Author: Aaron Weber

Harry Potter

I finished the Half-Blood Prince on Friday night– Bookdwarf had company over, but I was hidden in the bedroom with the air conditioning and Harry Potter. For the last hundred pages or so she came in every few minutes to see where I was, and if I was crying.

I didn’t cry.

Angry Letter

Dear MTV.Com:

I just watched the MADE episode where Samantha is made into a Girly-girl (off-schedule; I have TiVO). The show said, check mtv.com for more. So, I:
* Visited MTV.COM
* Switched from Firefox to Internet Explorer
* Installed a new Flash upgrade
* Rebooted
* Visited the MTV Overdrive
* Crashed my browser
* Restarted my browser
* Visited MTV Overdrive
* Discovered that Overdrive Life After Made only shows info for the latest MADE episode.

That’s an awful lot of work for a disappointment.

Note: the same lack of episode information applies to Pimp My Ride: what was fan reaction to that C-10 Truck they put all those monitors into? I just spent most of this afternoon watching Pimp My Ride on Tivo and I want to know how Heather has fared with a truck that no longer holds her garden implements because it’s so full of electronics, and what fan reaction was!

Look, I know my life is empty. But your website doesn’t help me in my quest to forget that fact. I’m going back to beer.

Yours,
Verbal at Secretly Ironic Dot Com

In which I finally cave in

OK, so, I resisted it as long as I could, but I have started reading the latest Harry Potter installment. I managed to avoid reading any of them until last year, well after Phoenix came out. And now I’ve managed to wait all of six days before, last night, giving in and reading the first couple chapters.

My current guesses as to who dies in the end: I don’t know about the “central character death” but I’m thinking, there have to be some additional collateral fatalaties. For one, Voldemort. He dies at the end of all the other books, too, so he’s got to die in that one. Also that French girl. This is a novel by a Brit, after all– the French can’t go so well in this one either.

I kind of hope Hermione gets it, though. Not sure why.

Mitchum Man

Gothamist complains about these lame Mitchum ads encouraging people to run for the subway. Now, I don’t find those particularly annoying. The ones that get me are the ones in my gym: “If your personal trainer came to your birthday party, you’re a Mitchum man.” No, if your personal trainer came to your birthday party, you are paying people to be your friends. And especially the one in the locker room: “If you’re here at 7AM with a hangover, you’re a Mitchum man.” No, if you’re at the gym with a hangover, you’re drinking too much.

The thing is, I like Mitchum because it’s unscented, not because it’s intensely strong.

I Love Ananova

Who cares if it’s true? It’s funny! In the Netherlands, police aren’t quite sure what to do when they find people misbehaving in parks. The Dutch have a strong tradition of live-and-let-live, so obviously the first thing to do when you have a problem about public behavior is to discuss it and reach consensus. And then you get news reports like this: Eric Droogh, who is director at the Veluwe National Park, said: “A national debate on wild sex parties in the countryside is essential.

Bad Product Names

People don’t believe me when I tell them, but it’s true: Nissan really does make a car called the Armada. The car is as absurd as it sounds. It is approximately the size of some apartments in this city, and of some cities in Europe.

Why pick a name like Armada? Why, to convey that this is no mere land-yacht, no sir! It’s a whole FLEET! I assume it handles like an armada going down in a storm off the coast of Spain. Or like the oil tanker required to fuel it– the 5.6 liter, 8-cylinder engine means you’ll be doing as little as 13 MPG in city driving. The 4×4 LE edition weighs 5,612 pounds, and the titans are priced to move at $35,000 to $40,000.

Is there a better way to proclaim to the world that you are an asshole? I mean, aside from driving a Hummer?

Remuneration

Someone told me recently that Tiger Woods is the first-ever sports billionaire. Why not Jordan? I guessed that Jordan signed his licensing deals earlier on, so they may not have been as favorable. Or perhaps a year of golf tournament prizes add up to more than a year’s worth of basketball salary. And basketball doesn’t appeal to bankers, so Jordan never got licensed for much beyond sports gear, cereal, and toys, while Woods reps for Nike, Cadillac, and Accenture.

While in 2004 Woods ranked as the top-paid athlete, pulling in $10M directly from golfing plus $70M in endorsements, Jordan certainly isn’t doing badly. He was ranked fourth, at $35M/year, — all in endorsement revenues, since he’s been retired for some time now. $35M/yr is not bad for a retired guy.