The Harry Potter saga, if it had been filmed by John Hughes. You know, there’s a certain part of me (the 80’s part) that can’t help but think this would have been way better.
according to the YouTube, I’m supposed to credit this to ‘Thewlis Rox’ @ davidthewlis.net so, thereyago!
In related news, click over the jump to today’s celebrity gossip links.
because up here the sun does not set this time of year until about 1:30 am and then only in a sort of curtseying manner, bobbing back up again in an hour or less. So you can actually read a newspaper by the daylight at midnight here in Yellowknife.
Which is why the market for spooky stories is somewhat depressed, locally. We’ll see what happens when the 24 hour darkness sets in, and to judge by some of the Inuit Art, whatever sets in then, it ain’t equanimity.
Shaman Drum Dancer by Nelson Takkiruq
See?
So, the market for ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night appears to be at a minimum now, yet somehow I still managed to drum up a squeal of morbid joy when I saw that the slow-grinding wheels of film production had, at last, released this:
Edgar Allan Poe-ster
for lo, opening night cannot come fast enough for those of us here at Operation Global Media Domination HQ. We are indeed looking forward to watching our old Twitter buddy bring to (unsteady, morbid, doomed) life one of the greatest of American Writers. Ah! If only I had my copy of Closed on Account of Rabies with me, and perhaps a bottle of Amontillado (they don’t sell it at the liquor store, but I bet Chef Pierre could rustle me up some) I could set the mood. For now, these small talismans, the poster and this YouTube of Christopher Walken reading The Raven from that very album will have to do.
Cheerful, isn’t it?
Emma Watson and Cameron Adams/Hermione Granger and Himmione Grainghim
via Gawker
This right here? This is the streams crossing. This is the polarity reversing back on itself and swallowing its own tail. This, my friends and stalkers, is the moment for which the celebrity-internet culture was made. Even if it did mortify one of them into deleting his Twitter account (after tweeting a no-doubt-heartfelt “Awkward!“).
This is a picture of fresh-faced ingenue Emma Watson and her perky gay pornalike, Cameron Adams, who played Himmione Grainghim in the extremely NSFchirruns Whorry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Balls.
SFW no, but amusing, yes. Yes, yes, YES!
From commenter JamesFromCambridge comes this positively magical trailer.
And I’m spent! If you’re not, toddle over to that comments section on Gawker for the biggest damn roundup of filthy Potter puns this side of Repressed Housewife Fanficdom!
Or you could just click past the jump and read some more gossip, if you’ve got the endurance! Once more into the breeches!
That's just wrong, dude. You wear the red shirt on the next away mission.
Longtime readers of the ol’ raincoaster blog will know that we rarely (make that never) comply with demands for retractions when we’re sure of our facts. And we’re usually sure of our facts, even when they are wrong.
Like they were in this case.
This is what I get for relying on The Sun for anything but tits, really.
So it turns out the facts in this case were not quite as reported. Which case? The one we blogged about, titling it
which was really rather pointed of us, wasn’t it? Too bad those don’t appear to be the facts.
So, what are the facts?
It happened in the UK. That is not disputed, particularly by the nice lawyer who contacted us therefrom; well, technically the Head of Complaints at the Press Complaints Commission (does this make me a Real Journalist now? Dad would be so proud). UK libel laws, you and Graydon Carter may recall, are pretty heavily weighted in favour of the person being discussed (usually known around these parts as “the material” and around Vanity Fair as “Roman Fucking Polanski Goddammit”) regardless of what was said and their pre-existing reputation, but that is neither here nor there. Tho it had to be said, because why? Because it’s a blog, that’s why. If you don’t read the text and only come for the saucy pictures of anarchists, you’re skipping this part anyway and I can insult you freely, you puce-faced pantyliner.
By the way, WordPress.com stood by me and thanked me for bringing it to their attention, reiterating what I already knew; that in the absence of a court order, they would not remove the post without my permission.
As for The Incident Itself…
It involved a woman called Sarah Dean, a young British woman, a woman who worked in the travel industry, a woman with a really good lawyer. No, really good. Go ahead, google her; the archive is wiped except for some irritable bowel symptom reference. Yes, even Yahoo; that is some god-like omnipotence shit right there, that is. I’ve never seen Yahoo wipe something before.
What the Sun reported was that, a couple of days before several car-based explosiony terrorist attacks in the UK, her car “exploded in a fireball”, taking out the neighboring cars as well. And that was, apparently that. Except that I went on to say:
To be serious for a moment, either people with connections to the travel industry who happen to be blowing cars up in the UK are a risk or they are not. Either all such people should be investigated for connections to terrorism, or none should be. I have not the slightest idea of Sarah Dean is a hapless clerk or a terrorist mastermind, but then neither do you. Let this very weird, very peculiarily timed incident be fully investigated. Cars rarely blow up, especially German ones.
Regardless of what happened to her car, I stand by that statement. Now, as to what happened to her car, this is the statement released by the lawyer and printed in the Sun (which I can’t even find on Google; told you the lawyer was good!):
Further to your article “I blew up my boss’s Porsche”, I would like to make clear that after seeing smoke from the engine I pulled my car over and pushed it into the staff car park. It later caught fire causing minor damage to two other cars. There was no explosion nor were any other cars written off.
So, now that we’ve gotten our facts straight we can move on, thinking: a) that all suspicious travel-related incidents in a time of domestic terrorism deserve an equal chance of investigation, b) Sarah Dean seems to fall into the category of “hapless clerk” and not “terrorist mastermind” unless she truly, truly sucks at it, and c) the Sun‘s standards for “Fireball” would not be accepted by any Dungeon Master in the entire constellation of parallel universes of RPG’s.
which is nothing less, although possibly nothing more, than a comparison of Julian Paul Assange, founder of Wikileaks, recipient of the Sydney Peace Foundation medal, the UK Media Award from Amnesty International, the Sam Adams award, the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, (etc etc TK already) and the minor sci-fi character James Bolivar (“Slippery Jim”) diGriz, aka de rat van roestvrij, aka die Edelstahlratte, aka El Escurridizo, aka un criminale al nichel-cromo, aka (my favorite) Ratinox, aka the (you thought we’d never get here, didn’t you?) Stainless Steel Rat, protagonist of Harry Harrison’s The Stainless Steel Rat books
Harry Harrison on OK Cupid oh and Cupid is SO NOT OKAY with using a fake name
Did I say “Harry Harrison?” Gee, it’s awfully early in the post to be that confused: of course I did! That name should ring a few bells for Assangeologists, particularly those of a fangirlish turn, for it is the usernomdeplume that Assange employed on sites as High Nerdy as delicious and as decidedly non-nerdy as OKCupid (come for the casual sex, stay for the quizzes!).
That’s so funny: every guy I know calls himself “Steve” on dating sites.
Well, it occurred to one (and that one this one, this one right here) that, worthy as Mr. Harrison’s screenplay for Soylent Green undoubtedly was, that sort of thing won’t get you far on a dating site (although it is a people business, come to think of it but now that I have, I wish I hadn’t. Not to say it doesn’t explain a whole lot about my dating life, but ENOUGH of that line of thinking, moving ON! What? What? STOP LOOKING AT ME) dystopian dramas really don’t pull the chicks like being a dashing James Bond villain-type.
Viva Julian the TinTinja, but that's a whole OTHER post.
Of the type typified by the above-mentioned and highly morally ambivalent Stainless Steel Rat. So I’m thinking, Golly, if I were a dashing James Bond villain-type of man who was strongly identifying with the works of Harry Harrison (not Harrison himself, because that would be creepy and somewhat self-defeating on a dating site as he is well out of Top Pulling age range although I’m sure a charming enough man in person and with some advantageous lighting) I would be identifying with ol’ Slippery Jim, you bet your sweet bippy I would, whatever that is, because whatever Harrison’s other books, Return to Eden, West of Eden, and Winter in Eden are about, I’m relatively sure they are NOT related to the rather tedious Anne Rice erotic novel, and believe me, there’s nobody in there you’d actually want to identify with, particularly if they could be played convincingly in a movie by Rosie O’Donnell, as none of them were, according to the reviews. And Clan of the Cave Bear, which I imagine to be much the same, didn’t get anybody laid. So, that.
And here, an interlude, because my English teachers taught me you can never have too many references in a scholarly work of this nature.
DiGriz himself, although an accomplished liar and a notorious intergalctic thief, did have values, he saw his exploits as not only a means to get rich but also as an entertainment for the masses which caused his plans to get bigger, brasher and bolder…he had a reputation to uphold after all. He was also quite proud of the fact that he never took a penny from anyone without insurance cover and his intended targets were usually powerful institutions with little scruples themselves.
But where was I? Oh yes, introducing Ratinox. Did you ever see the old Batman tv series? Stick with me here, this is good stuff. There’s a payoff, I promise. So, “Batman” was my sister’s first word, but no, that’s not the payoff (unless you’re the proud parent who can swan around the play group for weeks like a queen because YOUR little girl’s first word had two syllables and was a superhero besides; OR you are The Sister, in which case you’re used to this bullshit but are glad it’s you-centric for once). In those old Batman series, as rich a guide to the world of comic comicbook criminality as existed, just before the villain tried to kill off Bats and the Boy Blunder, he’d tell them the whole plan from start to finish, slowly, presumably for those in the audience too stupid to riddle out the riddles (which meant everyone who couldn’t afford the kinds of drugs the writers were on at the time). And so it is with the comic comicbook criminality of Slippery Jim diGriz, who will tell you just everything about himself if you read far enough through the books, and you will, if only to see if his wife finally does kill him or not.
So, let us read. All excerpts below are just from The Stainless Steel Rat for President
raincoaster 