And on as different a note as there could possibly be, there’s a new trailer for Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs out.  I am pleased to report that in my branch we stocked nine copies of the picture book and they are all all all OUT at the moment, thereby proving my theory that when a film based on a movie comes out, people flock to read the book again.  Mind you, it didn’t work out quite as well when I stock-piled those copies of The Water Horse or Five Children and It . . . .

I wouldn’t call this the first attempt anyone has ever made to construct a working, accurate version of the Weasley Clock featured in the Harry Potter books, but it’s certainly the most complex.  Those of you who have read the books will recall that in Harry Potter the Weasley family has a clock where each face is on an arm and points to where they are (Home, Traveling, Mortal Peril, etc.).  With our current GPS craze, how hard would it be to create one’s own real life clock?  A bloke at Blog What I Made goes through all the details, and there are several videos of deconstructed clocks in various states.  For the techies amongst you, this is gold.  Big time thanks to Tom Angleberger for the link.

Off-topic?  Not necessarily.  This is, after all, a literary blog and so I find this Tricky Linguistics video to be a rather nice complement to the various discussions we get bogged down in.  Which is to say, I just like listening to Stephen Fry talk quickly and well.

There’s always one video per week that makes the rounds on the various blogs before I’m able to pick up on it.  This week it ties in nicely to the upcoming cinematic adaptation of Shauna Cross’s YA nove Derby Girl (the movie will be called Whip It). In real life we’ve a mild mannered librarian turned roller derby player, as seen on CNN.