(no subject)

[active_apathy]

Ok, so it wasn't quite as all as I said it was¹, but that's fine! Because I have...

content.

(for once)

(kind of)

(eee! Parentheses)

Anyway...

Apparently there's a fan petition for Jo Rowling to not end at HP7. I say apparently because I randomly saw it on a bizarrely placed TV in a shopping centre, which, as a source, is only slightly less reliable than reading the entrails of a neoconservative². I have two immediate thoughts on this: one,

1. If she did write HP8, would we have to start calling her Joanne Conan Doyle? (...but maybe not Sir Joanne Conan Doyle)
   
2. Could we maybe, just maybe, petition for Robert Jordan to stop writing books?
   

On the subject of books, I saw possibly the happiest sight ever in a bookshop today - one, and exactly one, copy of a book by Christopher Paolini. It gave him a whole inch of shelf space, which is about 25.4 millimetres more than he rightly deserves, but it's a very big step in the right direction.

On the plus side, I now have copies of Company, by Max Barry³, and Selling Out, by Justina Robson, both of which should be fun and entertaining.

I've missed the opportunity for this to work best, I think, but still: if you're in a Potter!queue and get bored, I encourage you to start singing Potter Potter Potter. If just one person joins in with "Snape, Snape, oooh it's a Snape",⁵ the world will be a better place. Not much better, but still...

And that's about it, apart from one last little observation. I walked past a sign outside a supermarket earlier today, advertising positions vacant for butchers and bakers. I'm saddened that the supermarket industry is so intent on denying certain members of society the opportunity they dream of to become a manufacturer of lightweight, portable lighting devices composed from a reserve of solid fuel, principally rendered fat, paraffin or beeswax, formed around an internal wick, and frequently made into the approximate shape of a stick.

Also, ⁶.

1. Yes, bad and evil. For the editing types reading this, I'm sorry. Mostly.
2. Not actually recommended. It's:
   
   1. Messy.
   2. Really messy.
   3. No, seriously. It's incredibly messy, and really hard to clean up after.
   4. Somewhat illegal.
   5. ...where 'somewhat' means 'very'.
   6. Kind of smelly.
   7. Prone to claims of having no specific recollection of whatever you were trying to divine, anyway. It's probably better to just stick with cromniomancy instead. At least when you're finished you can cook something with the onions.
3. Max Barry is the person responsible for Jennifer Government, which I quite liked. If you haven't read it, find a copy and do so. I'm fairly confident that most others who've read him would happily second this recommendation.⁴
4. Yes, I'm supposed to have a whole comm for doing this, but this here journal is my soapbox and I can spruik anything I want to. :)
5. These commas are always kind of awkward. US English and common non-US usage says the punctuation goes inside the quotation marks in all cases, but 'proper' non-US English says that it goes outside unless the punctuation semantically belongs to the quoted text, in which case it goes inside and the sentence needs no punctuation of its own, especially when quote and sentence both end at the same time.
   
   (This footnote serves no purpose other than to share the thought processes behind the relative placement of two punctuation marks in an offhand comment on the Internet. I think I might have too much time on my hands.)
6. I now have a footnotes tag.