OMG Dumbledore caught teh ghey!!1!!11!!

First of all, sorry for the extreme lack of blog-posting lately. Your humble blogger was at a scintillating conference in which he learned how to get lots of money from the federal government (ha!), and subsequently got engrossed in fascinating details at his place of employment. Consequently, blogging has been kept to a minimum, even though there have been a number of important stories in the national news. What? No, not the San Diego fires. I'm talking about Kid Rock getting arrested in a brawl at a Waffle House, or Britney Spears' new addiction to something she calls "purple drank," which is "a mixture of Diet Sprite, prescription-strength cough syrup with coedine, and painkillers"--yum! Really, it's like Kid Rock and Britney are trying to have a contest to see who can out-trash the other.

However, the most annoying story of the past week has to be the big revelation that Albus Dumbledore, beloved headmaster in the Harry Potter series, is/was gay. Gasp! As an acknowledged Harry Potter fan, I've gotten lots of emails about this, and, really, my reaction is "meh." Here's the thing: beginning with the fourth book of the series, JK Rowling went CRAZY with the length of the books. I mean crazy, like 800 pages per book. My feeling is that if she didn't think Dumbledore's gayness was important enough to include in the nearly 3,200 pages that constituted the final four books, why should readers feel like it was an issue of any importance?

Really, the whole business of talking about character backstories after the books have concluded makes me feel like I"m talking to one of those Star Wars fans who has read all several hundred of the Star Wars books, and can therefore tell you EVERYTHING that ever happened to the characters. "Oh, yeah, well, Han and Leia had four kids until Leia was killed by an enraged cyborg that was created by the son of Darth Crapious--he was a Sith from the Tarbek system--and then Han had to team up with Luke's cousin Amelior and they ended up..." Really, it's all very tiring, and, at the risk of offending these folks, I feel that if it's not in the books (Harry Potter) or the movies (Star Wars), it didn't happen. Case closed. Sorry. Finally, here's a Dumbledore-is-gay t-shirt that is pretty sweet.