A Wrinkle in Time

I took a short (3-day) break from Harry Potter between #5 and #6 to read Madeleine L'Engle's classic A Wrinkle in Time. Very very good science fiction novel, nice and short compared to Harry Potter books. If you haven't read it, you're really missing out. I found the fantasy and science fiction elements of the story to be very inspiring for a short story I'm writing called "Angels and Men," loosely based on the music of Juno Reactor.

Classical Music

Classical music... what an odd entity! Considering very few classical songs actually have titles, it was obviously not meant for the information age, but who can blame the classic composers? It's not like any of them ever heard of a search engine. Classical classification remains only by division, from a composer to an opus to a suite to a song (brief spark of pop-culture familiarity) to a movement (what?) My favorite composer is... Hiromi Uehara, hands down. She is the piano virtuoso. Who is your favorite composer?

Decline in Harry Potter Books

I think I have found out why the fifth and sixth books of Harry Potter are my least favorite ones. The reason is not that the books have gotten darker and the tone more serious. It's not even that Mary Grandpre's illustrations have become less cartoony. It's because all the character roles in which the readers got so set over the first four books get changed and turned upside down. For example, in The Order of the Phoenix Ginny stops being all crazy about Harry and starts dating, and in The Half-Blood Prince, Harry is "hungry" for Ginny (creepy). Harry becomes a very angry young man, the government are complete morons, and Sirius gets himself killed. Neville becomes less dorky and Ron gets on the Quidditch team.... It all adds up to a seriously confusing Harry Potter world the likes of which we didn't see in the first four parts. And that is why my order of favoritism is 241356. w00t.

Word List

I have been interested in excellent words and phrases to use for quite some time now. I have compiled a running list of my favorite words. It is composed of not only English words, but also phrases and foreign-language words. But all of the contents have one thing in common: a special flow of sound. With the phrases especially, the cadence and rhythm is very important. This is exemplified in the phrases Supreme Mugwump, Richard Nixon, and Ottery St. Catchpole. Four of my words have the "qua" sequence because that is a cool pattern. I look forward to using these oddments on my readers (1 person) soon. This enthralling, alphabetically-sorted list can be found at the bottom of my blog.

REI Purchases

I got some great stuff at REI this morning, including: a mess kit, a fold-flat mug, light hiking boots, flip-flops, two lightweight heavy-duty T-shirts, and a large dark Toblerone bar. If there are better things in life, I've never heard of them. And the best part was my mom paid for all of it! My favorite things are... all of them! A very productive trip indeed.

Camping

From June 25th on, I will basically be solidly camping for the rest of the summer. More on that later. I am looking forward to the various trips, but I'm afraid I might be too busy to do much. I'm paying a visit to REI tomorrow morning to purchase some outdoor gear. I love toast. Toast will make a good camping snack.... The Spanish word for camping is "camping," with an accent on the a, which makes it the funniest Spanish word of all time, especially in context. For example, "Este verano mis amigos y yo vamos de camping." Hilarious. Blog you later, hopefully with something more substantial to talk about.

Disturbia

I finally went and saw Disturbia yesterday. It was alright. Personally, I found it pretty scary. It had me shaking in my seat. There were lots of creepy dead bodies hidden in the most unexpected places. They try pretty hard to make Shia LaBeouf's character, Cale, look like a "normal" testosterone-filled teenage boy. He plays XBox 360, half-stalks the hot blonde girl across the street, socks his Spanish teacher in the face, and would do anything for his iPod. However, even so, the film never feels dry or forced. After getting into house arrest for said Spanish-teacher-punching, Cale notices his other neighbor, Mr. Turner, the one that's neither hot nor blonde nor a girl, doing suspiciously-like-a-notorious-serial-killer-from-Texas things. So he joins forces with Ashley (his neighbor) and Ron, his best friend, to stake out Mr. Turner's house. They hit a lot of dead ends in which something that makes him look like he's a psycho serial killer turns out to be harmless. But in the end, Mr. Turner is a psycho serial killer. He has a lab for disembowelment and like I said, lots of unexpected places for him to hide the corpses. It all ends well, though, and by the end, Shia has dropped approximately infinity S-bombs. Not a movie for younger children.

No spoilers please!

How people already know things about the 7th Harry Potter book, I have no idea. Nor would I like to have any idea. I am one of those people who can't stand to have a bit of plot revealed beforehand. I seemingly cannot do anything on the Internet without having HP spoilers shoved in my face! Listen, if it's an official press release from J.K.R. herself, even if it's just a wild theory of yours, I don't want to hear so much as a morphograph about it!

Potter Plotter

It's time for a little plot discussion. At the end of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Severus Snape murders Professor Dumbledore, which is a huge bummer. My sister holds her belief that Snape is innocent for one reason or another. For one thing, there is a passage from the 6th book where Dumbledore is telling Snape to do something he does not want to do. She also thinks that he was trying to stop Malfoy from becoming an evil Dark murderer by killing Dumbledore. Is Snape serving his benign headmaster? Or is he trying to prevent his favorite student from heading down the path Snape himself once took? Either way, Malfoy already has been Dark-Marked, which means he's probably going to end up serving Lord Voldemort, unless he displays the same resilience seen from Snape and Karkaroff (doubtful, because we all know Draco's a pansy).

I think the only reason Snape ever came to Hogwarts was because he could hide from the Dark Lord he pusillanimously abandoned. Dumbledore trusted him and gave him a second chance. Snape bided his time, and when Lord Voldemort returned, Snape had to regain his trust by taking down a major good guy.

Here is an interesting lead on Draco Malfoy's identity: http://www.mugglenet.com/editorials/editorials/edit-hseeker01.shtml

Farewell, Muggles!

Quotes

I am really into quotes. I've compiled a list of three quotes. I'm sure you'd love to read them, so here they are:

Reality is always controlled by those who are the most insane.- Dogbert

Nothing is impossible. What you want is simply expensive.- Nikola Tesla (David Bowie) in The Prestige

I'm just trying not to catch on fire.- Bobby Flay

Very interesting indeed. All of these people can be located in my profile. I'm off to read more Harry Potter.

My first post

I just started blogging! Hooray! I can't think of anything else I'd rather do! Except for writing in a real, private journal. Gee, that would be fun. Why am I wasting my time here? I have some really good books I could be reading. I just thought of a really good topic for a blog post: things I could be doing right now if I wasn't so lazy. I am in the course of rereading the Harry Potter books that have yet been published. I am so far 3 1/2 books in. There are approximately 1900 long pages left to read, but I have to do it for three principal reasons. The first reason is that the fifth HP movie will be released this summer, and I don't want to be watching the movie when I read the book, if you catch my drift (you probably don't). The second reason is the scheduled release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, for which I want to catch up on the plot. My last reason is I have gotten very interested in the illustrations by Mary Grandpre, who is an awesome artist, and am studying her technique. Since I lost my "original" paperback copy of The Chamber of Secrets, I acquired a new paperback version with minimal, wimpy cover art and none of the fun little original chapter illustrations. It was a real disappointment, but of course I'm past that one now, and onto The Goblet of Fire, of which I have the original hardcover. As you probably already have figured out, I am a nerd. What else do I have to do, you ask? I could record my memories in my physical journal for preservation, though nobody could decode my handwriting. I could waste away watching TiVoed Food Network shows. I could take part in one of the many online supercommunities of which I am a part (e.g. YouTube, Weebl and Bob, iTunes, Email, Myspace, Wikipedia, the Black Lily, Amazon, Google Earth). I could do whatever I want. And yet, here I am, blogging about it, in a blog no one else will ever read unless I glued their eyes to the screen. Yippee.