J.K. Rowling Wasn’t JK-ing About Ditching Harry.

J.K. Rowling has been busy writing a lame book. It’s lame because it’s not another Harry Potter series. It’s called The Casual Vacancy, which sounds more like an echo of what her life must be like without a certain boy-wizard than something I’d like to read.  But, without a doubt, it will be wildly popular because it’s Rowling.

Here’s the synopsis, judge for yourself:

When Barry Fairweather dies unexpectedly in his early forties, the little town of Pagford is left in shock.

Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war.

Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils…Pagford is not what it first seems.

And the empty seat left by Barry on the parish council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity and unexpected revelations?

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The Downfall of Imagination in Hollywood: An Apocalypse of the Mind.

Oh, America.  Don’t you wish you could sometimes just hop in Doc Brown‘s DeLorean and go back to when the silver screen was saturated with magical creativity?  If I’m going to spend 10.5 BILLION dollars going to a movie in theaters nowadays, it’s gotta be good.  But it’s so hard to tell what’s going to be decent anymore.  Thank gawd for Rotten Tomatoes for some guiding light, but even the tomato smashers don’t always get it right.

Maybe we’re just spoiled?  Maybe we should just expect all movies to be awful and then occasionally be semi-pleasantly surprised?  That’s the mentality I’ve tried to have as of late – kind of bleak, but what can you do when the imagination of Hollywood’s gone to shit Bleepsville.

This is a graphic I TOTALLY stole from Short of the Week.  It’s kind of depressing, but totally true.

Chooseth Wise:

(From)

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Homebrew

This also needs to be here.