[Crocostimpy posted this in comments. It feels like it deserves a post of its very own. It’s damn long, but there are some gems in there. Teddy isn’t a Metamorphwerewolf. And re: the person who was supposed to do magic in later life: “I’m sorry about this, but I changed my mind!” Original is here.]

J.K. Rowling: I’m here …

Finished Spook Country, the new William Gibson. I doubt there will ever be a Gibson novel I won’t read, and read with pleasure, but there is, after nine novels, a certain undeniable sameness to his work. Maybe he’s just a victim of his own success — there’s so much faux-Gibson out there that even real-Gibson starts to sound like …

I was dickering around with Ain’t It Cool News’s Comic-Con updates, which contain some tidbits about Joss Whedon — he’s thinking about doing a BBC movie about Rupert Giles from Buffy. And I felt a pang when I realized I hadn’t seen anything by Whedon onscreen since Serenity two years ago.

Anyway, there was a link to an incredibly …

I have almost — but not quite — nothing to blog about today, so I will simply note that I am grooving, really intensely, to “The Mesopotamians,” off “The Else,” the new album by nerd-rock legends They Might Be Giants. There’s an intermittent quality to TMBG’s brilliance, but I don’t think that makes their genius any less genuine.

I’ve …

I wrote a short profile of Neil Gaiman in the print magazine this week. It’s here. For those curious about Gaiman’s presumably-now-lost English school novel, the full quote is as follows (I only had a measly page for this piece):

“Many years ago, when I was 17, I plotted my own story set in an English public school. Most of which I’ve

…

I’m not there, but Time’s got you covered. (Maybe that should be our new slogan. Did we have an old slogan?) Rebecca Winters Keegan, our one-person Los Angeles bureau, is covering it.

For a more granular breakdown of the Indy 4 presentation, swerve over to Ain’t It Cool. Wow, Karen Allen looks good.

Three people are dead and three more injured in an explosion that occurred at a spaceport in the Mojave Desert. These were people from Scaled Composites, Burt Rutan’s outfit, the folks who won the X-Prize with Spaceship One, who in latter days have morphed into Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson’s as-yet-notional space tourism outfit. …

This time to USA Today. I wish they’d gotten her to talk more about Deathly Hallows. This is probably the most interesting quote:

“I’m sort of writing two things at the moment,” she says. “One is for children and the other is not for children. The weird thing is that this is exactly the way I started writing Harry. I was writing two

…

While I wasn’t looking Comic-Con kinda sorta became the biggest event on the nerd-media calendar. You know, where everything happens and everything exciting gets previewed. I’m not there. Instead I’m stuck picking up dribs and drabs on the Internet like everybody else.

Said drabs include the trailer for Beowulf, which looks quite …

It still feels weird to post about anything besides Harry. Maybe that’s why nothing else really seems worth posting about today anyway. A video of some astronauts throwing away an ammonia tank, in slow motion, in space? Some computer program is pretty good at poker? They’re making a movie of the good-but-IMHO-overrated comic Y the Last …

To Meredith Vieira. Rowling is on the Today show tomorrow, Thursday, and Friday, and on Dateline on Sunday. NBC has released a partial transcript (transcribed with touching fidelity, I might add), which I’m slapping in below. No bombshells, but it’s always great to hear the source speak. (Thanks to Jim Poniewozik for the hook-up.)

RE: …

I’ve been wallowing in yesterday’s massive comment trail, thought I’d pick out a few (of the many) good points that got made. Keep in mind that Rowling will give a couple of exit interviews this week — I know she’s giving one to USA Today — so maybe she’ll clear up a few of these? At any rate, if I were interviewing her, these are a …