The Mirror of Erised

Who's up for a game of 11-dimension Wizard Chess?

Treasure Hunting

I've just gone through all 200-odd posts and added tags so my loyal readers can more easily search for the little nougets of wisdom hidden throughout this sucky blog.

In doing so, I've also noticed some areas of weakness on my part. Clearly, I'm not writing enough about sex or ghosts, so I need to work on that. Also, I've got more Harry Potter posts than Lord of the Rings posts, and that ain't right. Things that suck (at #2) is blowing the pants off Things that don't suck (just 3 posts!), and I've got way too many People are stupid posts, so I need to work on my attitude and try to be more positive. It would help if people weren't so stupid.

Now, I'm completely exhausted. I think I'll take a nap and maybe have sex with a ghost while watching Lord of the Rings.

Home from Hogwarts

My son, the magical prodigy.

All About the Bens

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to be split into two movies.

Because why not? There's not going to be any more books to make into movies, so why not milk this cow until all that's left is a desiccated husk.

Dumbledore's Army

Now that Dumbledore is officially out as a gay man, surely this just goes to prove that all those people who were against him and Harry Potter, people like Jerry Falwell, Bill O'Reilly, and Lord Voldemort, were justified in their hatred of this man and his very gay crusade to turn all the little witches and wizards into an army of homosexual tolerance crusaders of paganowiccaSatanifascism.

Dumbledore made the kids use wands, after all - that should have been a dead giveaway, along with all the subliminal messages hidden in Rowling's seven guides... er, books. Let's see how many we can find:

"The wand chooses the wizard." Wow, this is a pretty obvious reference to homosexuality, laying the foundation in young minds for the false lie that a person is born gay. At the same time, it shows the power of "the wand," especially a large, black, turgid wand with a phoenix feather core, to convert an otherwise straight man into a raging homowizard.

Cornelius Fudge? Oh, come on! This name screams gay. And he was Minister of Magic! That's like the president or something.

Quidditch is a game based on soccer (only slightly less gay than gymnastics), in which boys and girls compete as equals (as if) as: Chasers (chasing tail) who chase a quaffle (to swallow!); Beaters (!!) who whack mindlessly violent balls(!!!) called Bludgers (anti-man) with penis-shaped bats; a Seeker (code for gay temptor of straight men) who tries to catch a Golden Snitch (a spy trying to discover the real motives and methods of the gay agenda, someone like Rev. Ted Haggard or Sen. Larry Craig). When the Snitch is caught, the game is over!

Speaking of Quidditch, what kind of man rides a broom? A gay man, of course. Real wizards ride gas-powered leaf blowers.

I'm sure you can think of others. There's bound to be tons. Just be careful in your research. If you read these books too closely, you're liable to find yourself having odd thoughts and desires about your beer drinking buddies. Normally, it is perfectly safe to have odd thoughts and desires about other men, but these books will also have conditioned you to accept them as normal and fill you with an irresistable desire to act upon them, which you MUST NOT DO openly. REMEMBER, if you gaze too deeply into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you and turns you gay as a smurf.

Funniest Political Cartoon Evah!

This one is too good to steal borrow. Click here if you love Harry Potter, or even if you don't.

Dragon Fossil

Is this the fossilized skull of a small red dragon?

No, it actually belongs to a newly-discovered species of pachycerphelasaurus, those dinosaurs usually depicted with dramatic cranial horns and tubas.

This one looks more like something drawn by Larry Elmore. However, it's scientific name is dracorex hogwartsia. Maybe they should have just gone ahead and named it the Hungarian Horntail.

The Mystery that is Harry Potter

I probbly should na say this, but here goes. (SPOILER ALERT)

What is so great about Harry Potter? I've read all six books now, seen all four movies, and I still can't figure it out.

I'm not saying they suck, because they don't. They are extremely engaging stories. But like the very worst secret agent and superhero films, the plots are for the most part laughably unlikely.

Take the Goblet of Fire, for instance. If you are powerful enough a wizard to defeat and capture an ex-Auror like Moody and take his place, fooling everyone including Dumbledore, why in God's name do you need to go through the whole elaborate Tri-Wizards Tournament and risk the million different ways it can go wrong and you be discovered and your identity revealed, if all you really want to do is kidnap Harry Potter and take him to Voldemort? It's ridiculously complicated. Catch him in Hogsmeaded and teleport him out! Problem solved.

But Goblet of Fire is one of the best of the series! It's a great story, but the plot makes not a lick of sense. That's not supposed to happen!

Now take Chamber of Secrets. Tom Riddle wasn't really after Harry Potter. Jenny Weasley made a much better target. Harry only found the magical diary by accident, and the accident made sense in the plot. The story is much more plausible. And it sucks. It's not the worst of the series, but it is second worse.

The worst is definitely Order of the Phoenix. If ever there was a filler book in a series, that was it. Two chapters at the beginning of Half-Blood Prince would have been sufficient to cover everything in Order of the Phoenix, and it would have spared us from having to watch Harry Potter act like an obnoxious 15-year-old for 500 pages. The whole thing was dreadfully tiresome, and nothing but a set-up for Half-Blood Prince. Again, if all Voldemort needed was for Harry to get the prophecy, why the elaborate set-up? Just do it, man!

So why is it that the series is so good? I have very discriminating tastes in fiction. I recently read two of the giants of spec fic - Ringworld and Ghost Story. I was impressed by neither. I'd say Ghost Story was relatively awful. But Ringworld is considered one of the great all time sci-fi novels, Ghost Story one of the scariest horror novels ever written (whatever!). Not to me, they weren't. So when I say the Harry Potter series is good, I mean it.

But I can't, for the life of me, figure out why they are good.