catching up (finally)

I know I'm one of the few people left in the western world that has yet to have read a "Harry Potter" book. After a friend flaked on his offer of loaning the books, I did the next best thing - audiobooks! I downloaded the six audiobooks on my iPod mini, and thanks to a long day in the tissue culture room yesterday, I just finished the first book.

First of all, I was surprised how much of the book was in the movie. Okay, some lines were given to other characters, but that's an old trick Peter Jackson used in "Lord of the Rings". There was only a few extra things that were omitted from the movie, but some of the omitted stuff could be introduced in other movies.

I really don't envy the job that the some poor writer will get when s/he has to write the movie script for "The Order of the Phoenix". While the first audiobook was 8 hours, the "Phoenix" is 26 hours! There's going to have to be some major trimming there.

Now that I'm done with the first book, I am catching up on some podcasts. Here's the podcasts I'm trying to catch up on right now:

::overclocked::podcast

100 word stories by Laurence Simon

History According to Bob - really enjoying these so far

MicrobeWorld 90 second stories from American Society for Microbiology.

NASA Astrobiology Magazine

Science Friday

Slate magazine

Yeah I know - too many interests for my own damn good.

made in America

This was an interesting article about the golden days of American propaganda. The author focuses on the posters used in World War I in attempts to motivate Americans in support of the war as well as why it wouldn't work for the war in Iraq.

someone didn't like the "always low prices"

Not too much information on this because the breaking news was posted at 2:00 PM. But apparently, a Wal-Mart on the west side of Phoenix was the scene of a shooting.

Here's the story. Hopefully there'll be more information soon