Nothing Very Important

Buckley's Cough Syrup

Buckley's is advertising itself as tasting awful but working great. This cracks me up. Talk about embracing your flaws and running with them! It's sugar- and alcohol-free, so there's no risk of anyone really abusing it to overdose on something ... unless they've got an insatiable addiction to camphor, Canadian fir balsam gum, pine needle oil and menthol. Ick.

And if you have a truly grossed-out face, you can submit it to Buckley's ... for a chance to win a year's worth of Buckley's. If the stuff tastes that terrible, one bottle might actually be a year's worth of their medicine ...

The Whole Harry Potter Thing ...

Actually, it's the whole Dumbledore thing.

I haven't read the books, mostly because I know that once I start, I won't be able to stop, and I'd like to wait 'til most of them are in paperback so I don't feel completely extravagant when I buy them all. So I post this as an outsider.

But I don't get why J.K. Rowling had to "out" Dumbledore .... and not because of any stance on homosexuality. That's a completely different subject. You want to have a gay character? Then have a gay character. More power to you.

But here's the thing -- it apparently wasn't implicit in the books, if this big announcement about his preferences had to be made known to the world -- three years after he was killed off.

Fiction -- especially children's fiction, I would argue -- is supposed to stimulate imagination. What information the author gives is fuel for the imagination to fill in the gaps that are left.

Why, as an author, diminish the capacity for imagination -- in either direction -- regarding one of your characters, if you didn't bother to make that aspect of their personhood known in the way you wrote them? If readers wanted to assume he was gay, there was obviously nothing written that would prohibit them from assuming so. And if they wanted to assume the opposite, or if the thought of his orientation never crossed their mind, then there was nothing -- until recently -- to contradict what their imagination had either assumed or left out altogether.

I enjoyed, in reading an interview with Lois Lowry, how she handled the question of whether "The Giver" and "Gathering Blue" were connected (the interview was apparently done before the release of "Messenger," which, I have read, connects the first two books) -- she said that if a reader wanted to assume that the characters of the two books were intertwined somehow, then they could, but she would leave that up to the reader's imagination. I liked that. I appreciated that. I have a pretty good imagination. So do most people, if you don't start limiting their options.