Guy next to me: “I didn’t think that was bad at all. I was expecting much worse.”

Me: “I guess that’s why we’re taking the bar in Colorado, not California or New York.”

On news from AT&T that only 146,000 iPhones were activated during the opening sales push on the new device, Apple stock took a $8.81 hit today.

Ouch.

Then again, there’s better news in the linked article. Seems like there’s better evidence to support my prior assertion that seems to confirm that a 3G iPhone is almost here. From the article, it sounds like November.

Sweet. If the stock is currently in the crapper at $134 bucks a share, what’s it going to do when it’s in all out rampaging bull mode?

Saw this letter to the editor in the Knoxville News Sentinel today, and laughed just a bit. I guess this person was sirius..err serious.

Like millions across the world, I saw the new “Harry Potter,” movie, which was even better then I hoped, but I was also struck by a possible underlining message.

As most people know, the issue of the movie is He Who Should Not Be Named is back, and unless everyone starts working together, the world is doomed. But, though there is plenty of evidence to support the crisis, the Ministry of Magic — the government of the Magic world — is refusing to admit that there is a problem and is actually undertaking a media campaign to discredit Professor Dumbledore, Harry and others who are trying to warn the world of the coming danger.

As most people know, each book or movie starts with Harry living in London with his normal family and in a world that knows nothing of magic. The first couple of scenes in the movie take place in blazing hot heat with media reports of a record heat wave.

Is anyone else other than me seeing some similarities between the movie and our nation’s handling of the global-warming crisis? Of course, in Britain there is widespread acceptance of the incredible scope of the global-warming crisis, and both the Liberal and Conservative parties are united in their will to fight.

In the movie, there is no conspiracy — just policy leaders who can’t deal with the scope of the problem and therefore simply convince themselves that the experts are wrong. So, if President Bush is our Minister Fudge, I guess it is up to us to take up the issue.

Right now it looks like He Who Should Not Be Named is clearly winning. Let’s just hope we have enough people who join Dumbledore’s Army to save the day.

Gil Melear-Hough

Knoxville

So I understand how there is some indication of the ineffectiveness of a government bureaucracy and a “none so blind as he who wouldn’t see” motif can come through in the HP books. Certainly makes sense to me. I think that JK Rowling has even stated that there’s some metaphor on governments and bureaucracy in HP. Extending it to global warming? Saying that the government is taking on a media campaign to discredit global warming activists? The logic doesn’t seem to follow to me from what I’ve seen in the news.

Taking the same logical leaps that the writer of this letter did, I’m going to make some broad, unsupported by objective proof (since I don’t feel like researching them now to buttress my case) statements at this point. In our country now, the advocates of the position of human induced global warming tend to get much more favorable press than those that are dubious of the claims. Global warming caused by burning fossil fuels and other man-made activities is taken as absolute gospel truth. The global warming doubters are labeled in the press as Luddites who simply refuse to see what is glaringly obvious. That is hardly the case in HP.

Think about your comparisons in more detail before you try to be cutesy in writing a snippy letter to the editor or a blog post. Read what you’ve written more than once before you send it. Does it really make sense? I know that I’ve written tons of things that I’ve later decided weren’t correct. It’s after this kind of review and analysis that you can determine if there’s a true metaphor there.

I really don’t care what position you take on global warming, and I don’t think it’s particularly relevant to the point I’m trying to make here. Ultimately, we can’t shoehorn every possible pop culture reference to model our personal world view. The drafter of this particularly poor letter to the editor has tried and miserably failed in his attempt to do so.

I say “Expelliarmus” to this bad piece of writing and to the KNS for printing it. Hopefully the spell will work to exclude nonsense such as this from the paper in the future.

Thoughts on the Lohan arrest?

I can only hope brendan didnt really need pencils for the bar exam.