how one of my favorite television characters, The Fonz, was recharacterized as a menacing, child-frightening monster.
Not since Wayne Rogers' happy go lucky character in M*A*S*H became the dour Pernell Roberts interpretation in Trapper John, MD has an iconic character from my youth been so poorly treated.
Despite this, Pan's Labyrinth is a beautiful, beguiling, and poignant movie that nevertheless puts me as a parent yet again on edge: What's with the goddamn faeries leading children away? It seems that, throughout literature, faeries are the manifestation of a parent's - and therefore society's - failure to keep children entertained.
I resolve to feed my daughter more gum.
The Stolen Child - William Butler Yeats
Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scare could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand. See also: Pan's Labyrinth official siteLabels: art, movies, netflix odyssey, poetry
Time machine
 Whenever I buy something at Costco, it is a pleasant reminder that there is so much left to do. "This product will see me through a lot of changes," I think solemnly.
That is how I felt when I bought a 40-oz. bottle of Kirkland Signature Shampoo recently, which I began using today. How long will it last me? I can guarantee that the Fetus to Be Named Later will have arrived by the time the last coconut/petroleum squirt has been dispensed from the bottle's black pump nozzle.
It is not lost on me that that is also the way babies are born.
As Tot #2 will transform from an inboard to an outboard, magma to lava neonate, so too does each depression of the shampoo pump bring forth something heretofore only supposed, hinted at.
The world around the bottle of Kirkland Signature Shampoo will change, and so will I. I may cut my hair or grow my beard. The amount of shampoo I use daily could change, too. Luckily, the convenient pump dispenser is well-suited to potential changes in my mane's needs.
It pleases me to know that this weapons-grade bottle of hair product is proof of the existence of Time, and undeniable evidence that I control my own mortality.
Previously: Costco 1975; Walt Churro
Labels: abstractions, commerce
 As you know, it's hard to be Pope. But the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, today's Pope Benedict XVI, is not a feel-good pontiff like his predecessor; some of his recent official remarks have been interpreted as cantankerous.
There's his pronouncement that all forms of Christianity that are not Roman Catholicism are in fact perversions of and subservient to it (take that you Catharist punks).
And then there was the motu proprio, or formal direction, that it was OK to bring back the Latin mass, the one celebrated prior to the opening of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, or Vatican II, or v. reloaded, in 1962.
The Latin mass was not for several years delivered in "High Latin" but instead the vulgate, or "church" Latin, the form that was more palatable to speakers of the Romance languages from which English is partially derived, characterized particularly by pronouncing Vs like Vs instead of Ws (Elmer Fudd never liked church Latin).
Allowing the Catholic mass to be performed in a parishioner's native language would, you'd think, open up the experience to billions more people who didn't have access to Latin teachers Don Bailey and Grace McDermott of Lowell High School, like I did.
But Pope Benedict XVI, who was there at Vatican II's opening ceremonies in 1962, said that things got lost in translation.
"...in many places celebrations were not faithful to the prescriptions of the new Missal, but the latter actually was understood as authorizing or even requiring creativity (emphasis added), which frequently led to deformations of the liturgy which were hard to bear," he said.
For me, taking Latin was one of the most beneficial choices of my life, and I almost realized it at the time. The structure of the language was even a back door to the structural rigors of math, which I'd always had trouble with.
Around the time I was learning to love Latin I was learning to distrust the Catholic church. For various youthful indiscretions I was made to read the Bible, which I'm sure to my parents' regret made me distrust the church even more. For one, I was surprised to find that most Catholics of a certain age had never read the Bible themselves, but instead were content to have parts of it spoon-fed to them.
My elders finally admitted to me, defiantly, that "the priests know what they are talking about so we don't have to read the Bible."
The reason for this is that many Bible passages are contradictory to Catholic dogma, and that actually reading the Bible lays bare those contradictions. The only people allowed to interpret the Bible, then, are the professionals. And even they might get it wrong in the myriad translations of the mass, hence the call for a return to form.
In the Catholic tradition there are several "Holy Days of Obligation" during which the faithful are required to go to church. These include Christmas and Easter, of course, but also feasts like the Assumption of Mary, celebrating (on August 15) the assumption, body and soul, into heaven of Mary, mother of Jesus.
This event was not mentioned in the Bible, which I was taught was the entirety of the Word of God. The veneration of Mary came about much later, when there arose a need for it, and the Assumption was folklore until it was infallibly decreed as a genuine event by Pope Pius XII in 1950.
I remember being shocked by this as a teen, and equated it to my infallibly decreeing that my invisible bear, George, was the one who had eaten all the fudge when I was two.
"George ate the fudge," I remember saying, and sort of believing it, fudge all over my face in my crib, a box denuded of fudge nearby.
What's more, when I mentioned the Assumption assumption to the people most invested in making me go to church in those years, I was told that Yes, the Assumption was in the Bible, and that I just hadn't read the Bible closely enough.
That about wrapped it up for me and the church. I suppose if I had been forced to read "Jaws" and then got shot down when I said that Amity was a town on Long Island and not an island unto itself like the movie portrayed it to be, I'd also be a lapsed ichthyologist.
My hometown was an early ground zero for the scandals that have recently rocked the Catholic church in America and Ireland. Luckily for me, I was an unattractive child.
But I remember the words of my Literature of the Beat Movement professor from the University of Lowell (now the University of Massachusetts at Lowell), Charles Jarvis. He had known Jack Kerouac as a boy and I guess that was the reason the University gave him a course to teach. Because of his class I got great discounts on a lot of books.
"I still pray to my childhood saints," he said once.
It's a line I think of when anyone introduces himself as a "lapsed" anything; it's hard to forget what you grew up with and part of you still wishes all of it was true. It's big trouble when everything is open to interpretation.
"(An) insidious obstacle to the task of education is the massive presence in our society and culture of that relativism which, recognizing nothing as definitive, leaves as the ultimate criterion only the self with its desires," the pope has said. Better to have someone else check your thoughts for you (this also applies to the Electoral College).
It's not surprising that the first thing kids learn in Sunday school is the story of Adam and Eve, bottom line: Don't ask questions. Bringing back the Latin mass not only ensures that more people will just take the priests' word for it but also, I'm sure the thinking goes, will keep the priests from getting too "creative".
It is hard to contemplate. The imposition of a language in this way is a means of restricting deviant or parallel thinking. It is similar to the way the church discouraged people from reading the entire Bible.
But for me, Latin encouraged critical thinking. I don't know what to believe anymore.
All I know is that the Latin root of Amity is "amicus", or friend, and Amity, as you know, means friendship.
See also: The Ordinary of the Mass; Open hearts to Latin mass, Benedict says; Buy "Visions of Kerouac" (Charles Jarvis); U.S. Study of "Dead" Latin Making a Comeback; A "traditionalist" Catholic blog; Pope: Evil not necessarily excitingLabels: language, lowell, religion
Zzyzx, baby, Zzyzx
 It is quaint to upload these pictures three whole days after I took them. While I could have done this instantaneously with my iPhone, I preferred to let the content, a dusty Mojave Desert offramp that was 112 degrees at 6 p.m., influence the medium. Also, I don't own an iPhone.
Here is Zzyzx. Nothing much was happening. There were no bleached cattleskulls, tumbleweeds, or rattlesnakes. I did not take peyote with an Indian, neither casino nor call center. I did not go mad.
 I was roughing it, however. I didn't turn my air conditioning on the entire trip. I am purifying myself and taking myself off the grid. I was not even able to shuffle the songs on my iPod, because it is three years old. I had to listen to them alphabetically. That's hard core.
I was supposed to be driving with someone but he flaked. That is the Hollywood Way. But I was in Zzyzx, where the Old Ways are best.
 In the end I returned to my car and drove toward Primm, which begins exactly at the Nevada border, where everything starts again. The same guy who flaked on the drive would flake on the hotel on the Strip, which reinforced my belief that Las Vegas is the Pheasant Lane Mall to Los Angeles' Lowell.
Previously: Primm, baby, PrimmLabels: las vegas, lowell, travel
Tidied up but I can't find anything
Las Vegas in July
 The best part of my drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas is, if I plan it right, approaching the Nevada state line.
Prior to that, I will cross the San Bernardino Mountains and drive through Dario Argento's Hesperia.
As you can see from the map, after Barstow, California pretty much throws in the towel for the 100-mile trek through the Mojave Desert. During that time I will pass through Zzyzx, CA, which will be a comparatively cool 109 degrees.
Approaching the state line at twilight is great fun because drivers can see the line as defined by the lights of Primm, the first city over the Nevada border. Las Vegas is about 50 miles beyond that.Labels: las vegas, travel
"Sorry Fugu": If the River Was Ratatouille
 TAARG noticed that the food critic/Alan Rickman character in Pixar's Ratatouille (played by Peter O'Toole) recalled the food critic in T.C. Boyle's short story "Sorry Fugu" from a 1989 collection.
In the movie, the merciless critic Anton Ego caves in to a simple peasant dish that he remembers from his childhood. In the short story, the critic's boyfriend is kept at bay with burned steak and peas, "shanty Irish" food his mother used to make.
The critics in both stories find it easier to dismiss things than embrace them.
"To like something," Boyle's critic says, "to really like it and come out and say so, is taking a terrible risk. I mean, what if I'm wrong? What if it's really no good?"
Ratatouille's critic says, "But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new."
This was the first movie the three of us attended at a theatre, and our 2.5-year-old took the movie like a champ while other kids around her shrieked and kicked their chairs. Ours was the child that made single people and childless couples want to have children, and both TAARG and I had to fend off proposals to create children.
"No, really," TAARG said. "I'm already pregnant."
"Sure, when?" I said. "I've got a 3:00 and a 3:15 available."
Ratatouille's animation was brilliant but the story required a little too much of the audience. It wasn't a matter of giving the audience too much credit, it was a matter of not knowing when to stop teaching us about individualism and following one's dreams and listening to one's heart. There were too many ingredients in the stew.
And the density in one area was a deficit in another. While it's not very interesting that "anyone can cook", we would like to know how the human protagonist suddenly is an expert rollerblader and customer service representative when before he couldn't ride a bike or keep a job. The story needed simpling up, but visually it was rich, and the ending was very satisfying.
See also: Buy T.C. Boyle's "If the River Was Whiskey"Labels: books, movies, TAARG, tot
Another blot on the good name of geeks
 You'd think that the Geek Squad wouldn't have to resort to stealing porn since they already get to keep those cool Beetles.
The comments on Consumerist's story about how the Gawker Media website used a program like Remote Desktop or Timbuktu to catch a Geek Squad employee downloading a client's personal photos - that included porn - onto his own hard drive were less about how interesting this story was than they were about how computer technicians stealing or at least snooping on personal files isn't news.
The Geek Squad tech was supposed to be installing iTunes, which he did, in addition to poking around a folder invitingly titled "Honey Pot". His invoice recommended a memory upgrade (to increase porn transfer speed) and mentioned that the computer needed "protection". You think?
Since I am a Profiler and an Empath, I know that the Geek Squad employee was confident that a person who couldn't even install iTunes would never be able to figure out that his porn was copied.
It's a sad world.
Full disclosure: In 2002 I was thisclose to being one of the first ten people the Geek Squad hired in Los Angeles. I really wanted the free car. Their official arrival was delayed and I got another job instead. Among the things I learned in the interview was that Geek Squadders had to drive their VWs away from the rest of traffic so that the vehicle would be more distinctive.
Previously: Pea, cow, Apple, garlic
See also: Consumerist catches Geek Squad stealing porn from customer's computerLabels: faulty technology, geekery
Report: Rapture didn't happen
 As I was assured on the subway in March, The Rapture was supposed to happen tonight at 7 p.m. (PST). This evening at the appointed time I had just bought a bottle of gin and was driving down Los Feliz (The Happy) Boulevard.
"Where's The Rapture?" I asked at 7:02.
"Where's The Rapture?" I asked at 7:30.
"Where's The Rapture?" I asked at 10:00.
I guess it's not happening. I'd better start drinking. I'm never going to trust the L.A. subway system again.
Previously: Mark (Matthew, Luke, John) your calendars
See also: The Los Angeles subway systemLabels: alcohol, los angeles, the apocalypse
 I currently reside in Glendale, CA. If you are cruising down the street and find a WiFi network called "Hate This Place", that's mine.
It's not that I don't like the parks, freeway access, and easy driving to my office in downtown L.A., but behind the well-manicured lawns and the idyllic suburban tableau of families strolling on a summer night, live some neighbors who make my life more interesting than it should be.
Take young Kevin Cunningham, a 22-year-old man who lives down the street. Early this morning, probably because Independence Day had passed and he thought it was no longer acceptable to shoot fireworks out in the middle of the road, Cunningham is alleged to have shot his remaining wad of fireworks in his house. This destroyed his apartment and damaged three others.
I feel like I should have had neighbors like these in my early 20's while I lived in student ghettos in Brighton and Allston, MA. But not one BC, BU, or slumming Harvard student shot bottle rockets in his own home.
While I do have exemplary neighbors, and while I no longer have to worry about Eastern European Bleeding Kansas parking since I cleaned out my garage, I still look forward to putting Glendale behind me. I'm told that this is all because my french doors face a cemetery.
At least Armo continues to inspire folk art.
Previously: Knowing my neighbors; The Triumph of Death
See also: Man Booked for Arson After Fireworks-Sparked Apartment BlazeLabels: glendale, los angeles
Finding Mido
 South Korea's Oldboy (2003) is a provocative and poignant study of the relationship between fathers and daughters, brothers and sisters.
It is a film for as much of the family as possible.
See also: Oldboy (imdb), Official siteLabels: movies, netflix odyssey
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