Some guy asked me, “What’re you dressed up as?” And I said, “…a Muggle?”

Still, I’m most impressed that the movies finished, and didn’t stop partway through the series with dwindling budgets and audience interest. His Dark Materials couldn’t get past the first film, and based on the box office, it’s pretty clear that the current Narnia films aren’t going to continue beyond Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Eight movies over a decade, adapting a complete series, and going out with a bang? That’s an impressive feat right there!

I keep misreading the Snapea Crisps as Snape Crisps…and then Katie noticed that you could pick out a related name from the Maragogype Coffee at Trader Joe’s.

Go ahead. Tell me Dumbledore doesn’t look like Gandalf in this poster.

Yeah. Especially in IKEA.

For example, here we have Harry Potter’s favorite instructor in Defense Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts, magically transformed into a set of venetian blinds.

And here’s the thief who ends up as one of Blake’s 7 on the Liberator…as a set of sheets. (Nine of them, no doubt, to the wind.)

And it’s not just IKEA. Robin of the Teen Titans has his criminal counterpart in this bottle of wine:

Or the older daughter of Eddard Stark, playing music instead of the Game of Thrones.

So, what good crossover names have you seen?

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was originally scheduled for November, but Warner Bros. has just decided to push it back to June for scheduling purposes.

Is it annoying? Yeah. Is it a personal affront? Not so much.

Maybe I’m jaded, having been through this with movies like Stardust and Serenity, not to mention Sci-Fi Channel’s insane scheduling system that basically treats each “season” as two 10-episode seasons and splits them across what might as well be two years…or, going further back, PTEN’s insistence on holding back the last 4 or 5 episodes of each Babylon 5 season until the following fall, every single year to the point where TNT, after picking up the final season, did the same thing. Pathology got postponed twice, then pulled off the schedule entirely before it finally hit theaters nearly a year after the original release date.

Or maybe it’s just that I like the Harry Potter books better than the movies.

It’s not like it’s been taken off the schedule indefinitely. It’ll still get a theatrical release. I can’t think of any at the moment, but I’ve had movies I really wanted to see get stuck on a shelf, finished, for years. Some of them eventually surfaced as direct-to-DVD releases.

And they’re not delaying production on Deathly Hallows. The actors will still be well within the standard Hollywood “teenager” age range by the time they finish playing 17-year-olds in the final film.

So I can understand being annoyed, but I don’t understand the letter-writing, the petitions, the plans to boycott the film — yes, there are fans who intend to boycott the film if they have to wait for it.

*sigh* I’d better go over to Newsarama and see how crazy the thread about Final Crisis #4 being delayed 2 weeks has gotten. Actually, no, I shouldn’t. I should get some sleep instead.

P.S. Anyone else think that “HP Rebellion” would be a great name for a computer?

Now the charity is doing a standard hardcover run of the book…and a $100 collector’s edition designed to mimic the original hand-written run. While considerably cheaper than the £1,950,000 Amazon spent to get their copy of the original run, it’s a little more than I’d like to spend. (I mean, I didn’t even spring for the $150 for the special edition of Comic Book Tattoo.) I think I’ll stick with the standard edition.

We got there about 10 past midnight, and they were distributing books, but the line was already all the way down one side of the store. I ended up getting coffee at the in-store Seattle’s Best, talked to the baristas about just what’s open so far, and we both browsed a bit. Finally they called her wristband color, and we had the book in our hands by 12:50.

We went home. I went straight to sleep (despite the coffee!), while Katie stayed up to read the first few chapters.

It was nowhere near the level of the iPhone launch last month, but then there are many more places you can buy Harry Potter, and there’s little risk of the book selling out.