Rupert Grint – who plays Ron Weasley in the Harry Potter movies – has had to stop filming for a few days after catching swine flu. He has now recovered from the “mild bout” of the disease and returned to work filming the Deathly Hallows Harry Potter films.
I’m really not surprised he caught it – and rather more surprised that there have been no others from the film. After all, Leavesden Studios where the filming takes place is in Watford – which has been declared a swine flu hot spot.
The …

JK Rowling, millionairess author of the Harry Potter books, has given Gordon Brown his one piece of good news in weeks: she has donated £1 million to the Labour Party.
And her reasons for this? Because Labour has, she claims, “reversed the long-term trend in child poverty, and is one of the leading EU countries in combating child poverty.” Yet that’s actually a load of complete bollocks:

Gordon Brown’s flagship anti-poverty campaign [has] received a triple blow… with news that a rise in both child and pensioner poverty had left Britain a …

The Vatican has condemned the Harry Potter books by JK Rowling because in the books “witchcraft is proposed as a positive ideal” and claim that Harry himself is “the wrong kind of hero.” The author says that the seven-book series has an “inverted and confused spirituality: a world where bad is good” and that they are characterised by a “vague, new-age philosophy.”
What a load of utter bollocks.
The Harry Potter books are no more characterised by a “vague, new-age philosophy” than any other fantasy series. It is a fictional belief system …

Or so claims a French philosopher. Jean-Claude Milner says:
It must be said from the start that Harry Potter is deeply political and that the books speak of today’s England…Reading it, one can see that J.K. Rowling — like many cultured English people — believes there was a real Thatcherite revolution, that it was a disaster, and that culture’s only chance is to survive as an occult science….Harry’s uncle and aunt – Muggles par excellence – live like heroes of Margaret Thatcher’s world, in a neat little estate where all the …

[T]here’s no limit to what gay and lesbian people can do, even being a wizard headmaster.
So say gay rights group Stonewall, after JK Rowling opens Professor Dumbledore’s closet and outs him as gay.
You do just have the wonder whether Stonewall actually thought that sentence through. After all, the Harry Potter books in which Dumbledore features is fiction. That means it is not real. I just get the feeling that they pulled out a stock press release and just added the profession in, and then neglected to read it through.
In the …

I wonder – has Gordon Brown been reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows today, like he said he would back at the end of May?
I’ve said what I thought of it – will we get to hear what Gordo thinks?
[Also, the number of visits since my last post on this has been phenomenal! More than 500 in less than two hours!]

Today was the day that the seventh, and final, Harry Potter book was published. One thing I did not do was queue to get the book – I went on my way back from the pub last night instead. There has been a lot of hype over almost all of the seven books, so is it possible for them to live up to it? Not really.
Some claim that the Harry Potter books are “children’s books” and look down their noses at any adult who reads it. But they’re wrong. Whilst …

A computer hacker has claimed that he has discovered the plot of the new Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, to be released on 21 July. He posted on a hackers’ website that he has discovered the ending of the seventh and final Harry Potter book, and which two main characters die.
Quite bizarrely, the hacker, who goes under the name “Gabriel” appears to have been moticated by religion, posting:
“We did it by following the precious words of the great Pope Benedict XVI when he still was Cardinal …

After Gordon Brown takes over as Prime Minister on 27 June (29 days away), he has revealed that, far from bothering with organising his Cabinet or trying to run the country:
“one of his first acts as prime minister will be to read the final Harry Potter book.Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is published on 21 July, just three weeks after Mr Brown succeeds Tony Blair.” (BBC)
I really would have though that, considering there is nearly a month between when he will become PM and the publishing of Harry Potter …