• Tomorrow is Super Tuesday. If you are part of a Super Tuesday state, I encourage you to vote. Now, I know that primary elections aren’t as significant as the general election in November so if you skate on this one, I’ll forgive you but only if you promise—and pinky-swear!—to vote later this year.
• If you do vote tomorrow and can participate in the Republican election, would you please consider Ron Paul?
• I know people like to say that voting for an underdog is like throwing your vote away but, well, tell that to New York Giants fans. Truth is, you never know.
• And while I’m sorta on the subject, how weird was that Super Bowl? I mean it was the biggest snoozer of all time until the 4th quarter at which point it became a great game, seemingly out of nowhere. The telling statistic? There were three lead changes in the fourth quarter: A Super Bowl record. I listened to the end of the game on my commute home from work. When Manning tossed that pass for the TD late in the game, I LOL’d. Seriously.
• You may have already gathered from the Twitter feed (had you been following along at home like I keep telling you), but I finally made my HD dreams come true last weekend. We picked up a Samsung 46″ LCD, got rid of the old 36″ Trinitron, wrangled some HD cable and iced the cake with a PS3/Blu-Ray, an HD-capable TiVo and a Logitech Harmony 550 universal remote. It was a lot of money… so much that I kind of freaked out about it for a little while, but then I caught my first Sharks game in HD and, well, I didn’t feel so bad about it after that. There is more to the story, of course, including a still-ongoing royal rumble with Comcast over the acquisition of a cable card for the TiVo, but I’ll spare you the details until I can provide the epilogue.
• So… there’s this movie called ‘Sunshine.’ It’s deeply flawed but I think still worth watching. Either way, it basically did for Blu-Ray what The Matrix did for DVD: Sell the format.
• I have, however, decided that I no longer have any interest in purchasing physical copies of movies. As such I won’t be “upgrading” my DVD collection to Blu-Ray. Aside from the general uncertainty of the format’s future, I just am sick of storing movies in my living space. First we had a pretty impressive collection of VHS tapes. Now we’ve finally gotten to where we have a lot of DVDs. I don’t care to go through the exercise again, so until we all figure out how too handle digital film storage, I’ll stick to rentals.
• Of course, the PS3 came with Spider-Man 3 (ugh) and also included a 5-free Blu-Ray offer (which I felt obliged to take advantage of) so I will have at least six of the stupid things. But that’s it! I’m not paying for any more.
• I am also fully aware my resolve has no bearing on the activities of my spouse, who loves to own her favorite movies and TV shows. I guess I better buy a new DVD rack.
• You know what I think is tacky? That the Cheesecake Factory has ads in their menus.
• However, TCF makes a mean meatloaf.
• Nik and I saw Michael Clayton over the weekend. It’s a pretty great flick although I didn’t think so until the very end, and there is still a particular scene that I don’t quite understand once the “truth” is revealed. Or I guess considering what that truth does reveal. Either way, it left Nik and I scratching our heads. Also, it has to have the worst title of the year. Who wants to see a movie named after the fictional lead character? It’s not even some deeply memorable character nor a remarkable/memorable name like Forrest Gump. Michael Clayton sounds like the title of a biopic for some long-ago sports star no one remembers.
• I would have gone with “The Fixer” or perhaps “The Settlement.” But that’s just me.
• Snack Watch: So, if you like Sun Chips I implore you to find the “Garden Salsa” flavor, they are exquisite. However, you may also want to investigate Cinnamon Sun Chips (you read that right) which sound questionable but are in fact quite delicious (though more of a standalone snack than a lunch accompaniment). You may also be interested in knowing that the Black Cherry and Almond flavor of Clif bars are especially tasty if you need a mid-afternoon light meal. And I can say with confidence that the energy drink Nos is not suitable for human consumption.
• On the flip side, has anyone tried Chocolate Chex yet? Nik is too chicken to try them and I’m hit or miss with Chex brand cereal, but I can see it being a fine addition to a batch of Chex mix. Anyone?
• I’m committed to Lost for the long haul, but I’m terribly, terribly disappointed in the direction they’ve decided to take the show.
• I have to give some respect to Netflix, a company which had such a terrible site back when I joined almost five years ago that I filed a bug report on it. Now they have one of the best designed, most user-friendly sites I frequent. As a simple example, I indicated to them that I was interested in getting Blu-Ray discs when available. Their system simply confirms that you know what you’re talking about and that you have the appropriate hardware and then it automagically goes in and replaces any movies in your queue with Blu-Ray versions. Brilliant.
• I loved the book Freakonomics and since I finished it I’ve been following the Freakonomics blog, which often has funny, insightful or thought-provoking posts. Today they had one I found cynical and amusing in all the right ways: Choose a six word motto for the US. My favorite sarcastic suggestion: “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Democracy.” My favorite funny suggestion: “Just like Canada, with Better Bacon.”
• As much as I love Rock Band, especially the multiplayer, Band World Tour mode is sadly flawed in a fairly fundamental way. And the fact that online co-op doesn’t allow BWT mode is kind of a criminal oversight. Still, I have faith in my Joey Big Hat bandmates to rise above the stupid game limitations.
• It occurs to me that we need a band logo. And I think you can upload such files into the game and use them as tattoos for your avatar.
• Excuse me, I have some Photoshopping to do.

I’m still recovering but I’ve been doing a lot of lying around and thinking so I have a few unconnected thoughts and anecdotes to share, in a familiar format.

• For reasons that won’t make sense unless you’re a gamer who owns an Xbox 360 and an OCD-afflicted psychopath such as myself, I purchased a copy of Madden 06 for under $5 from my local game store and have been simulating thirty seasons worth of games. What’s significant about this is that, according to the software, the 49ers won’t win the Super Bowl again until the year 2033. Just something to look forward to.
• I’m reading a wonderful book by Naomi Klein called “No Logo” about marketing, advertising and branding. There is a passage in the book that stuck with me:
  

  The people who line up for Starbukcs, writes CEO Howard Shultz, aren’t just there for the coffee. “It’s the romance of the coffee experience, the feeling of warmth and community people get in Starbucks stores.”

  I guess that’s why I dislike Starbucks. Here I thought they made bad coffee and served them in pretentious and ubiquitous locations. Turns out the make pretentious and ubiquitous locations in which to serve bad coffee.

• Our band name (comprised of myself on “vocals,” Nik on guitar, HB on drums and Gin as a roadie/groupie, but soon she’ll play bass… I just don’t have another guitar-shaped controller) is “Joey Big Hat is a Bit Much.” It’s completely an inside joke and probably not a very funny one at that. However, it still cracks me up whenever I think about it.
• The above bullet refers to Rock Band, which Nik bought me for my birthday.
• However, I’ve decided that this year I will buy a new guitar (I’m thinking Fender Telecaster), Nik has indicated that she wants to take guitar lessons and Lister has indicated that once he returns from overseas he wants to get a bit more serious about forming a jam band so music is on people’s minds. There may one day be a real-life variant of JBHiaBM. We probably won’t cover Bon Jovi’s “Dead or Alive” however.
• My folks sent me a very kind gift for my birthday which was essentially funds to be converted into San Jose Sharks tickets. I did some digging around and found that you can actually buy unwanted season tickets for a single game through Ticketmaster which seems to be the only way to get lower-reserve seating. But I found that the price differs wildly depending on what team is visiting. For example, for about $60 a ticket I can get lower-reserve center ice tickets (row 25) and see the Sharks play the Columbus Blue Jackets. For those same seats I can see them play the Anaheim Ducks… for $300 each.
• I’m probably going to see the Blue Jackets.
• We went and saw Juno on New Year’s Eve. It’s an exceptional movie.
• Just days before my birthday I went to the eye doctor as a sign of solidarity with Nik, who was going because she’s had terrible migraines for about a month now and her doctor suggested she may be having vision trouble (the actual doctorese-to-English translation of that is “I have no idea what’s wrong, so hows about a stab in the dark?”). I hadn’t had my eyes checked in a very long while so I went along, assuming my vision was still 20/20. It’s not. Now I need glasses. Strangely, Nik and I need practically the same prescription.
• I have no delusions that people who meet me or pass me on the street are fooled into thinking I’m anything but a nerd. However, for those few who may have been blinded by the ruse, I think glasses ought to remove all doubt.
• Truthfully, I’m okay with that. However, with my basketball-shaped noggin, hairless pate and the chunky Buddy Holly style glasses I went with, I fear I may end up resembling Dr. Bunsen Honeydew.

It’s worth saying up front that in the wash of deserved praise Rowling will get for her now-completed work, book seven is by far one of the worst of the series from a strictly literary perspective. The Amazon.com book review notes that the Harry Potter books have suffered from a progressive lack of editorial guidance which is probably due to a misguided notion that Rowling sells a vulgar number of copies of each book so obviously she must know what she’s doing. The hands-off approach works for legions of Potter fans because they were so enraptured by the breezy, whimsical joy-bombs that made up the first three books. Had Rowling been let off the reins back then and let her propensity for meandering diversion show itself as strongly then as now with skillions of dollars under her belt perhaps the series would not have attained such a following. She’s still a very clever and entrancing writer but I think her books would be as good as her stories if they weren’t treated as untouchable relics that need no surgical fat trimming.

Anyway, it hasn’t been about the strength of the writing since about halfway through book four: We’ve been pulled along because we need to see how this thing ends. Now we know.

I found it a bit disorienting that in light of all the “will Harry live or die” brouhaha prior to the book’s release the answer to the question was really “yes.” I can’t tell if Rowling was so conflicted over which way to go with the character that she felt the need to have it both ways or if this had been the intention for as long as the question had presented itself to her. I found that in my own reading I was comfortable with the inevitability when it seemed that Harry was going to be forced to make the ultimate sacrifice: Yes, this is how it should be. When it came to pass that he was able to remain The Boy Who Lived after all, I was just as happy. The end result, I suppose, is that Rowling merely proved she could have handled the darker path with aplomb but ultimately either chickened out or felt the hero deserved a more pedestrian triumph.

And really, that’s how I found the final 100 or so pages: Rather pedestrian. All three main heroes survive and live fairy tale-esque happy lives. Ho hum. The biggest tragedy is the death of one twin who leaves behind a) a nearly indistinguishable doppleganger (I always found it odd that neither Fred nor George were ever given anything resembling individual personalities) and b) a large and improbably intact family. That Tonks and Lupin were felled was unfortunate, but hardly emotionally resonant especially in light of the fact that the parallel between their new son Ted and Harry himself wasn’t really explored. I don’t know who else I would have picked to die but since most of the principal characters survived, that meant that the only real resonant deaths that resulted from Voldemort’s supposed return and reign of terror were Sirius, Mad-Eye Moody and Dumbledore. Considering what we now know about Dumbledore’s demise (note that ESR called almost the entire thing, except for Draco Malfoy’s fate, nearly two years ago to the day) that pretty much means that despite the way it was presented, Voldemort’s return was hardly impacting: Not nearly as much as his original rise to power had been.

It may sound like I’m being kind of hard on Deathly Hallows. I suppose I am, in a way. For all the indications of how the series would progress, it felt the most disconnected of all the books. At least in the other recent chapters there was still the thrill of Hogwarts to ground the books in their whimsical places. Book seven found the characters wandering randomly around the countryside performing macguffin tasks and wasting valuable pages on pointless adventures and mistakes that neither ratcheted the tension nor provided much delight. By the time we catch up with Hogwarts in Deathly Hallows all the good stuff has already happened. I felt as though I would have rather read a book about what happened to Neville Longbottom before Harry, Ron and Hermione showed up than the other way around. I like that Rowling aged not only her characters over the life of the series but also her tone from book to book, but this book is so far removed from The Sorcerer’s Stone that it frequently feels like it might be from a different set altogether.

There are good things about the book, though. The way Rowling was able to incorporate elements from earlier books, especially during the latter third of Deathly Hallows, is welcome and clever. I doubt in many ways that these connections to earlier adventures were planned from the outset but unlike some connect-the-dot moments in other serials (ahem, Lost), they didn’t feel faked or forced. I like that at long last we see a lot of what makes Dumbledore tick and it feels genuine and he comes across as a well-rounded and complete character. One thing Rowling has always done well is give her protagonists real flaws so that we aren’t constantly reading about Superman. Dumbledore, like Harry, we find to be a genuinely good, well-intentioned and wise person but certainly not without problematic and worrisome aspects to his personality. Also the Epilogue was, in spite of its general corniness, a welcome and fitting close for the whole run.

A few things that have no bearing on anything of consequence but that I didn’t care for: The way Neville’s acquisition of Gryffindor’s sword from the Sorting Hat was never even remotely explained; the manner in which Draco Malfoy played practically zero role in the climax of the book/series except in a second-hand way by providing the means for his parents’ implied redemption; the lack of logic behind the secrecy of Harry’s mission to destroy the Horcruxes (even if he himself was the seventh, I fail to see how having Ron and Hermione’s help alone versus the entire Order of the Phoenix would have changed anything); the obtuse symbolism of the creature in King’s Cross Station during Harry’s vision/dream/visit to the afterlife; and finally, the lack of clear indication of how Harry, Ron and Hermione turned out aside from a general sense of happiness and their families. Some professions, perhaps? Living locations (did Harry and Ginny end up at Twelve Grimmauld Place)? A description of how they look at least?

Some minor things I did like about Deathly Hallows were: The chapter where the truth about Snape was revealed at last; the emergence of Ron—finally!—as a standalone heroic character; the focus once again on the three main protagonists without as much interference from secondaries; the fitting send-off for Dobby; the non-cop-out resolution of Harry’s relationship with his aunt and uncle plus the extra charm of Dudley’s last-minute decency that didn’t quite make up for everything else; the lack of time and space-wasting recap exposition; and the generally clear descriptions of the battle scenes taking place at Hogwarts. Often authors don’t effectively explain the whos and whats of large-scale action sequences but I felt the Battle of Hogwarts was easy to visualize.

Anyway, these are just my scattered thoughts and impressions. If you’ve finished the book, drop me a comment and let me know what you thought. What I’m really wondering at this point is what Ms. Rowling will do next. More books in the same universe with different characters? Something completely different? Retirement? I want to know.

After the first book they put out a couple of others including a somewhat disappointing sequel to The Relic called Reliquary and a standalone novel entitled Mount Dragon but neither really matched the initial brilliance of The Relic.

The authors seemed to want to branch out and try writing different kinds of stories using new and interesting characters (one of Mount Dragon’s greatest failings was that its characters were nowhere near as memorable as those in The Relic) but were struggling to do so. Gradually the authors began to get a little bit better with their standalone work and they managed to sneak a few recurring characters from The Relic into later novels without making them full sequels or even really requiring the reader to have finished The Relic to enjoy the books.

But gradually it became apparent that the fan favorite from The Relic, Special Agent Pendergast (who was unceremoniously and idiotically excised from the agonizingly stupid film adaptation), was the star of the Preston/Child show. And so the duo began writing books that pulled a few key characters from previous standalone novels into a cohesive cast and put Pendergast right up front as the leading man.

They still tried hard to maintain the illusion of the self-contained novel. It’s interesting to read a title like Still Life With Crows where you can see them struggling to try and use Pendergast in a capacity away from the Museum of Natural History in New York where The Relic, Reliquary and many later books take place (or at least provide employment to a large percentage of major recurring characters). After several of these it seems that Preston and Child have finally realized that Special Agent A. X. L. Pendergast is their man and they should stop trying to deny that longtime readers will tolerate but not necessarily appreciate novels which do not feature him prominently.

The last three books have focused so intently on Pendergast that the authors have taken to calling it the “Pendergast Trilogy,” something that would be acceptable if I still had delusions that it would not stretch into a “Pendergast Tetralogy” and then the “Pendergast Pentalogy” and so on. But it will, and I’m wary of this.

What struck me as significant in the most recent book (The Book of the Dead) is that the authors have moved so far into dealing with the life and times of Agent Pendergast that they have almost stopped really worrying about having new mysteries to solve and new strange-b ut-explainable circumstances that have served as the hallmark of their previous work. In this case the passing references to and sketchy outline of an Egyptian curse are barely developed as we spend far more time reading about Pendergast’s time in prison (long story) such that when he finally steps outside the prison walls it takes him all of half an hour to solve the case.

The most telling part of the whole book is that once the “plot” is sufficiently resolved, there are still roughly 100 pages left of a very extended epilogue which—if my wishes come true—finally wrap up the Evil Brother plotline that followed through the “Pendergast Trilogy.” It isn’t that The Book of the Dead is a bad book, it is that it so clearly reveals that the authors have let Pendergast as a protagonist become the story himself to the detriment of their real skill which is in their well-reasoned techno-thriller mystery hooks. I finished the book more or less satisfied but I honestly hope that the next novel shows a return to form with Pendergast there only to solve the mystery and not to be the mystery.

I mean, if I wanted to read a million pages of character-driven soap opera with some passing nods to my favorite genres, I’d go back and read The Wheel of Time again.