Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows Review:

I posted this on my Livejournal last night, and now I am posting it here. I’m using the “more” tag so that no one is inadvertently spoiled for the last installment of Harry Potter. W00t.

IDK, my BFF Snape?

So I finally finish Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, am all set to write my darn review, and Livejournal crashes! Not that I don’t want to grace you all with my review, (the short version: compelling, yet made me yearn for a red pen) but LJ is just better suited for that sort of thing. Or at least it is if you’ve got tangential ties to Harry Potter fandom.

In addition to Livejournal, my computer went and crashed the other day. It went down in a blaze of glory, which is to say it flickered, froze, and would not restart. The Mac Genius Bar folks couldn’t recover anything, and so now I start afresh with a new hard drive. I’m very seriously considering investing in a .mac account so that I can back up everything, including my favorite places, on Mac’s servers.

Today’s entry is brought to you by the search terms “equine penis” and “draco malfoy shirtless.” Because I am running a porn ring of bestiality and lukewarm evil.

Angry Blonde Pancake

My Harry Potter Spoiler of Doom is: Draco Malfoy is killed by a falling Hagrid never knowing the ultimate truth Get your Harry Potter Spoiler of Doom

As July 21st inches closer and closer I do grow concerned for all three (Harry Potter, Severus Snape, and Draco Malfoy) of my favorite characters. Aside from Voldemort, I think they’re the three with the biggest literary prices on their heads.

The World Series of Ketchup

When I was but a wee lass I thought that there really was a game called Ketchup. It was what adults played when they had fallen behind. As someone who is ostensibly an adult (I have all of the parts, at any rate) and who has fallen behind rather hideously, I think it is time for a little first-class sporting action in the recently renamed Heinz Arena.

Please bear with me as I try to tie up all the loose ends I have left in previous entries. This could get ugly!

•  Hullo Interweb! and Artery Clogging Sausage Stuffing don’t really have any loose ends. The stuffing is still delicious and lethal, and the only question that might arise from the first entry is that of which person I am in the photograph. The answer is, of course, the attractive one. Or the one on the left. Whichever.

• Why I Can’t Be Arsed To Come Up With a Witty Headline asks the age old question of “what the heck is this blog about?” Like most cosmic queries, it has proven unanswerable. So sorry. I still love the New York Public Library as much as I did when I made this entry, though I have not looked at the available Rosetta Stone software even once. What can I say; I am a lazy American and my monolingualism is imprinted on my DNA.

• Next up was my pièce de résistance, Not So Live Satire Blogging, also known as the only entry of mine ever read by more than a dozen people. Well whaddaya know! Apparently The 1/2 Hour News Hour was picked up by the Fox News Channel, which has been airing it ever since. (Thanks Wikipedia!) I couldn’t be bothered to sit through it again, not to mention that it airs in the same time slot as The Tudors, and I can think of very few television shows that take precedence over Jonathan Rhys Meyers frolicking shirtless and being Machiavellian. Also, um, all that history.

• A Soul Crushing Work of Staggering Idiocy. Where to begin? I’m still pretty idiotic. However, I did finish my personal statements, did hear back from my recommenders, and have been accepted by my top three Museum Studies programs. Oops, programmes. I will most likely be accepting a place at the University of Leicester for the 2007-2008 MA course. Now of course I must stress over finances, visas, health, housing, fitting my copious belongings into one suitcase, etc. I never did make a follow-up entry on the International Spy Museum, but suffice it to say that I got to crawl through an air duct. It kind of shames the museum dork in me, but that was probably the most satisfying experience I have ever had in a museum, and I could have done something similar in a local junkyard. There was probably less of a tetanus risk in the museum though. (Really that’s just me being facetious. I’m a big advocate of making museums more interactive, though that line between Disney World and Learning is a little blurry and hard to pin down. I’m not going to even pretend to start on this topic… I’m supposed to be tying up loose ends not raising more questions!)

• I was such a huge cock-tease in Peaceable Kingdom. What kind of person promises sensationally titled entries like “Fisticuffs with Jesus: 5 People Who Want to Sucker-punch the Lord” and then doesn’t deliver? A real bastard, that’s who.

• Have I mentioned that I managed to finish my personal statement? Because I have. It doesn’t have anything to do with The Universal Curatorial Impulse, though I’m still trying to work out how to build my Master’s thesis around this (completely made-up) concept. You wouldn’t know it from this particular blog, but I am a great fan of making up concepts. If I were a great philosophical genius (or just a genius) I could take these crackpot ideas and turn them into accepted scholarship, but instead I am a passably intelligent crackpot, so I turn them into blog posts.

• I am not even going to attempt to re-type the title of this entry, but know that in the interim my grandmother has attempted to set me up with (among others) distant relatives, parents of my mother’s students, and 40 year old men. There is some overlap in these categories, particularly the “40 year old men” one.

• I came in last place in all my NCAA pools, much as I predicted I would. Also, I still find the kid who plays Harry Potter to be disconcertingly attractive. I console myself with the fact that his haircut in the upcoming Order of the Phoenix movie was a regrettable choice that causes his head to somewhat resemble a penis.

• I never actually experienced Saturday, Computerless Saturday, as I unsurprisingly chickened out and checked the weather online. It was all downhill from there. It was in this entry that I mentioned my “upcoming trip to Costa Rica.” I went and I had a great time. As you might have noticed from the entry previous to this one, there were monkeys there. There were AN OBSCENE NUMBER OF MONKEYS there. This might require more significant follow-up than I can provide in this bulleted list. No promises, of course.

• Unsurprisingly, the majority of Americans do not think the solution to school shootings such as the tragedy at Virginia Tech is to arm students to the teeth so that they can return fire. After those involved had time to mourn, I am pleased that public opinion blew in this direction.

Just so everyone is aware, there is some large and scary bug flying around my room right now. I thought you might like to be informed. Also this entry has not been proofread. At all. I didn’t even intend to write it right now… I wanted to go to bed!

Why I Can’t Be Arsed To Come Up With a Witty Headline…

…Because I can’t figure out what to put after it.

I have spent a great deal of time musing over what the heck to do with this blog. Being no great wit, I am wary of attempting a typical personal blog. Not only do I lack a clever way of telling you what I had for breakfast, but there’s also the fact that what I had for breakfast is likely even more dull than whatever you ate. (That is my polite way of saying that my life is not all that interesting. A word of advice: do not take a gap year after graduating college. If you must, do not move back home. Go be poor somewhere else!) Still, a personal blog is essentially all I know how to do, having kept a Livejournal (oh the wangst!) for years.

So what to do? Pick a subject to focus on? OK, I’m game. What subject? I guess I could talk about education, particularly my place of employment the New York City Department of Education? No: others do it better, I’m not that entrenched in the politics and culture (this is a gap-year stopgap), and as I have gotten in trouble for journaling—because for whatever snobbish reason I am drawing a distinction between blogging (here) and journaling (LJ)—about real life in the past, you might say that I am “once bitten, twice shy.” Well, then what about culture and the arts? Nope. Again, other people do it better, though I suspect I will end up not blogging at all if I refuse to write anything that isn’t shiny and perfect. Plus, being the nerdgasming nerd I am, I’m a bit terrified of writing about anything that will cause my ignorance and naïveté to show too glaringly. That knocks religion and politics right out of the running too! In fact, it knocks out just about anything that doesn’t have to do with 17th and 18th Century American history… and you just KNOW that would be fodder for some fascinating blogging! Today’s post: making tobacco barrels in colonial Virginia…

I am going to spare you that post, though you might be interested to know that I once sat through an hour and a half lecture on that very topic. Instead, I am going to throw off the shackles of crippling blog insecurity and just make a darn post already. Coherent subject and theme be damned!

Well, really I just thought that maybe since today is Valentine’s Day I could get a thematic freebie. Last year my Valentine was beer (a very Love You and Leave You Hurting and Broke sort of chap), and this year I am following it up with another inanimate lover (remember when I mentioned that my life isn’t that interesting?): the New York Public Library. I feel this is fittingly nerdy for a blog called Nerdgasms, and as such might even be on theme!

If I could write poetry I would compose a Petrarchan Sonnet unto my love the NYPL. It giveth me unlimited free books, movies, and CDs! It alloweth me to download some of these directly onto my computer! It permiteth me to request exactly what I want and have it delivered to the library nearest me (which in my case is about 3 blocks away…sweet)! It even granteth me access to Rosetta Stone language software for free! …OK that’s getting old.

Basically, unlike beer, the NYPL wants me to save lots of money AND remember things the following day. Instead of renting videos and spending billions of dollars at Barnes and Noble, I can get (almost) everything I want to read or watch for FREE! Or, at least it would be free if I returned things on time. I’m actually pretty awful at that. Also, I get to GROW brain cells instead of killing them! It’s brilliant!

It’s also pretty convenient for someone such as myself who is going through severe college withdrawals. Trust me, the brain does not stay alive all on its own.

And I still love beer. It only hits me because it loves me back.