Spoilers. (Duh.)

( book-destroying spoilers )

Finally, the jacket copy absolutely cracked me up.

Proposition: the reason that Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is less interesting than the first book is that the story is mostly about someone other than Harry.

Discuss.

(Alternatively, what the heck was Bloomsbury UK thinking with the kids-version cover art for the seventh book? (See also: US version.))

ETA: I've booklogged this book & its predecessor.

My car went in the shop for two days this week (replace all the tires, repair a mis-aligned headlight), and I rented a car from the dealership. On the phone, they told me that they'd give me a Corolla, which was fine since my car is a 2003 Prius, in other words small, and a big car would be awkward.

Instead of a Corolla, they gave me . . . a Scion xB. I think the xB stands for "extra boxy." It looks like someone took a minivan and smushed it down with a rectangular compressor. An unspeakably dorky car—and I swear its dorkiness is an idiot magnet, since people tried to accelerate past me in lanes that were ending in ten feet, stepped out in front of me while I had the green light, all kinds of moronic behavior. (It was extremely sluggish accelerating up to highway speeds, between about 40 and 50 mph, but those weren't the times when people were acting like idiots around me.)

I was very glad to get my cute little car back.

This weekend we did Christmas at my parents' house, driving out Friday night. Saturday morning we saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and in the afternoon and evening I cooked two meat pies and a batch of baked mac & cheese, while listening to football on the living room TV. A good football day, as the Pats shut out the Buccaneers (who are good, unlike the Bills—but I still don't want to hear people talk about them as Super Bowl contenders) and the Giants beat the Chiefs with a record-setting performance from Tiki Barber. The movie was fine, given what it had to work with, and I do think the kids' acting has improved still more; but Hermione's dress was weird, Cedric had really big eyebrows (is this a British notion of attractiveness? Harry has the same thing going), and the ending could have stood thirty seconds' more exposition. The third is probably going to remain the best for the fresh quirky visuals and tight story.

Today my dad's side of the family came down, which was good because it's been a while since I've seen them for a holiday (and it's been years since I saw my step-cousin S.). My baby first-cousin-once-removed is very serious looking but was thrilled by the gift of a "Sit and Spin" toy, so that was very cute. And my parents' dog Truman did his usual crowd-pleasing performance of shredding wrapping paper as people opened their gifts. Then we sleepily drove off, made it safe home to our happy dog (who has already put a hole in the super-tough toy that my parents got her), and got stuff put away. It's going to be another long week at work, I'm afraid, but I'll try to get some Genji in, finish that monster Rent post, and so forth.

This is appallingly spoilery; be warned.

( minor thought on a major spoiler )

There is much to tell about the last couple weeks, and I was going to tell it tonight, but I decided instead to treat my tired self to a novel. After some deliberation, I went back to reading Stephen King's Dark Tower series.

I'm not done yet. I made myself stop reading most of the way through. But I would just like to say that it is much more disconcerting than I would expect to find that Wolves of the Calla uses the same font for chapter titles as Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix did.

That's all. Good night.

Catching up . . . . On Tuesday the 1st of June, we went out for an anniversary dinner at the local fancy French place, recently renovated but still with the volumes of McKinney's Consolidated Laws of New York on the shelves, which never fails to amuse me. Unfortunately neither the service nor my entree were as good as I would have liked, but Chad's meal was fine and it was a nice change of pace.

That Thursday, Chad had some of his advisees over for dinner, which was fun though you'd never have though that people could talk about The Family Guy for so long. The tree people had come that day and ground out the stumps of the trees they took out (the yard looks much nicer now), so unfortunately there were many wood chips lying around for the dog to eat, despite our best efforts to stop her. Sure enough, she was sick the next morning. It would be really nice if she had a better ability to grasp causal connections.

On Saturday, Chad played hoop and I went to cheer him on. We went out for dinner after, to a place called Auberge Suisse that I'd seen recommended for its fondue. This was an extremely strange experience: there was one other couple in the restaurant when we came in, and after they left it was just us, the hostess/server, and an unseen person or persons in the kitchen. The food was perfectly good; I suspect the location, out in what looks like old-money suburbia, works against it.

We went to see Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban on Sunday. ( Indiscriminate spoilers for both movie and book )

The next week was fairly uneventful; I had Friday the 11th off, as the State closed for Reagan's funeral, but came into work anyway because I'm a touch swamped at the moment. The weekend was more interesting, as I went out to Massachusetts because one of my friends from high school, now on the West Coast, was in town. Met the new baby, the first of our group, who is absolutely adorable—smiling all the time at three months—caught up with my friends, and spent some time with Mom and Dad, which was all good. I'd been hoping to met someone else, my (adoptive) brother's biological half-brother, who came very unexpectedly into our lives the week before, but because of logisticial issues, that didn't work out.

Last Tuesday, Chad's parents came down and we had a nice dinner to celebrate Chad's birthday early. I took Friday off and we went down to New York City for the weekend—tune in tomorrow for the details.

Hey HP fans: "What I did on my Summer Holiday", by trickofthedark, "an alternate universe OOC ficlet in which Harry Potter grows a brain."

(Also, New York's income tax forms? Suck hard vacuum through a straw.)

Non-HP-fandom people, ignore this.

FictionAlley has started posting listings of new fics to LiveJournal, and so I read a few while killing time.

It's probably wrong that my main reaction was, "whee, fodder for mctabby's Summary Executions!"

(I think this one pushed me over the edge:

Desperate to prepare Harry for what lies ahead, Dumbledore attempts the one thing that can help him - to split Severus Snape in two. Desperate to start climbing the nine steps to bliss with Ron, Hermione attempts the one thing that can help - get him in the rose bush.

That is all.)

(Non-HP-fandom people should ignore this post.)

Ahem. lizbee's terrific gen short story "The Language that God Speaks"? (Summary: Pratchett reassured us that all libraries are one, and Gaiman told us about one particularly unique library. Hermione discovers a twenty-year-old experimental potion which allows her to access the Dreaming.)

Why did I not know until now that ajhalluk, a.k.a. one of my favorite authors, had remixed it? (Summary: "She will be a librarian. She loves truly, and has never been forsworn.")

Right, I have things to do, but had to get my fangirling out of the way first.

I read Order of the Phoenix yesterday in one big gulp, from about 11:30 (went out to get it in the morning) to about 2:30. The rest of the day I spent socializing (we have a houseguest) and intermittently trying to digest.

What follows is my impressions after a night's sleep, but not after a re-read: a detailed one is up next. These are my impressions of the whole book, and therefore have huge, book-destroying SPOILERS.

So I'm taking a break from my present project by keeping current on jurisprudential developments, and in the Ninth Circuit's opinion in United States v. Gonzalez [8 page PDF], I read:

Gonzalez contends that a temporary zone of privacy was created when he was alone with Standifer. It is doubtless true that "the Fourth Amendment protects persons, not places." However, "the extent to which the Fourth Amendment protects people may depend upon where those people are." . . . Here, however, the defendant . . . chose to conduct his criminal activity in a public area.

Gonzalez would have us adopt a theory of the Fourth Amendment akin to J.K. Rowling's Invisibility Cloak, to create at will a shield impenetrable to law enforcement view even in the most public places. However, the fabric of the Fourth Amendment does not stretch that far. He did not have an expectation of privacy in the public mailroom that society would accept as reasonable.

It was . . . disconcerting.

*waves to ajhalluk, pinkfinity, and other legal types in the fandom, and goes back to what she was doing*

Last night, we were driving to my parents, listening to Chad's new mix tape. I was singing along to the Afghan Whigs' cover of "Lost in the Supermarket," and then John Mayer's "Your Body Is A Wonderland" came on, and I thought of Chad's weblog post calling the song "indescribably cheesey."

I said, "One of the weird side-effects of getting involved in a fic-writing fandom is that, when certain songs come out, you just know that there will be a flood of bad fics using the song's lyrics. This one, that Avril Lavigne song 'Complicated' . . . "

Chad made an affirmative noise.

"Having said that, though," I said, "I now have this horrible image of a songfic based on 'Lost in the Supermarket.'"

"Yes, that would be strange," said Chad.

"On the other hand, if the Dursleys had only lived in an apartment, it would work perfectly."

(And then I laughed for far too long, because I was tired.)

(This will probably make much more sense if you know the lyrics to "Lost in the Supermarket," which are behind the cut tag.)

( Lyrics )