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?

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.

We agreed that the preview of The Dark is Rising looks terrible. It looks like they’re turning it into an action movie. Will Stanton with magic powers?!?!? It’s sad, since Christopher Eccleston seemed like perfect casting for the Dark Rider.

Saw a second preview of The Golden Compass, though, and it looks even better than the first one we saw. They could still screw it up, but I at least have high hopes for this one. The visual look is dead-on (which was my first reaction to the very first Fellowship teaser), and it looks like they’ve stuck with the book’s concepts.

I’m a little more apprehensive about The Dark is Rising (Susan Cooper), mainly because the IMDB page says they plan to start early this year, but the Los Angeles Times has it down for a September release. For the record, I do think this is the one to start with, not Over Sea, Under Stone, because as I recall it has a much greater sense of tension, which will translate better to screen. Plus it provides more of an introduction to the world and the conflict, since Will is dropped right in the middle of it, while I remember the other book being set more solidly in the “real” world. The Drews don’t get involved as deeply until later.

On a related note, I don’t think I’m in the target audience for The Number 23. We saw the trailer for it on Friday when we saw Pan’s Labyrinth (which is quite good, BTW), and I could not stop laughing. Not because of Jim Carrey, but because of the premise. Perhaps it comes from reading the Illuminatus! trilogy. There’s a great sequence in the book where one of the characters is starting to look for certain numbers, including 23, in everything. Of course, since he’s human, he finds them, using ever more convoluted arithmetic to prove that they’re significant. While reading Illuminatus!, I looked up stuff on synchronicity and found the tech term for this tendency to see connections where none exist: apophenia. And here I’m watching this preview, and there’s a sequence in which the lead character starts finding the number 23 in everything, using ever more convoluted arithmetic…. I don’t think I could take the premise seriously enough to get into the movie.

Did a Google search just for the heck of it. I wonder how quickly those numbers will climb…

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Teenager with a destiny? Check. Red-haired girlfriend whom he used to think of as the girl next door? Check. Break-up because the hero is marked for danger? Check. Yes, the thought had crossed my mind.

(via scans_daily)

Is this what he saved those mean girls from?