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July 18, 2005

Asshole Alert: "Pranksters" Spoil Harry Potter Suprise Ending to Kids Standing On Line To Buy Book

DO NOT CLICK ON THIS IF YOU'RE READING THE BOOK AND CARE ABOUT THE ENDING. The link gives away the ending.

I'm not into Harry Potter... but this is just assholery of the first order.

Some people just need attention. And they don't much care if it's good attention or bad attention.

And yeah, okay, Boston Irish and I did sort of the same thing for a week when The Crying Game came out. But one, no kids were involved (I hope no kids were seeing it, anyhow) and two, the producers and studios were so annoying about not giving away the "suprise twist" (which most people knew about) it seemed justified.

Thanks to Evan.

posted by Ace at 01:01 PM

Comments

What kinda' link is http://www.ace.mu.nu/www.bostonirish.blogspot.com?

Posted by: SWLiP on July 18, 2005 01:08 PM

You'll be amused to know that the whole Potter spoiler idiocy began with a leftist Olympic-class asshole named Richard Stallman. Apparently as a form of "protest" against the silly Canadian courts decision to forbid people who'd bought early copies of the book from reading them, someone scanned the pages that reveal the big plot twist and sent them to Stallman, who urged people to boycott the book until the court apologized.

Since then the scanned pages have become an internet phenomenon, on ytmnd.com and other places. But I thought you'd appreciate this is something else you can hang on the lefties.

Posted by: Il Padrino on July 18, 2005 01:30 PM

Still. . . I had to laugh.

Oh, BTW-- Darth Vader is Luke's father. And Kevin Spacey is Keyser Soze. Bruce Willis is already dead. Mister Glass is the supervillain.

Kevin Costner? Communist.

Harrison Ford's wife murdered his mistress. Tyler Durden is a figment of Ed Norton's imagination. Jeff Bridges unwittingly drives the bomb into FBI headquarters. Soylent Green is people.

Those murderers, they finally blew it up, damn them all to hell.

Cheers,
Dave at Garfield Ridge

P.S. Oh yeah-- SPOILER WARNING!

Posted by: Dave at Garfield Ridge on July 18, 2005 01:36 PM

and BostonIrish is a feckless Fenway F**kwit.

Sorry, cuz. I can only defend so much bunk.

Posted by: TC@LeatherPenguin on July 18, 2005 01:47 PM

Donald Sutherland? The pod people got him, too.

(BTW, Dave, Costner as the very mole he was supposed to be hunting, the one that didn't really exist, but was used as a cover story to disguise the Secretary's accidental killing of his girlfriend, who was ALSO Costner's girlfriend ... that one still has me going.)

Posted by: Phinn on July 18, 2005 01:51 PM

That was hilarious...

Posted by: Eric on July 18, 2005 01:55 PM

The guys at CTU shouldn't trust Nina Myers.

Dr. Richard Kimble needs to pick more reliable friends.

The aliens hate water.

Posted by: Slublog on July 18, 2005 01:58 PM

You mean Harry Potter is a man? Holy crap! I had no idea!

Posted by: Monty on July 18, 2005 02:21 PM

A few years back, I read a piece by Joe Queenan where he decided to find out exactly how obnoxious you had to be in a theatre before management would actually step in and do something about it. When Queenan went to see The Crying Game, he screamed out, "Oh my god! That's a woman!" the first time Forest Whitaker showed up.

Speaking of spoilers, the Chinese-subtitled release of The Crying Game is called Oh, No! My Girlfriend Has a Penis! True story.

Posted by: utron on July 18, 2005 02:45 PM

IT'S A COOKBOOK!

Posted by: apotheosis on July 18, 2005 03:51 PM

Rosebud?

A sled.

Posted by: Slublog on July 18, 2005 04:02 PM

What is this with all these spoiler revelations? Next, someone will say you don't actually get renewed at carosel...

oops.

Posted by: BattleofthePyramids on July 18, 2005 04:55 PM

It's her sister. . . it's her daughter. . . it's her sister. . . it's her daughter. . .

Posted by: on July 18, 2005 05:00 PM

SHE'S A MAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(run away after screaming into theater)

ah.....memories

hey TC -- where's the love?

Posted by: bostonirish on July 18, 2005 05:33 PM

It's a cookbook!

Posted by: Joey on July 18, 2005 05:38 PM

Little slow on the uptake there, eh, Joey?

Posted by: Dave at Garfield Ridge on July 18, 2005 05:46 PM

Okay, I click on the link and just get some cheesy text saying "NOOOOOO YOU BITCH!" Apparently, it doesn't want to work for me.

Posted by: Xoxotl on July 18, 2005 06:24 PM

SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE?????

Posted by: John from WuzzaDem on July 18, 2005 06:33 PM

Sorry John. Truth hurts, I know.

Posted by: Dave at Garfield Ridge on July 18, 2005 06:52 PM

Nicole Kidman and her kids are dead.
Carter Burke sent the colonists on LV-426 out to that alien ship.
Robert DeNiro falls back into his coma.
Christmas is saved because Rudolph uses his bright red nose to lead Santa's sleigh.

Posted by: Donnah on July 18, 2005 06:57 PM

Oh Lord, how I wish somebody, ANYBODY, told me the secret ending of "The Crying Game".

Posted by: digitalbrownshirt on July 18, 2005 07:01 PM

xoxotl, turn up the sound on your computer and wait. You'll hear the spoiler in an audio bit, along with some reaction from the kids & their parents.

Oh yeah, and "the Matrix" is a big battery pack for the machines that conquered humanity.

Posted by: Russ from Winterset on July 18, 2005 07:47 PM

More spoilers!

Sopranos "Whacked" List

Season 1 - Jimmy Altieri and Mikey Palmice
Season 2 - Big P Bompansero
Season 3 - Jackie Aprile, Jr.
Season 4 - Ralphie Cifaretto
Season 5 - Tony Blundetto

Heh. Can you tell what one of my favorite shows is?

Posted by: Slublog on July 18, 2005 11:32 PM

Amazon.com Widgets

Now Available!
The Deplorable Gourmet
A Horde-sourced Cookbook
[All profits go to charity]

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Good rickroll

What? Skeleton of the most famous Musketeer, D'Artagnan, possibly discovered in Dutch church closet.
Dumas picked four names of real musketeers out of a history book, D'Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos. So there was an actual D'Artagnan, though he made most of the story up. (Or, you know, all of it.)*

Charles de Batz de Castelmore, known as d'Artagnan, the famous musketeer of Kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV, spent his life in the service of the French crown.
The Gascon nobleman inspired Alexandre Dumas's hero in "The Three Musketeers" in the 19th century, a character now known worldwide thanks to the novel and numerous film adaptations.
D'Artagnan was killed during the siege of Maastricht in 1673, and there is a statue honoring the musketeer in the city. His final resting place has remained a mystery ever since.

A lot of Dumas's stories are based on bits of real history. The plot of the >Three Musketeers, about trying to recover lost diamonds from the queen's necklace, was cribbed from the then-almost-contemporaneous Affair of the Queen's Necklace. And the Man in the Iron Mask is based on real accounts of a prisoner forced to wear a mask (though I think it was a velvet mask).
* Oh, I should mention, Dumas says all this, about finding the names in an old book, in the prologue to his novel. But authors lie a lot. They frequently present fictions as based on historic fact. The twist is, he was actually telling the truth here. At least about these four musketeers having actually existed and served under Louis XIV.
Fun fact: You know the beginning of A Fistful of Dollars where the local gunslingers make fun of Clint Eastwood's donkey and Eastwood demands they apologize to the donkey? That's lifted from The Three Musketeers. Rochefort mocks D'Artagnan's old, brokedown farm horse and D'Artagnan is incensed.

A commenter asked which should be read first, The Hobbit of LOTR?
Easy, no question -- read The Hobbit first. It's actually the start of the story and comes first chronologically. It sets up some major characters and major pieces in play in LOTR.
Also, the Hobbit is Beginner-Friendly, which LOTR isn't. The Hobbit really is a delightful book, and a fast read. It's chatty, it's casual, it's exciting, and it's funny. In that dry cheeky British humor way. I love that the narrator is constantly making little asides and commentary, like he's just sitting next to you telling you this story as it occurs to him.
LOTR is a very long story. Fifteen hundred pages or so. The Hobbit is relatively short and very punchy and easy to read. If you don't like The Hobbit, you can skip out on LOTR. If you do like it, you'll be primed to read LOTR.
Oh, I should say: The Hobbit is written as if it's for children, but one of those smart children's stories that are also for adults. Don't worry, there's also real fighting and violence and horror in it, too.
LOTR is written for adults. (It's said that Tolkien wrote both for his children, but LOTR was written 17 years later, when his children were adults.) Some might not like The Hobbit due to its sometimes frivolous tone. Me, I love it. I find it constantly amusing. Both are really good but there is a starkly different tone to both. LOTR is epic, grand, and serious, about a world war, The Hobbit is light and breezy, and about a heist. Though a heist that culminates in a war for the spoils.

The Hobbit Challenge: Read two more chapters. I didn't have much time. Bilbo got the ring.
I noticed a continuity problem. Maybe. Now, as of the time of The Hobbit, it was unknown that this magic ring was in fact a Ring of Power, and it was doubly unknown that it was the Ring of Power, the Master Ring that controlled the others.
But the narrator -- who we will learn in LOTR was none of than Bilbo himself, who wrote the book as "There and Back Again" -- says this about Gollum's ring:
"But who knows how Gollum had come by that present [the Ring], ages ago in the old days when such rings were still at large in the world? Perhaps even the Master who ruled them could not have said."
In another passage, the ring is identified as a "ring of power."
I don't know, I always thought there was a distinction between mere magic rings and the Rings of Power created by Sauron. But this suggests that Bilbo knew this was a ring of power created by Sauron.
Now I don't remember when Bilbo wrote the Hobbit. In the movie, he shows Frodo the book in Rivendell, and I guess he wrote it after he left the Shire. I guess he might have added in the part about the ring being a ring of power created by "the Master" after Gandalf appraised him of his research into the ring.
I never noticed this before. I know Tolkien re-wrote this chapter while he was writing LOTR to make the ring important from the start. And also to make Gollum more sinister and evil, and also to remove the part where Gollum actually offers Bilbo the ring as a "present" -- Bilbo had already found it on his own, but Gollum was wiling to give it away, which obviously is not something the rewritten Gollum would ever do.
But I had no memory of the ring being suggested to be The Ring so early in the tale.

Finish the job, Mr. President!
Melanie Phillips lays out the case for the total destruction of the Iranian government and armed forces. [CBD]

TJM acts like he knows anything about John Wick and screenwriting. It's embarrassing, really.

Podcast: Sefton and CBD talk about how would a peace treaty with Iran work, Democrats defending murderers and rapists, The GOP vs. Dem bench for 2028, composting bodies? And more!

Oh, I forgot to mention this quote from Pete Hegseth, reported by Roger Kimball: "We are sharing the ocean with the Iranian Navy. We're giving them the bottom half."

Batman fires The Batman
Batman is disgusted by the Joachim Phoenix version of Joker
Batman tries to fire Superman
Batman is still workshopping his Bat-Voice

Forgotten 80s Mystery Click: Red Leather Suit and Sweatband Edition
And I was here to please
I'm even on knees
Makin' love to whoever I please
I gotta do it my way
Or no way at all

Tomorrow is March 25th, "Tolkien Reading Day," because March 25th is the day when the Ring is destroyed in the book. I think I'm going to start the Hobbit tomorrow and read all four books this time.
The only bad part of the trilogy are the Frodo/Sam chapters in The Two Towers. They're repetitive, slow, and mostly about the weather and terrain. But most everything else is good. Weirdly, the Frodo-Sam chapters in Return of the King are exciting and action-packed and among the best in the trilogy. (Though the chapters with everyone else in Return of the King get pretty slow again. Mostly people talking about marching towards war, and then marching towards war.)

Sec. Army recognizes ODU Army ROTC cadets for their bravery and sacrifice in private ceremony
[Hat Tip: Diogenes] [CBD]

TJM gives you a brief tour of his movie collection.

Forgotten 80s Mystery Click
One day I'm gonna write a poem in a letter
One day I'm gonna get that faculty together
Remember that everybody has to wait in line
Oh, [Song Title], look out world, oh, you know I've got mine

US decimation of Iran's ICBM forces is due to Space Force's instant detection of launches -- and the launchers' hiding places -- and rapid counter-attack via missiles
AI is doing a lot of the work in analyzing images to find the exact hiding place of the launchers. Counter-strikes are now coming in four hours after a launch, whereas previously it might have taken days for humans to go over the imagery and data.

Robert Mueller, Former Special Counsel Who Probed Trump, Dies

“robert mueller just died,” trump wrote in a truth social post on march 21. “good, i’m glad he’s dead. he can no longer hurt innocent people! president donald j. trump.”

TJM has thoughts on Superheros and Iconography

Canadian School Designates Cafeteria And Lunchroom As "No Food Zones" For Ramadan
Canada and the UK are neck and neck in the race to become the first western country to fall to Islam [CBD]

Chuck Norris, Action Icon and 'Walker Texas Ranger' Star, Dies at 86

Podcast: Sefton and CBD have a short chat about Iran, the disgusting SAVE Act theater, Mamdani's politicizing of St. Patrick's Day, and more!