News: The lefty mysteries

■ The lefty mysteries: In pursuing the "handedness" riddle, scientists are unlocking secrets of the brain, genetics and human diversity.

Fanart rec (?): houseguest!Voldie, Animagus!Lucius/Narcissa, and more

■ "He doesn't want to be a bad house guest u guyzz." (cackles and dies from the "Animagus!"Lucius)

I love Makani, LoL. Her characterizations of the Malfoys and the DEs are...well, ridiculous :] Irk, she, among many others, also makes me jealous/envious~~

Dan Abrams: "At least they won't have to have abortions now, right?"

This is both funny and sad. But the bigotry and sideways logics is not so shocking as some found it. (Jaded, much?)

I've also heard much about fandom sniping about this...but honestly, this is JKR's book. I dislike the 7th book and almost loathe the epilogue, but that is how Harry & Co. went on being. I still read pre-DH stories and is being dragged on to the epilogue ships, but either way, that is what JK wants Dumbly to be. I can see where she comes from, actually, since I had thought, "wow, Dumbledore is pretty enthralled with Grindlewald back then" as I was reading.

Perhaps it is shocking because Dumbledore is a mentor figure, and generally no one wants to know who grandpas have the hots for, but is revealing so in the book going to make DH a better book? Would putting the Dumbledore/Grindlewald in there help the plot along, or would it be just another useless fact? I am of the latter opinion. It makes sense if he is gay, but it's not necessary in terms of the main plot, like the whole [spoiler]"OMG he helped keeping his squib sister locked up"[/spoiler] stuff. But all that only focuses on why JKR decides to not put it in the book.

As to her decision to reveal this fact at all...well, she was being honest to her fans—that was what she thought of Dumbledore. Perhaps she has an agenda, and perhaps she was trying to make a statement. It doesn't matter much to me, and I don't find searching for a conspiracy theory all that productive. Fans asked for the information; is it so wrong for her to answer to the fans' requests?

Perhaps I have too little of imagination to feel restricted by the abundance of detail JKR threw out since the last chapter of the book; while I have not much love for the epilogue, it is a detail that I like to see the fandom to work around. Certainly I gripe about Draco's receding hairline and the lack of substance of said chapter of Harry's life, but thats more the challenge. If the characters only has a bit of background and minimal personality, thrown into a vaguely described world (all of which the series is skimming the borders of, IMO), without certain cemented blocks, then wouldn't it feel similar to reading an original fiction?

Yes, it does restrict the creative space that "canon-whores" have. But it gives interesting insight on the subtext. Yes, it will stick the writers towards a certain road to make their ship work (coughH/Dcough), but to me, it's more of a thrill to read about how the writer wiggles their versions of the characters out from such a tight spot. Since there is more "history" (canon) to work with, the characters can have more conflict and background to make the story more interesting, as each writer creates their own solutions to the same problem. (I was going to say with more history, the characters would have been developed more and be more solid to write about...but then realized there hasn't been much chara development at all.)

As for Ginny being a JKR self-insert? I don't have evidence to argue against that :)

Ayumuneechan, if you see this, this is for you.

Puffy, adj: OED Word of the Day. (20 Oct 07)
Today's word from the OED has the following earliest quotation: a1594 Edmond Ironside (1991) III. i. 87 Staye, Yorke, and heare me speake, thie puffie wordes, Thie windie threates, thie raylinge Cvrses, light Vppon thie stubborne necke.

I'm not sure if you should feel better or worse about this.

News: Doctors Discuss Theories on Aging Brains

■ Doctors Discuss Theories on Aging Brains

News: HP: Dumbledore and the rainbow

■ Harry Potter fans, the rumors are true: Albus Dumbledore, master wizard and Headmaster of Hogwarts, is gay.

With that, JK's Epilogue Sins are almost completely forgiven now.

Shoebox for $.99; the cat is free

...I think he likes to feel small and dainty. Ladies and gentlemen—my cat.

ArtRec: Five Books H. James Potter Never Wrote or Published [HP/SS]

■ Five Books H. James Potter Never Wrote or Published

Well, this is more like a "haha, gotta save this" rather than a true rec, really. It's HP/SS, for one. But that last bit's got me grinning, so I shall keep this in my archives.

Men's Early 19th Century Nightgowns

Okay, so this, I admit, is ridiculous enough that it should be deemed as a nightgown. But this? Really, now.

Book meme, because I'm an uncultured swine.

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of today, 30 September 2007). As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. Add an asterisk* to those you've read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad (because we only read part of it in class and I had always meant to finish...)
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West (does strike throughs also mean "slowly working on it"?)
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray (ended up taking The House of Seven Gables for a particular book project instead...)
Mansfield Park
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune (OMG, have actually read this...! If not for some semi-forceful bouts of book-giving and commuting, I would never have picked this up, haha.)
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter (Ah, good times...or bad...LoL)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita (only sort of, though)
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an Inquiry into Values
The Aeneid (Plz Greek legends should always be interesting and this was not.)
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit (er, not so sure on this one)
In Cold Blood : A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
Bastard out of Carolina