WEEKLY WHINE

An open letter to JK Rowling

Dear JK,

May we call you JK? We'll call you JK.

As you know, JK, we here at GoobNet are huge fans of the Harry Potter series. And by that, we mean that a couple of us have seen some of the films. As far as reading the books, let us know when the qualifiers for the 2010 Quidditch World Cup start.

Many people have heard you say that the seventh and final Harry Potter book, which you're working on now, features the deaths of a couple of major characters. There is great panic and commotion over the possibility that one of those will be good old Harold himself.

You know just as well as anyone that we've never been that interested in popular culture here at GoobNet. The Millionaire, Survivor, Star Wars, South Park, American Idol, X Games, Britney Spheres, Ricky Martin, Ashlee Simpson, Lindsay Lohan, extreme ironing, DDR, WoW, the Sims, oil spill surfing, Bennifer, Bennifer Two, Brangelina, Filliam H Muffman, Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, X-Men, X-Men 2: X-Men United Football Club, X-Men 3: You Morons Really Think This Is Going to Be the "Last Stand"?!, Anna Kournikova, Maria Sharapova, Danica Patrick, erotic paintball, Myspace, Youtube, podcasting, texting, and sudoku fads all passed us by.

Nonetheless, JK, we feel a special affectation for the characters we've seen in the Harry Potter films. Like that guy, and those two Indian chicks, and the other guy who's kind of a jerk, but not as much of a jerk as that one guy. And besides, hasn't everyone else told you that Hogwarts is like a younger students' version of Caltech? Only with significantly more expensive set design, of course.

So, we feel that we're uniquely positioned to tell you how to do your job. We've been listening to the voices clamoring for you to ensure that good old Harold survives this last novel, and we've got this sneaking suspicion that the two "major characters" you've killed off are the big funny looking guy and the little annoying guy, the same two characters that everybody's been begging you to kill off all this time.

But in case you still haven't decided which characters are going to get bumped, allow us to make a modest proposal.

Kill Harry.

Please.

Our reasons are simple:

1. Good old Harold is playing with fire. In the last movie, he was in that competition and ate that thing that gave him temporary gills, and he and that guy nearly drowned [or was it that girl who has the hots for him who can never get up the nerve to tell him?], and then that other guy killed his opponent and almost killed him too. He's done plenty of dangerous stuff in his time at Hogwarts, Harry has. It's setting a bad example for today's youth, who put the books down and believe that they can go around putting their hands on trophies and reaching for snitches with no ill effects. Our children need to realise that there are consequences to this sort of behaviour, and killing Harry will get that message to them.

2. There are no heroes. Good old Harold is painted in your books as this really great magic guy who can do stuff that other people can't, and, as a bonus, is actually nice to people and tries not to be a menace to South Central while drinking his juice in the hood. Have you ever met anyone like that? If you take out the magic part, you probably have. And what happened to that person? Green Day were right: The nice guys do finish last. Killing Harry will prevent anyone from falling into the misapprehension that it's possible to be a hero any more.

3. Move along, please. JK, you know how modern culture works. Everyone obsesses over something, it lasts for a while and then goes away, and then everyone obsesses over something almost completely identical and forgets about the previous thing. But people who began obsessing over Harry Potter nine years ago are still obsessing over him. It's unhealthy to obsess over something that long; just ask Nick Hornby. Killing Harry is in the best interests of your fans' health.

So JK, if you care about your people at all, you know what to do. And if we know you, you're already thinking about your next epic series of books. We would like to make a humble suggestion: Chris Hirata and the Cake of Positrons.

Yours faithfully,

Reginald J Goober
Founder and CEO, GoobNet Enterprises, Inc
[which doesn't actually exist however]