I wonder how many blog posts have this title? It’s just the catchy thing we bloggers love. I originally started with “Rowling Howling” and Google was saying twelve results (from blogs) but only three recently. I updated it to yowling when I saw there were no results from Google Blog Search.

Anyhow, Orson Scott Card, author of my beloved Ender’s Game, has a nice diatribe (oxymoron?) against J. K. Rowling’s latest misdeed (and I’m just hearing about this). The word diatribe often has an unsavory connotation against the issuer of said diatribe, but I want to be clear from the start that I think Card is perfectly in the right.

Apparently, some poor schmuck published a book that acts as a reference for the Harry Potter series called Harry Potter Lexicon. Said schmuck, according to Rowling, simply rearranged her work and so it represents a violation of copyright. The terrible yowling that JKR has committed during the course of this utter debacle is truly shameful. I loved the Harry Potter series, but since its completion, she is going downhill. I’m going to have to agree with Card here, I think she wants to be taken seriously. Why can’t people be content with mad cheddar? Would people be happier if they had the respect of millions of people rather than millions of dollars? People always say money can’t buy happiness, and it would seem to be correct, since she is nickle-and-diming this poor fool who raised his head an inch above the crowd-line. Just for once, I’d like someone to prove it to me (by giving me millions of dollars). The deal is, if I stay happy, I get to keep the money.

And completely unrelated, I decided I liked the word “crowd-line” and checked to see if it’s available. Unfortunately, the .com variation is taken, though .org is free. Estibot guesses the .com is worth $140 (compare that to mendicantbug.com, which is worth a whopping $340). Crowd-line with a dash dot com is available, though.. Interestingly, Go Daddy is selling .info domains for $0.99 a year. Is that because they are trash and the refuge of spammers and online biz marketers? The only domain extension more reprehensible is .biz itself, which they are selling for even more. The day I type a .biz address into an address bar is the day I leave the interwebs for good.

I think end-of-semester stress is making me grumpy.