Mr Mist’s Blog

Today we toddled along to the cinema and saw Ocean’s Thirteen. George Clooney, Brad Pitt and the rest of the gang together again to pull off another amusing caper. This time for revenge against a casino and hotelier Willie Bank (Al Pacino) after he pulls a fast one on Ruben.

Consistent laughs throughout, and an impressive pace help this movie along. I didn’t see 12, but I did see 11 and this kept the same sort of style but with a bit more of a tongue in cheek attitude that suited the film well, I think. Not too serious with itself, which I suppose in a third of a series is a trap you could easily fall into. Worth a look.

In real life, it seems that the flooding situation has become a bit chaotic in the south west, with lots of people left without power or even running water, due mainly to overwhelmed treatment centres. Meanwhile, sales of Harry Potter’s last adventure have swelled Rowling’s bank account nicely, with over 11 million sold in the first day. That’s a large number of books, considering the percentage of people in the world that don’t or can’t read.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows brings to a close the seven book Harry Potter series written by J K Rowling that has cumulatively sold over 325 million copies.

We were some of the happy few (or not so few, as the case may be), that (wisely?) chose to purchase our copies shortly after midnight on Saturday morning, and then I spent much of yesterday reading it from cover to cover. So how was it?

Well, pretty good actually. It doesn’t disappoint. I think there’s definitely bits in there for everyone, with a good mix of depth and lightness (though let’s be honest this book swings vastly in the favour of depth, for the light moments - much favoured by earlier books in the series - are few.)

Whether you could give this book to a young child and have them fully appreciate it, I am not certain. The wealth of information is much greater than in any of the previous books, and novice readers would struggle. Of course, if you’ve ploughed your way through the other six books, then you’re hardly a novice reader any more, I suppose.

I’ll not litter this short review with spoilers, but there are deaths in this episode, and the theme of people dying is, let’s say, consistent from start to finish. If you have been following the series, then I would come to this one prepared to see a character that you may have grown fond of not make it through. The punches that were pulled in earlier books are let fly in this one.

Rowling has definitely come on. Her ability to meld description and action, to set pace, and to rely confusion and mayhem has improved dramatically since book one. You can really feel the action and are swept along by the tide of events impressively well in Hallows. The sense of adventure is palpable, and the narrative constructs more mature even than book six. All in all the drive from start to finish is strong.

This book sits at just over 600 pages long, and you really get a sense that it is “all thriller and no filler”. There is not a wasted sentance to be found anywhere. Some expected this to be a longer book than the others, but, I think, it didn’t need to be, because the real estate was crammed to capacity.

It’s a good climax to the season. Go read it.

Big congratulations to Lewis Hamilton on winning his first Grand Prix in a tough race in Canada that saw a number of retirements and a fairly spectacular crash involving Robert Kubica in which he sustained a broken leg. Very neat job, we should see a lot more of this guy.

Here’s a story for you - a charity has said it will be making a complaint about Top Gear because of showing the Richard Hammond crash and making fun of people with brain injuries [news.bbc.co.uk]. This is so completely stupid. It’s almost as if people have nothing better to do than complain. Noone forced people to watch the programme and the humour was entirely in keeping with every other episode of top gear - something that regular watchers, who weren’t just tuning in so they could moan about it afterwards, would know.

Top Gear has a certain style to it. It’s funny. I personally would recommend that people who don’t find it funny don’t watch. How’s that for an idea? Honestly. A car that Hammond was in crashed in spectacular fashion at over 200 MPH. That’s hardly an advert for speeding now, is it?

Looking at BBC News, it seems that at least two big characters won’t make it to the end of the series [news.bbc.co.uk] and, reading between the lines, it looks like one of them could be Harry. The other, I could take a guess, would be Snape, or Hermione - though she also says that one character now won’t die, which could equally easily be one of those two.

I’m sure that the last book will be a good yarn either way, and will annoy as many people as it pleases no matter what happens. Yup.

On other notes, I’ve come to the conclusion that weblogging is difficult. Yes. It’s hard work. It’s (in manay cases) an incredibly thankless task (only very, very, popular journals get large numbers of comments on a daily basis) and it takes a large amount of time to compile a really decent entry. My theory seems to be largely weighed out by looking at my own links page. The links page that was a few years ago is now almost completely defunct. Only one original entry on my list from back when still blogs, and that is serialdeviant.org [www.serialdeviant.org]. Kudos to you for carrying on for this long in the face of the inevitable, which seems to be blog death. Nearly all my other links (if I haven’t already removed them) now point to dead pages, or blogs that haven’t been updated for months on end. (Of course, from other perspecitives, this site could be one of those dead pages - though I try to update every now and again.)

So, yeah, well done to those who manage to actively maintain blogs for sustained periods of time (over years for example.) I guess when you outlive your blogring codes you know you’re doing alright…