The Coolest Guy Show in the World, or Why Adults Shouldn't Read “Harry Potter”

I had written 800 brilliant, scabrous words on the rise of Harry Potter — and how adults have co-opted the franchise — but I inadvertently erased them for reasons not worth elaborating upon. Such absentminded mistakes on my part are common these days, but that’s another story.

In lieu of my Harry Hate, here’s a sampling of the chronic data stream uploading in my head, which I know readers are just dying to hear about.

•In the “How the Fuck Haven’t I Read Everything This Person Has Written Yet?” Department, I’m reading Orhan Pamuk’s “My Name Is Red.” While the novel can be slow going, it is also absolutely brilliant. I don’t know how I’ve managed to avoid Mr. Pamuk until now (though I’m not exactly well-schooled in modern Turkish writers. Mediaeval ones, either). Pamuk is a genius, a word I don’t throw around lightly with writers, and even in translation, it’s obvious why this dude won the Nobel Prize. Read this, not “Harry Potter and the Sphincter of Fire.” (More on Harry later.)

•The Chicago Cubs have decided that playing baseball was more fun than beating the snot out of each other, and have the best record in the majors since manager Lou Pinella’s head exploded in June. This is a bad thing. The Cubs are three games out of first place, and as a result, I am a stupid, love-struck teenager once more, following their every pitch and swing of the bat. They will ultimately break my heart, and yet I still watch them with blind affection. Call me stupid; call me a sports fan.

•Media Mania Over Drug Addled, DUI Hollywood Hos! I just wanted to say that.

•I am coming down with yet another cold. My throat feels like a morbidly obese union carpenter is using a power sander where my tonsils used to reside.

•Baby won’t abide his crib, despite his parents’ unstilted efforts to get him to do otherwise. We’ll put him down, asleep, and in the time it takes the pee to hit the urinal (as I have been holding it in for about 73 minutes as I hold the little bugger), his cries echo through our home; first, flaccid and weak, then increasing in volume until The End of the World is nigh. My solution for this is just let Baby cry until he loses his voice, permanently. He’ll eventually fall asleep and we won’t ever have to hear his rotten screaming ever again.


Wrigley: scene of the crime

•The number of comments on my blog as ground into a number smaller than functioning brain cells in Dick Cheney’s diseased mind. There is a fair amount of blogrolling (you comment on my blog, I’ll comment on yours) in cyberspace, and as I struggle to keep up with others’ blogs, nobody visits here, unless you count the turds who want to know if a certain violinist is gay and you know who you are and if this is how you spend your time, asking if this man is gay, then you live an impoverished intellectual and spiritual life indeed. Learn how to drink or something.

•I changed the layout, added polls, and some bizzare rating systemf at the bottom of each post, and one can see the overwhelming response. It would probably do me more good if, like, I actually wrote something more than once a fortnight.

•Speaking of viewership, I have a friend who runs a terriffic baseball blog that gets several thousand page views a day. Yes, his blog gets more page views in a month than Bookfraud has in its two-plus-years of existence. He was kind enough to have linked my rant on the Cubs’ impending sale, and, viola! there were suddenly hundreds of hits to Bookfraud. Just about nobody commented, unfortunately, and few visitors have returned, but since they were largely St. Louis Cardinals fans, it makes sense, since Cardinals fans are largely illiterate.

•Don’t send hate mail, Cardinals fans. Just a silly joke there from a pitiful Cubs follower. You suck, that’s all.

• Media Mania Over Drug Addled, DUI Hollywood Hos! Man, I love saying that.


Kids fare; for adults, fair

•“Dogfights” is the coolest guy show in the world. The show recreates classic air battles using computer animation, interviews some of the pilots involved, and analyzes tactics and strategy. Incredibly cool. If it only didn’t deal with extreme violence, and if it didn’t (essentially) celebrate young men’s deaths, it would be perfect.

•My Take on Harry: Of the 8.3 million copies of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” that flew off the shelves last weekend, my empirical observation posits that 4.15 million are being read by adults. I see people over the age of 18 reading it on buses, in parks. I see patients reading it while awaiting surgery and hookers standing around trying to pick up johns. Please, adults, read something else, too. Like Orhan Pamuk, or anything but “Harry Potter and the Boner Factory” or whatever it. It’s a book for children.

•Now let the hate mail flow.