I'm a mite slower than Judge Adam, but I devoured the new Harry Potter book over the weekend. About half-way through, I was getting pretty annoyed. All the talk of the Half-Blood Prince made me think, come on guys, it's obviously Voldemort. Obviously. Why hasn't anyone pointed out this fact, and why did J.K. Rowling build in a plot point that was so bloody close to the one in Chamber of Secrets?

Fortunately, I was wrong. But I won't spoil anything else. Just go into it thinking it's not the most obvious answer to the question.

Overall, it's not as gloomy and given to teenage angst as Order of the Phoenix, but the ending more than makes up for it. It definitely gives you a false sense of security, She's laid down her cards for the seventh book to be very, very different, and I can't wait to see how it wraps up. Just get rid of Slugworth, or whatever his name is. Please.

This just dawned on me. On the back of my '97 Ford Escort station wagon, I have a sticker on the left side for the punk band Rancid, and on the right side for local Mexican food giant Burrito Amigos. I really don't want people to get the idea that the two somehow go together...

Sundays are my day to haul my ass through all the DVD Verdict work that piles up during the week - editing reviews written by my editing "charges," adding reviews to the server edited by the other editors, making whatever improvements I can to the site. I usually do this sitting in my cramped apartment, but today I decided to go to Eugene's Fifth Street Market. Like most things in Eugene, it started as a counterculture thing back in the '70s, but has since been co-opted by Eugene's disturbingly growing yuppie contingent. They offer free wireless access, though, and have great coffee (the northwest prides itself in great coffee - remember, Starbucks is from Seattle), and on the lowest level there's a great outdoor cafe area with a fountain. So, I'm sitting here, pounding away on my laptop, watching the yuppies, batting away flies, listening to the fountain...or at least what little sound leaks in past the headphones, currently cranking Nine Inch Nails (With Teeth is such an incredibly cool album). Yep, it's a weird dichotomy. Yuppies, tranquil fountain, Nine Inch Nails. Oh, and coffee. Can't forget the coffee.

Radio sucks. We all know it. If you want to hear new, fresh music you've never heard before, commercial radio is not where it's at. For that, I turn to Mother Internet. Shoutcast is the best source to find MP3 streaming stations. I've listened to several stations that have come and (unfortunately) gone over the years. One of my favorites used to be this one that played all Pink Floyd, all the time. For the past couple years, I've listened to one hosted out of http://www.dashnineradio.com, but sadly they've been off the air for the past week or so.

My new favorite is SomaFM. It's what's loosely called "college music," so it tends to be morose or off the wall, either of which makes good creative doing-work music. Plus, it's mostly bands I've never heard of, which is often the best way to find new favorites. DashNine introduced me to the Mr. T Experience, who positively rock.

Remember, kids, Clear Channel is not your friend.

Both times I saw Revenge of the Sith over the weekend, and now during Desperate Housewives, I saw commercials for Mr. & Mrs. Smith. I can't resist the urge to yell at the screen every time I hear "They're the world's most deadly assassins." It's deadliest, you jackasses. In the script, they probably wrote "they're" as "there." Morons.

And damn, if Angelina Jolie looked half as sexy on set as she does on screen, you'd have to be made of stone not to dump your wife and run off with her. She's the very definition of "hellooooooo nurse!"

I was just looking at our upcoming DVD releases list, and 15 out of the 20 titles that have their pictures displayed are of television box sets. Those pictures are selected based on the titles' sales ranks at Amazon. Why are TV sets so darn popular? I admit I have a few -- all of the Family Guy and Futurama releases, plus a handful of Simpsons, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Gilmore Girls sets, and I'm definitely planning on buying the first season of Lost -- but all of those are things that I would want to watch at a moment's notice. Are all these people buying Lois and Clark to watch over and over again? And if so, don't they have anything better to do with their viewing hours? (And now that I look at those pics again, I wouldn't mind having NewsRadio either; I don't think it's on a cable network I receive, and the Phil Hartman years were pretty darn funny.)

Can somebody please explain this madness?

Check the timestamp - just got home from the midnight showing of Revenge of the Sith. Other than sitting in a theater seat for nearly six hours (I'll save that story for later...I gotta get up for work in four hours), I had an incredible time. While not perfect, no Star Wars movie has been, and I'm going to bed a happy man.

I've always gotten a kick out of it that I shared a birthday with James Doohan. Checking IMDb just now, I also see I share a birthday with hottie Jessica Biel, David "Bud Bundy" Faustino, Laura "the other chick in Mulholland Dr." Harring, and Miranda "the crazy witch in Sleepy Hollow" Richardson. Speaking of Tim Burton, when my son's birth was stretching a week or so late, I kept hoping that he'd be born on August 25th, my fave director's birthday. Alas, he popped out the day before, meaning he now shares a birthday with Steve Guttenburg.

A couple jobs ago (it's depressing how often I change them, but then again, I am in the internet biz) I used a company-owed laptop and fell in love with it. Unfortunately, when the company was closing and I got to choose a machine to take with me, I opted for a desktop machine instead of my beloved laptop, since at the time DVD Verdict needed a new server. It ended up dying a couple months down the road, and I kicked myself even harder for not taking the laptop instead.

Well, I finally got enough money together to buy a new one. I searched all of the likely places online the best possible deal. I was initially attracted to the Balance laptops at Walmart.com, but the off-brandedness really threw up a red flag. I looked some more, and finally settled on an Inspiron 2200 from Dell. Basic and inexpensive, which was just what I was looking for, but the $700+ price was a bit of a challenge to my budget. Well, I started searching for reviews of it, and found one with a link to get it for a lot cheaper - $599. I had been going through the Home/Home Office section of their site, but if you went through the Small Business section, there was an incredible sale: double the RAM, free internal wireless, a free inkjet printer, and $150 off. Wow. I got a helluva Dell for cheaper than the crappy Balance laptop. The only upgrade I opted for (other than the free ones) was a CD burner, because you never know when that will come in handy.

So the moral of the story? If you're looking at getting a Dell, look through all their "divisions" and see if they're offering different specials.

Unfortunately for me at the moment, my wife left me (relax, it's only temporary) and took my uber-cool laptop-carrying backpack with her, so I can't go sniff surf on a wireless network away from home. And she has my (she'd make me say "our," but she's not here) digital camera with her too, so I can't take any "action shots" to share. So, really the only fun I've had with it so far was watching the Dawn of the Dead remake in bed. Funny enough, I didn't watch all of it - the same thing happened with the original as well. I wonder if the remake will look as hopelessly dated in twenty years as Romero's version?

Noooooo!

Oh well, I'll get over it. If Revenge of the Sith contained everything the fans wanted it to, it would have to be released, Kill Bill style, in two parts. Hey, maybe Lucas should've started with Attack of the Clones and let us have the Clone Wars goodness we all wanted, and none of the childish Jar-Jar crap we didn't!

(Oh, and this makes more sense if you read Judge Mitchell's entry "Continuing the Theme.")