The premise of this episode was my deep aversion to history. But really, I’m as much a fan of historic tales as the next person. My aversion is actually to pioneer history. Mandi loves her pioneer history, or more specifically, the fur trade. I’ve never been able to muster much interest in that period. And that’s the reason I’m not big on Canadian history as a whole. It’s all pioneer history. For some reason Australia’s history interests me much more than Canada’s. Perhaps I like history that’s more removed from my own life; tales of exotic, far-off lands. Perhaps it’s simply because Australia produced Nick Cave and Canada produced Chad Kroeger. I suspect this is the subtle cultural difference that causes so many Canadian youths to travel in Australia when they leave school.
What is it I don’t like about pioneer history? I suppose it’s the because everyone seemed to have been in a life and death struggle over stakes that were pitifully small. I don’t get the impression anyone got rich in the fur trade or the gold rush, they just got sick and dead. Maybe I’m just not an adventurer. I don’t wish to go where no one has gone before, I wish to go where people with bulldozers and bridge-making equipment have gone before. In fact I’d rather not go until the plumbers, electricians and people with memory-foam beds have been there. And finally, the people with the vaccines. I’m not going until I know I’m not going to get tetanus.
No, give me Roman or Egyptian history over pioneer history any day. The Romans had plumbing—Sewers at least. Though I do enjoy the streets flowing with shit in Deadwood, I prefer Pharaohs to cowboys.
Posted by nerdhurdles 
The waiting is over. I’ve finished reading Harry Potter and the Longest Wrap-up Ever. Although I can sort of appreciate what I think Rowling was trying to do with drawing everything out in this book—create a sense of tension leading up to the outbreak of the second war—I mostly just felt tediously annoyed by the annoying tedium. Even the final, perhaps a little too chaotic, climax drags its feet getting started. And after that grinds itself to a halt, there follows a denouement not even Tolkien’s attention span could grasp. OOTP so far holds the strange distinction of being the best written and worst edited book of the series. J.K.’s done a pretty good job here, but her publishers were asleep at the wheel. A position I found myself in as a reader for most of the book.
That’s right, at least the last half of Goblet of Fire is actually fairly decent. For the first time the characters are actually fleshed out into three dimensional (though still stereotypical) people and more time is spent on believable interpersonal relationships. These interpersonal relationships take the form of Degrassi-like jealousies and emo-douchiness, but at least they ring true. Finally people are behaving in this magical world like people instead of archetypes cut from farytales. Which is why, in spite of the series seeming to get better, the first three books are still lifeless and shallow. I can see how readers can project the three dimensional characters from the latter books onto the early books in hindsight, but that doesn’t make them good books. They should have been able to stand alone. I still feel the strategy to begin the books for a young audience and age them progressively with the characters was a conceptual flaw. The last third of Goblet of Fire just affirms that more. The darker, deeper, and better, the writing gets, the worse the earlier books seem to be.
