Time Flies

Posted on 07/21/2007 by chick

Twelve chapters in and I’m just barely able to close the book long enough to write about it. Harry’s crazy. They’re all crazy. If they get caught . . .

I have to go read some more. See you at the end of Chapter 18!

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The Book So Far

Posted on 07/21/2007 by chick

It’s an immediate roller-coaster ride, full of action and suspense. There have already been some deaths, including an important character, but I doubt he’s really dead. I think I see how he could have survived, but I won’t spoil anything for you by saying what it is.

Six chapters down, 30 more and an epilogue to go.

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Hair and Harry

Posted on 07/21/2007 by chick

Harry Potter arrived at about 1:30 this afternoon, just as I was about to leave to get my hair cut. I had to put Harry aside in favor of my hair. It was awful, but my hair looks much better!

My Faithful Reader asked me if I was sad about this being the last book. I’m not. Every journey must come to an end and the end is an exciting thing. This is what that whole series has been leading up to—the final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort.

Everyone else is doing predictions. I don’t want to be left out, so here are my guesses.

Voldemort is definitely going to die in this book, so if J.K. is counting bad guys when she says that two main characters will die, then that’s one of the two. Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny, the twins and Neville will all survive because they’re kids. The casualties have to be adults because Rowling is sensitive to her readership and killing a kid would be too harsh. There are a slew of Weasleys, making them somewhat expendable from a novel-writing point of view, and the emotional impact of losing one could really drive the remaining characters to find strengths that they never knew they had. Mr. Weasley or one of the older brothers could be the other casualty.

Snape will show himself to be well and truly on the side of good. He only did those horrible things in the last book because Dumbledore told him to. Snape and Harry have to make peace in order for Harry to complete his passage into adulthood. It is possible that one will be injured (in the case of Snape, even killed) in service to the other. Neville Longbottom will play a huge role in this book, probably by stopping Bellatrix, but he might even help Harry with the fight against Voldemort (the prophecy could have been about Neville, after all). Percy will get a clue and join the good side at the best possible moment.

But anything could happen.

Time to find out!

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Background Noise

Posted on 07/21/2007 by chick

Keys go clickety-clack, clickety-clack
While the clock tick-tocks.
My head is a surely big whirlygig
Spinning with the beat.
Clickety-clack, clickety-clack.
Tick-tock.
Whee!

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Misinformed

Posted on 07/20/2007 by chick

People love to talk about hardwood floors. They’re supposed to be so great, but I’m living on hardwood floors and let me tell you something—they may look nice but they’re absolutely infested with dust bunnies. You can sweep and clean and clean and sweep and still they will find some dark nook or cranny in which to breed. And unlike their cousins, the Bathtub Hairballs, these guys are hard to catch and far from harmless.

I’ll take wall-to-wall carpeting over hardwood floors any day.

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Beware the Granfalloons

Posted on 07/19/2007 by chick

Since I’ve never heard the word granfalloon outside of Cat’s Cradle, I have to assume it never caught on, which is too bad. I don’t know of any word that means quite the same thing. Vonnegut defined a granfalloon as a “seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done. . . . Examples of granfalloons are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows—and any nation, anytime, anywhere.”

Contrasting with the granfalloon was the karass, a team that does “God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing.” Pondering the karass takes more effort than my brain can handle right now. It raises too many questions about Fate and God and whatnot.

The granfalloon, on the other hand, is something that I’ve actually encountered before. People are all too eager to include themselves in groups that have no real meaning in the grand scheme of things. One could get all twisted and turned around in life by believing too strongly in the importance of one’s granfalloons.

Beware the granfalloons!

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Grade Inflation?

Posted on 07/18/2007 by chick

Almost all of the books I’ve read so far in 2007 have ratings of B or higher. It’s not because of grade inflation, but rather because I don’t have time to read bad books. If I don’t enjoy the book right away, it goes in the donation pile. Snow Falling on Cedars, for example, went into the donation pile almost immediately. I’ll never know if it was truly as bad as it started out to be. It’s sad, but you only get to read a limited number of books in your life, so why risk wasting time on stinkers?

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Sperm of the Moment

Posted on 07/17/2007 by chick

Many years ago, I went on a date with a certain guy. I don’t know why. I wasn’t really attracted to him. Of course, chemistry or no, there came a point in the evening when he tried to kiss me. I turned my cheek just in time and the ensuing event, which landed in my hair, can’t quite be called a kiss. The phrase I used to describe it later was “snort-kiss.”

Now, many years down the road, Mr. Snort-Kiss is married to a friend of my friend. My friend is trying to get pregnant and she has been chitchatting with Mrs. Snort-Kiss, who already went through that ordeal. Women talk (and talk and talk), and somehow I became privy to information about Mr. Snort-Kiss’s “swimmers” (it seems they’re a mite slow).

Did I really need to know that?

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Word Nerd’s Delight

Posted on 07/16/2007 by chick

Mondegreen! That’s the official term for a misheard phrase or lyric. Such a thing can also be called an “aural malapropism,” or so I read, but that sounds like a term your doctor would use to describe a lump in your ear canal.

Mondegreen not only sounds better, but it is that which it describes. As the story goes, the writer Sylvia Wright, as a child, misunderstood the lyrics of “The Bonny Earl of Murray,” hearing “Lady Mondegreen” instead of “laid him on the green.” She wrote about this phenomenon in an article and the word seems to have stuck.

Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands,
Oh, where haw ye been?
They hae slay the Earl of Murray,
And laid him on the green.

Tough luck for the Earl of Murray, but the Lady Mondegreen avoids the slayage by virtue of her nonexistence.

My Faithful Reader asked me for more mondegreens and I wish I had some good ones. Right now, all I have is a rather sad Bon Jovi example. You know that song “Living on a Prayer”? Of course you do. I always thought the lyrics said,

“Take my hand and we’ll make it out square.”

I always wondered what that meant exactly, but it wasn’t until recently that I realized the lyrics actually say,

“Take my hand and we’ll make it, I swear.”

There will be more mondegreens later, I swear.

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Four Down

Posted on 07/15/2007 by chick

Four down and ten to go in the Vonnegut Marathon. Next up is God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. I think I’ll start it at the beginning of August.

I read this book a few years ago, but I don’t remember too much about it. I recall liking it, but not enough to put it on my list of favorites. It will be interesting to see how it hits me this time around.

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