Leaky wizards, kids who speak bat and rich apples

Apparently, last Friday a British Columbia retailer sold 15 copies of the sixth installment of J.K. Rowling’s series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. The Canadian publisher of the series actually sought a court injunction forbidding those lucky 15 souls to speak at all about the book until Saturday morning, 12:01 a.m., the official release time. (You can read all about it here.)



Clearly, this was the idea of the kid dressed as Ron, not Harry.

Is anyone really surprised about this? And are we honestly supposed to believe that a retailer called “Real Canadian Superstore” that is essentially a Canuck Target, was unaware of the release date of Book Six? A book that will no doubt be a very big revenue-contributor for the store this coming weekend? A book that on the U.S.-side of the border has a first edition print run of 10.8 million scheduled by Scholastic, according to the New York Times. T-e-n-p-o-i-n-t-e-i-g-h-t-m-i-l-l-i-o-n! For a first edition. Pretty much rules out the chances of that first edition being worth anything 50 years down the line.



"It didn't take long for Billy to realize that wearing his new Harry Potter Quidditch costume to school was a mistake."

According to that same Times story, more than a million copies have already been ordered at Barnes & Noble alone, along with an additional 900,000 via Amazon, including mine, which will be delivered directly to me Saturday morning, ensuring that I don’t need to show up at a bookstore at 11:45 p.m. Friday night and take part in the awkward social experiment that is adults pining for the tales of a 16-year-old wizard, potentially wearing Hogwarts house colors and discussing their pet owls. No f-ing thanks.



Ok, dude, aren't you a bit old for this?

No offense, if that’s your bag. I’m sure that screech owls do make a fine urban pet; it's just that I’d prefer to keep my geeky anticipation of the book to myself -- or, at least keep it out of a crowded bookstore. If you are planning on spending your Friday night in line for hours for a book you reserved months ago, you may like this site.



I am willing to bet that this young woman will be at the bookstore at 12:01 a.m. Saturday. Hopefully she remembers the rule about stripes and plaids before then.

Speaking of crazy talented young boys, while sitting on my stoop last night as dusk fell and the local bats appeared, I distinctly heard one of the neighborhood boys telling a younger one that he could talk to the winged rats.

“It’s true,” he said, standing in my driveway, neck bent back, head pointed straight up at the sky and a rock hidden in his hand. “My friend taught me. Listen.”

He proceed to make some sort of screeching sound that was loud enough to interrupt my phone conversation, arguably alter my hearing and gain his mother’s attention to call him in for the night. Apparently upset that this bat had the girth to make a liar of him and not heed his call, he let the rock fly, not even close enough to the bat to make it do the cool dive-at-it/you thing. Ah, young boys.

And in other news relating to me being a sheep (besides my being one of the few million who has already ordered his copy of HP), Apple announced its third-quarter earnings recently. According to the USA Today, Apple sold 6.2 million iPods in its third quarter alone, an increase of 616% from last year’s third quarter. Can you imagine that?