Got my Barnes & Noble line bracelet for tonight. Number 32.

I’m just saying.

Just a request: Until July 28, please don’t post any HP spoilers in the comments, or email them to me.

Thanks.

This is more in the interest of full disclosure than of intimate communication, but I figured it’s only fair to give the packs of Sony-loving readers some ammunition for when they accuse me of being an anti-Sony malcontent.

Pursuant to my question the other day, I finally decided to get an HD-DVD player. Not that you care–but I want to give a short defense of this decision in order to attempt to protect my objectivity on Blu-Ray/HD-DVD matters going forward.

So let me start with this: This is not a Harry Knowles-like decision. All of my “director friends” are not swearing by HD-DVD. It’s not even clear to me that HD-DVD is going to win the format war. In spite of my great misgivings about Blu-Ray, I find some of the Blu-Ray inevitability arguments relating to the importance of content very, very persuasive. I won’t be shocked if, in 24 months, Blu-Ray emerges as the dominant format.

So what does HD-DVD have going for it? Price. (And for me, necessity; I needed a new DVD player asap.) The HD-DVD player I bought cost less than half of the entry-level Blu-Ray machine and amounted to only $100 more than a standard, solid upconverting player (it was even a bit cheaper than the higher-end Oppo unit that everyone seems to love so much; *and* it comes with five free HD-DVD movies).

What I did was basically place a very small bet on the HD-DVD format that, win or lose, will be spread over at least 18 to 24 months. That’s low-stakes poker. So much so that I think I’ll be able to stay reasonably objective on Blu-Ray/HD-DVD matters going forward.

My basic analysis of which still stands: If a new hi-def disc format takes off in the near term, I think HD-DVD will do very well. They’ve got the cheaper players and if they take a sizable lead in the stand-alone player market over the next 18 months or so, then there’s a chance Fox and/or Disney will peel off from Blu-Ray and become platform agnostic, which puts them in a strong position going forward. If, however, Blu-Ray keeps the stand-alone numbers close until they get their price down in the $200-range, then I think their content advantage eventually overwhelms HD-DVD. (Remember that in all of this the presence of upconversion somewhat mitigates the advantages of content exclusivity and, to my cheap-skate mind, gives more importance to price-point.)

And then there’s the Sony thing: Every time I think about Blu-Ray’s advantages I’m brought back to Sony’s PS3 non-price-drop, and I think, This is the gang that can’t shoot straight. How on earth could they ever win a format war?

In sum, I’m happy with my HD-DVD, at least for now. The Toshiba HD-A2 is pretty much a dream: easy set-up, sensible nav menus, and very solid upconversion. If it becomes obsolete and I have to buy a $200 Blu-Ray in a couple years then it’s no big deal–I needed a new DVD player in the interim anyway. If this turns out to be the player I keep for the next 10 years, then that’s a bonus.

They’re going around. Tom Maguire and the Soccer Dad have theirs up. The Hogwarts Professor has a bunch. And the amazing Janet Batchler has predictions on basically everything, including horcruxes and who will die. (She also has this whoppingly good theory on Harry’s death.)

I don’t have any thoughts of my own independent of these deep thinkers–Batchler and Granger, in particular, I think, are going to look very smart come Saturday morning. So my amalgamated thoughts are that:

* Per J.B., Harry “dies” in a non-permanent way in order to get to the Dark Lord.

* Hagrid, once slated for death, is spared by JKR, but figures prominently in the denouement. As does Grawp.

* Tonks and Lupin survive.

* Ron and Hermione survive.

* The Weasleys are not through suffering, though. Percy bites it and either Fred & George or Bill & Fleur don’t make it out alive.

* Dead is dead and Dumbledore ain’t coming back. But I suspect he has left Harry a little something to help him along.

* Voldemort and Bellatrix, obviously, are toast. Ditto Fenmir Grayback.

* All of which comes at a cost. Luna, Neville, and Minerva McG are all in play. And I do stand by my prediction that, in the grand tradition of Joss Whedon, someone we care about dies early to serve notice that there is going to be blood on the floor.

* Which leaves Snape. I’ve been championing Snape since Book 1, much to the consternation of all who know me. I became convinced, even at the end of Half-Blood Prince, that Snape was a quadrupe-agent (think about it: that’s what he’d have to be) working for the Order of the Phoenix.

But now I’m not so sure. I wonder if the big surprise is that sometimes things are what they seem, and Snape really is evil. We know that Dumbledore’s judgment is highly imperfect. We know, also, by the end of HPB, that Harry’s judgment is much improved (i.e. his obsession with Draco’s project). Maybe it turns out that Harry was right all along.

Then again, it’s possible that Snape is more of a Prince in the Florentine sense of the word, as John Granger supposes. Or, it’s possible that, as all sophisticates now believe, Snape really is on the side of the angels due to his feelings for and about Lilly Potter.

More later.

The Pig sends us this excellent link to an Australian paper’s everything-I-need-to-know-I-learned-from-Ferris-Bueller essay.

Crikey, it’s good!

God won’t save you
Cameron crosses himself when he realises Ferris is taking the Ferrari and we know where that gets him.

Bonus trivia: As Cameron states, less than 100 of the cars were made with no two being the same. They are valued at over US $3 million. However, the car used in the movie was actually a modified MGB.

Extra bonus trivia: According to Save Ferris website, “the Ferrari’s personalised license plate was NRVOUS standing for, of course, nervous. Did you know that all of the Bueller cars’ license plates were also personalised and referred to other John Hughes films?

“Tom Bueller’s license plate reads MMOM referring to Mr Mom. Katie Bueller’s reads VCTN referring to National Lampoon’s Vacation and Jeanie’s license reads TBC which, of course, refers to The Breakfast Club. Ed Rooney’s plates read 4FBDO, standing for, For Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

So the Phillies lose 10,000 games and suddenly everyone in the world is talking about how they’re the losing-est team in history. Well guess what: That 10,000th loss didn’t put them over the hump or anything. They’ve been the losing-est team in pro sports for my entire life. Everyone else is just noticing.

Either that, or my theory that Philadelphia is America’s new BoSox is beginning to take hold!

Pity Ron Charles:

It happened on a dark night, somewhere in the middle of Book IV. For three years, I had dutifully read the “Harry Potter” series to my daughter, my voice growing raspy with the effort, page after page. But lately, whole paragraphs of “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” had started to slip by without my hearing a word. I’d snap back to attention and realize the action had moved from Harry’s room to Hagrid’s house, and I had no idea what was happening.

And that’s when my daughter broke the spell: “Do we have to keep reading this?”

O, the shame of it: a 10-year-old girl and a book critic who had had enough of “Harry Potter.” We were both a little sad, but also a little relieved. Although we’d had some good times at Hogwarts, deep down we weren’t wild about Harry, and the freedom of finally confessing this secret to each other made us feel like co-conspirators.

Along with changing diapers and supervising geometry homework, reading “Harry Potter” was one of those chores of parenthood that I was happy to do — and then happy to stop.

Ordinarily, I’d be inclined to give Charles a break because taste is individual and whatnot, but his essay isn’t just a personal dissent, but an attack on those who like Harry Potter: He charges that we suffer from “cultural infantilism.”

For my own part, of course, guilty as charged. But I’d like to stick up for the rest of you, the legions of reasonably sophisticated people who enjoy Harry Potter.

There’s no need for a point-by-point refutation of Charles, since his entire argument for how childish the Harry Potter series is rests on his assertion that he and his daughter were bored by it. QED. So I’ll simply suggest that this essay is such a perfectly predictable miniaturization of counter-intuition for its own sake that the only thing surprising or interesting about it is that it didn’t run in Slate.

Clearly the guys at KSK have been delving into Matus’s fantasy world. That’s the only explanation for this.