JK Rowling says wizard Dumbledore is gay - washingtonpost.com

Speaking at Carnegie Hall on Friday night in her first U.S. tour in seven years, Rowling confirmed what some fans had always suspected—that she “always thought Dumbledore was gay,“ reported entertainment Web site E! Online.

Rowling said Dumbledore fell in love with the charming wizard Gellert Grindelwald but when Grindelwald turned out to be more interested in the dark arts than good, Dumbledore was “terribly let down” and went on to destroy his rival.

That love, she said, was Dumbledore’s “great tragedy.“

“Falling in love can blind us to an extent,“ she said.

The audience reportedly fell silent after the admission—then erupted into applause.
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Rowling said she had read through a script for the movie adaptation of the sixth book in the series, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” and corrected a passage in which Dumbledore was reminiscing about past loves by crossing it out and scrawling “Dumbledore is gay” over it.

I never would’ve suspected that Dumbledore was supposed to be a gay character, but then I suppose that was probably the point. It should make re-reading the novels in the future a little more interesting as now I’ll be looking to see if there’s any subtle hints as to Dumbledore’s sexuality in them.

Update: Had to include the LOLCat once I saw it.

A Story of Christmas Eve in Frankfort


By K. Patrick Glover

     It was Christmas Eve in Frankfort, Michigan and The Mariner was empty but for me and an off duty cop named Dan Avery. Dan represented one third of the city’s police department and I,  Nick Kellerman, its sole private detective. We were drinking Jim Beam and discussing the presents we had purchased for our respective girl friends.
     My girl, Sasha, was only 19, and since I’m pushing 45, Dan’s end of the conversation included a lot of jokes about cradles and playpens. I took it in good humor, only occasionally threatening to spank him with my cane. In truth, the situation made me feel awkward, but Sasha felt it was perfectly acceptable so what did I know?
     We were starting to come to the conclusion that neither one of us was very good at gift buying when Susie Vandrick, who worked in the flower shop below my office, burst in and started babbling about a body down on the beach. Dan calmed her down and the bartender brought her a cup of hot coffee. It took awhile, but we got what details we could from her. She said the body was on the beach, just off the turnaround at the end of the road. Dan and I threw on our coats and went for a walk.
     The Mariner sat almost at the end of the main road and the only thing between it and the beach at Lake Michigan was a few condos and the turnaround. It had been snowing off and on for two weeks by then and the beach was covered in several inches of bright clean snow. A field of white broken only by the body lying in the middle of it. A single set of footprints, presumably his own, led from the turnaround to the body.
     It was a male, probably in his mid-thirties, with broad shoulders and sandy hair.
     “Any idea who it is?” Dan asked.
     “No,” I lied.
     The next hour was a flurry of activity. I walked out to the body and verified that he was really dead while Dan went back to his car and called it in. There was no blood, no visible injuries. I checked his fingernails and lips, smelled his breath. No obvious signs of foul play, could have been a heart attack or stroke. The ambulance showed up first, then the rest of Frankfort’s police department and least they were actually sober and on duty unlike Dan.
     We backed off and let them take over. Dan went back to The Mariner to finish his drink. I went home to think things over.

Good stuff. Go check it out if you haven’t already.

Going to the movies is not what it used to be. Security at the studio-owned theatres is heavy, it’s not a trip to be taken lightly. But if you want to see the film everyone is talking about without waiting a year for the home release, you have little choice. When you enter the lobby the first thing you see are long ranks of tiny, thumbprint activated lockers. This is where you must leave all of your electronics, your personal server and peripherals, even your watch, and you had better not be wearing smart spectacles or contacts. As you enter the security zone you’re scanned for anything you may have forgotten. Cochlea and optical implants must be capable of responding with a coded RF identification signal to indicate their systems are secure and cannot record. People with older models, or models implanted abroad where such interrogation is illegal, are turned away. Perhaps they would like to see one of the older releases? Once through the scanner you must submit to a biometric ID test - this is where the known bloggers, hackers and spoilers are ejected. Finally there is the non-disclosure agreement to be signed - these days most moviegoers choose to sign via the MPAAs annual subscription, just trying to take some of the hassle out of visiting the cinema. Finally you get to see the film. In the auditorium the audience is constantly scanned by an AI looking for suspicious activity, so don’t rummage in your pockets for too long. It’s strange that all this effort to protect the movie industry has done so little to improve the movies.

Tarmle’s vision of the future is certainly a worst-case scenario, but it’s still worth thinking about.

Link via Boing Boing.

Created by jun group entertainment, a fresh episode debuts about every 3 weeks and 11 episodes are now online so there’s plenty to catch up on. All episodes of THE SCENE have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times in over 70 countries around the world, and this is only the first of several planned shows, all intended to be free for downloading. Each episode is approximately 20 minutes long and several links are made available to procure each one. All totally free!

If you’ve ever wondered how the underground world of piracy works, this is your chance to see it from the inside. Well, just like you’re seeing it from the real inside.

Lagos left the classroom and saw his friend Inumæn the Cruel strolling across the campus and ran to catch up with his friend.

“Hey, bud,“ he greeted.

“Yo.“

Lagos spied a book clutched tightly in the crook of his friend’s arm and asked about it. Inumæn held up a worn copy of Despotism for Dummies.

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Nothing.

Just an unnerving silence and darkness such as he had never known before. He tried to open his eyes, but the darkness remained. He strained to hear anything and the silence was absolute. He couldn’t smell anything like you might expect at an accident scene either. It was then that he realized he couldn’t determine his body’s orientation; whether he was sitting, standing, or laying down. So he tried to sit up and was unable to determine if he had or not. As though all of his senses had gone completely mute at once. Now he was starting to panic.

“What the hell is going on?” he wondered aloud to himself. Or at least he thought it was out loud because he couldn’t tell if he had actually heard his own voice or just his thoughts of speaking. That made the reply he received that much more alarming when a familiar voice right beside him said, “You’re dead, Tom.”

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President Jet Fratboy was speechifying to an executive session of Christian Conservatives the other day and we were lucky enough to record some of his speech before we were handcuffed, flogged and thrown out bleeding on the street.

“Friends, it’s an honor to speak informally to this group of honest Christian reconstructionists, dominionists, Moral Majoritarians, and Christian Coalitionists.  I told you in 1998 that if you got me elected, I would pay you back many fold. We all followed the strategy of misdirection, stealth, deceit, denial, and downright imposition and it worked.  It worked real good! I told everybody that I wouldn’t intrude my religion on anybody, and they bought the story. Whatta bunch of losers!

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In order to know how to be original, I needed to see what other clubs and bars in the city had to offer, so I began to visit them one by one. A certain night I checked out a bar called enTRANCE, situated in a three story building that once must have been a factory or hotel, as large as it was. It housed a restaurant on the ground floor, a typical bar layout on the second, and a cavernous dance floor on the third. Not one to dismiss the perks allowed me while sizing up the competition, I had a marvelous free meal then proceeded to the bar for complementary drinks. I wasn’t wanting to get drunk though, as I needed to be observant and able to remember what I was seeing. The owner was there and he offered to answer whatever questions I might have, since he knew full well that a popular location would bring the tourists in and once there, they often hopped from bar to club to bar to restaurant to club and back again. He would see a sizable increase in traffic for his business if we were half the draw we hoped to be.

So I had a couple of drinks, talked about the patrons and their preferences and eventually excused myself to check out the dance area. I made my way up the stairs and entered a different space altogether than the bar area I had left behind. Here it was darker and more abandoned than I expected it to be. I was looking for lighting placements and the potential effects lights can have, working in succession, and if they complimented and enhanced the trance and ambient music playing there.

There were fewer patrons there than I had expected to see, perhaps twenty, and each of them seemed to be alone and self-satisfied, dancing drunkenly or hypnotically to the atmospheric sounds and surprisingly sparse lighting schemes. I walked to a back wall, leaned against it and watched, lost in the thoughts I was forming of my club-to-be and how it would make this place seem boring by comparison. I scanned the room and suddenly, as I was looking up for mirror balls, strobes and blinkers, a gradually-building-to-intense flash of light caught my attention. It wasn’t a large effect, being about the size of the moon when fully effected, but it was incredibly white, brilliant and complex. As I stared, this light seemed to pulsate and spin while moving in and out. It seemed as though it reached toward me and retreated, only to pulse and writhe again and again. Then, as suddenly as it appeared, it was gone. I looked for the apparatus that housed it yet could see nothing but the dark wall it should have been affixed to. I thought then that perhaps I had miscalculated it’s location and I made a mental note to ask the owner about it later. It was possible, too, that it was a retracting assembly that wouldn’t be visible until the DJ or light board operator flipped a switch. Dismissing an uneasy feeling, I finished my drink, gave my attention back to the music and returned to my mental musings of bars and clubs and exotic things that flash agreeably in the dark. I wanted music, lights and visible space to amplify each effect’s separate appeal at Abraxas. I wanted our patrons to have both an orgasm and a religious experience when they came there.

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Pick a situation, topic, concept, scene, or what have you that you think might make for an interesting short story and either leave it in the comments or email it to me and I’ll try to write a short story about it. Maybe it’ll be a couple of pages or maybe it’ll be a couple of sentences. Either way it’ll help me to flex my creative muscles and give us some content for a poorly under-used category here on SEB. What do you think? Sound like fun?