A Little Touch of Harry in the Night.

[Yeah; I know I've already used that headline for posts related to the Harry Potter franchise. But I like it. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Think how this reduces my carbon footprint . . .]

Warner Brothers will be splitting the final installment of the Harry Potter book into two halves, which means that mathematicians may be displeased by the final result: the seven-book series will yield an eight-film series.

It could be that they should have been splitting all the books after the first one, which would mean that there would be a total of 15 movies, and that a lot less meat would have been hacked off the last few.

Yeah, I'm joking. Sort of. I know that the filmmakers try to err on the side of pleasing me! me! me! (all of us, really) rather than catering to the muggles, but there's always a cut (or three) that upsets me.

And, of course, I realize that those kids they cast are growing up too quickly. But couldn't they have given them drugs or something, to stunt their growth?

I'm just trying to think outside the box, here.

The movie version of The Half-Blood Prince is due out this fall. I don't usually read up before another movie comes out, but I'm considering ripping through the entire series one more time sometime soon, in preparation for (only) my second reading of Deathly Hallows. That one was so structurally different from the others that it absolutely should be chopped into two movies. It was a tough nut to crack, and I knew it would be. I generally try to read a murder mystery—or a Potter book—all the way through in one sitting. But those MFs are so long.

Finally, there I was in San Diego, at Siggraph, reading Hallows at the Holiday Inn two freeway stops away from downtown. What a great book. What an amazing fucking book. I had to somewhat reduce my partying at the convention, but it was for a good cause.

This year—Calloo, Callay!—Siggraph is in Los Angeles again. Which means that unless I get a windfall that allows me to crash downtown for a few nights, I'll be commuting from home (probably a condo in Glendale, by then). If I do have a few extra bucks, and I can stay downtown for a night or two, I shall definitely be taking some primo reading material. And I'm not talking about the fuckin' internet.