By Staff
"Deathly Hallows," the seventh and last Harry Potter book by J.K. Rowling, carries a $34.99 list price – staggering to a guy who saw Paul McCartney twice for less than $10.
The series began a decade ago as a children's story, but at these prices and a ponderous 784 pages, it's closer to you've got to be kidding than to kid stuff.
If you see parallels to the second coming of the Beatles, OK.
Beatles VI vs. Potter VII.
But bigger than Jesus? Don't go there.
Still, it's the Biggest Book of All Time and goes on sale at the stroke of midnight July 21.
The first six Potter titles sold more than 325 million copies worldwide, including the one on which Harry bears an uncanny resemblance to John Lennon.
In 2000, 3 million copies of "Goblet of Fire" were gobbled up in two days, compared to 5 million "Order of the Phoenix" copies in 24 hours in 2003 and 6.9 million "Half-Blood Prince" volumes in 24 hours in 2005.
These are the sort of numbers one associates with four lads from Liverpool who shook the world.
In 1964, despite the distraction of the Sister Lakes monster, the Fab Four charted 15 American million sellers – nine singles and six albums – for 25 million sales their first year alone.
By October 1972, the Beatles had worldwide sales of 545 million – not that numbers alone can measure their or Potter's impact.
As I learned reading Rolling Stone's 1967 rehash, Monkeemania reached its zenith the Summer of Love.
The prefab four sold more albums than the Beatles and Rolling Stones combined and scored five hit singles.
No wonder Jimi Hendrix opened for the Monkees or that my dad took me to a car show at the University of Notre Dame to see the Monkeemobile (a customized red 1966 Pontiac GTO convertible), which is kind of like the Elvis coat show parody on "Saturday Night Live."
However tediously influential I think the Beatles are, fact is "More of the Monkees" and "The Monkees" topped the charts, followed by "Doctor Zhivago," "The Sound of Music," the Temptations' Greatest Hits and three Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass records – that's a lot of mariachi trumpet! – before No. 10, a little record called "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."
Harry came to Rowling on a train from Manchester to London – not a flaming pie.
She finished writing Jan. 11 at the Balmoral hotel in Edinburgh, Scotland.
I swiped the first Potter a decade ago from the kids because I was curious how a children's book landed on the cover of Time magazine.
It's not every day we get to witness a classic being born, as evidenced by the largest first printing of any book in history by Scholastic – 12 million, compared to 50,000 for the first $22 novel in 1997.
A first edition of "The Sorcerer's Stone" recently sold for $18,000.
Ten days before the book, the fifth movie, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," hits theaters.
I'm sick of all the midnight party hype for a book, since reading is a solitary pursuit.
Maybe I'll reread them backwards, searching for a "cranberry sauce"-style clue to Harry's fate.
The faux five: The Spice Girls, who gave us the very catchy "Wannabe" in 1996, announced June 28 a reunion for 11 concerts worldwide in December and January.
Ginger Spice left in 1998 and the group broke up in 2001.
All five Sheatles are on board, including Posh, Sporty, Baby and Scary.
No comment: Men and women are supposedly equally verbose, 11 words a minute, 16,000 words a day, Science reported July 6.
"This was one of those urban myths," University of Texas psychologist James Pennebaker told the Los Angeles Times.
After reading that women speak 20,000 words a day to 7,000 for men, he and his colleagues set out to learn the truth with a cell-phone-sized electronically activated recorder (EAR) Pennebaker developed.
"What it really means is not that she talks too much," Dr. Louann Brizendine, author of "The Female Brain," tells the Times, "it's that he doesn't listen enough."
Researchers also find that men tend to talk about things, while women tend to talk about people.
Quips, quotes and qulunkers: "There is a perverse consequence brought about by the scale of conservative failure. Conservatives have failed in ways that have undermined Americans' sense of collective capacity Their failure has communicated not just their own incompetence, but also the message that government in general is incompetent. By failing so dramatically, conservatives have created a significant roadblock for Democrats: They have undermined people's faith in the very instrument that we as progressives want to use to solve problems."
– Democratic pollster
Stan Greenberg
in The American Prospect
A cranky nation rarely undertakes great tasks, especially when achieving them demands a degree of trust and hope. Defeat of the immigration bill is the most obvious manifestation of how economic anxiety and a loss of faith in the federal government's competence have conspired to make it far easier for politicians to say 'no' than 'yes,' to reject compromise on difficult questions, and to assume that voters will respond to big initiatives with mistrust."
– Washington Post
columnist E.J. Dionne
"People are at least as smart as goats. Now one of the ways I keep those goats in the fence is I electrified them. Once they got popped a couple of times, they quit trying to jump it."
– U.S. Sen. Trent Lott,
R-Miss., on how to deal
with illegal immigration
"The whole thing somehow was beneath me."
– Barbara Walters on declining the first Paris Hilton interview after 23 days behind bars.
It went to Larry King
"When the (Wall Street) Journal get its (topless) Page 3 girls, we'll make sure they have MBAs."
– Fox's Rupert Murdoch
in Time magazine's July 9
cover story
on "The Last Tycoon"
43.6 million: Number of Americans without health insurance in 2006, up from 41.1 million in 2005, according to a report released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.