Not particularly a spoiler for anything, unless I missed a detail.

( I'm sorry it went down like this, your memory you'll lose... )

Back at work after a weekend at Conestoga in Tulsa. They went and developed a music track while I wasn't looking! lukeski and ericcoleman had concert sets, as did Cedric of the Bedlam Bards and a group called Queen's Gambit. I missed the Friday night filk (hadn't even thought there would be one -- there wasn't the last time they had a Harry Potter book release at the con) but the Saturday filk was well attended, and fun.

Unsettling story from the seeing-false-patterns-in-white-noise department: The night I was leaving Tulsa, a first-base coach from the Tulsa minor-league team was hit by a line drive and killed while his team was playing the Arkansas Travelers less than half an hour away from my family's home.

I'm currently midway through Chapter 5 in That Book, all of which was done on the ride down from the con to DFW with decoy01 and tmc4242. After the drive from the to Waco I was sufficiently wiped that I pretty much went straight to bed. Haven't read any more yet because I did not wish to be late for work...

I'm looking for a place name that rhymes with "do" and "you" (this is for a Harry Potter filk I'm hoping to have ready for release day).

Your help is appreciated...

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=830765

Key quote (from the downloaded paper itself, not from the linked abstract): "Rowling may do more for libertarianism than anyone since John Stuart Mill."

(via the Irish Trojan blog)

Unfortunately, I didn't finish Half-Blood Prince in time to write the Tribune-Herald's review. The features editor needed it in by this morning. I finished the book at 5:30 and needed to get some sleep (so I would be able to do the job they actually pay me for). Oh, well...

( Extreme spoilerage follows... )

Things you just don't hear many places other than a con:

"Okay, now flip over all your planets..."

"Are you visible?"
"No."

The Harry Potter party, combined with it being a Friday night at a small-to-medium con, pretty much blew out any chance for filk. Well, that and the filk room was locked until about midnight-thirty, since apparently no one at the hotel seemed to know for sure who had the key to that room. So it wound up just being me, msminlr and celticdragonfly. Saturday night was much better, with a peak of about a dozen people, half of them performing. I got to spring my "Northwest Passage" filk "Twisty Passage" on Mark Simmons, which unfortunately turned out to mean he didn't do his own "Goddard Passage," which had inspired "Twisty" as much as the original had. (In fact, because of the way I came at filk backwards from how the older filkers did, I heard "Goddard" before I heard the Stan Rogers original.)

I didn't get a copy of HP at the party because mine was waiting for me at a substantial discount at Barnes & Noble here in Waco. I walked over there for my pre-breakfast exercise at 10:30 this morning, while the weather was still something at least vaguely resembling cool (recall that I work odd hours -- in fact, I'm writing this while I should probably be getting ready for work). Started to read it, which was probably a mistake (and probably why I got started later than planned on writing this entry). Horrifying typo on Page 10, "site" instead of "sight"; Spell Check strikes again, I fear. (Pun unintended.) I read it up to the start of Chapter 3, which is the first in which Harry actually appears.

Also, it not only turns out that there is no copy of the new Usagi Yojimbo collection to be had at B&N (it's been on order for some months now), there's apparently no copy anywhere -- there will be a second printing late next month, and I'm pretty much SOL until then. Meanwhile, I have a standing order for future collections at the local comic store. (They had sold out of theirs -- they don't tend to keep the paperback collections anyway -- which is what led me to try ordering it through B&N.)

filkerdave, it seems I must become a borrower of your icon. A "pro-life" website has found it absolutely necessary to report that Pope Benedict has officially come out against the Harry Potter books (the link is actually to the Cinescape page where I saw the news; I feel no particular need to increase www.lifesite.net's traffic, they're likely to read that as approval).

Ah, yes. Now I remember why Ratzinger's being picked as pope annoyed me...