Views from Medina Road

I'm rushing to catch up on things before flying out tomorrow night for Glasgow. So quickly--

I finished reading the new Harry Potter over the weekend, and liked it just fine. Yes, they're too long, yes they have a certain repetitive episodic quality about them (with one major 'guest star' character in each book--Umbridge; Slughorn). What I haven't seen noted about the new book is that the insights into the evil Lord Voldemort's past are analogous to the purported background of the evil character in another current pop-fantasy series--Star Wars. For all the disdain and neglect of Harry Potter by the Sf genre insiders, it would be nice to at least see that Rowling is acknowledged as a far better writer than Lucas.

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Here's an item I can't figure out how to Blink; it's too complicated to summarize in just a few words. An article in yesterday's LA Times Magazine is about one Sophia Stewart, who sued the Wachowski brothers, not to mention James Cameron and others, for having plagiarized a 120-page manuscript she wrote in 1983 and submitted to a contest in 1986. She filed the suit after seeing The Matrix in 1999, and an inaccurate report of the suit on the Salt Lake Community College's Globe's website got copied and repeated around the web until the impression in the black community -- since Stewart is African-American -- is that she actually *won* her lawsuit and the truth about her millions of dollars of winnings has been suppressed by the mainstream media... Whereas in fact, of course...