I understand there's a new Harry Potter book coming out sometime soon. I expected bookstores would take early orders for it. That video stores are taking orders surprises me a bit, but I know the books are some of the best advertisements for the DVDs, so that makes sense. What throws me are the restaurants taking book orders. And not fast food places you'd expect to have licensed everything, but ordinary little mom-and-pop, or student-managed-at-least, restaurants. Maybe they're catering at last to the solo diner.
In pocket universe news, this morning I put a (roller ball) pen in my pocket. At a seminar mid-day I noticed the pen had disappeared, leaving the cap behind. When I got home, I had the pen back.
I saw on the SCTV 90 Volume 3 DVD today the NASA ``Buzz Aldrin's Mercury III Players'' production of Murder in the Cathedral, amusements with people in spacesuits as actors. The astronauts performing were Buzz Aldrin, Al Shepard, and Rusty Schweiker (sic); at production Control in Houston was Christopher Kraft (played by John Candy). I'm curious who the space program nerd at SCTV was. If you asked people to name astronauts they'd probably top out at Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, John Glenn, Al Shepard, and maybe since 1995 you'd get Jim Lovell. You could win bar bets that nobody named Rusty had ever been in space. As for naming flight directors ... And `Tom Wolfe' describing the performance as combining ``the early days of The Method and the X-15'' -- well. There are other odd space program trivia points in the show, but this is prominent.
Trivia: English King George III watched the 1769 transit of Venus from the observatory at Kew. Source: George III, Christopher Hibbert.
Currently Reading: Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book, Gerard Jones.