Tiger Woods is finally breaking his silence after three months in seclusion after his well publicized SUV accident and alternate life as “Fred Garvin, Male Prostitue“. What I love is that bookies actually have lines on several items related to this story:

A British bookmaker has set odds at 4-to-7 that Woods wife, Elin, will be with him. William Hill didn’t stop there, however. It offers 8-to-1 odds that Woods will announce he is getting a divorce, 12-to-1 odds that his wife is pregnant and 100-to-1 odds that he is retiring.

Can this story be delivered on a bigger silver platter to the comedians of today?

The reclusive author J.D. Salinger issued a lawsuit targeting a ‘rip-off’ of his classic novel Catcher in the Rye.

Lawyers for Salinger filed suit in federal court this week to stop the publication, sale and advertisement of “60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye,” a novel written by an author calling himself J.D. California and published by a Swedish company that advertises joke books and a “sexual dictionary” on its Web site.

Interestingly, the article also notes that Mr. Salinger once turned down Steven Speilberg’s offer to make a movie of his classic novel (news to me!).

The new (and old) trailers for the upcoming Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince movie are up at Apple’s site.  The new trailer looks great.  I was watching the HP and the Sorcerer’s Stone this evening on TV and its amazing how much the three main characters have changed and grown in the 8 years since that movie was produced.  I’m already looking ahead to see how they will do “Deathly Hallows” on the big screen.

I’m happy to share the launch of www.bookcontracts.com. My wife’s uncle wrote a book on how to effectively negotiate a book contract. Recently, he updated the book and I helped him build out the website to sell a PDF version of the book. So if you are in the middle of writing a book, and need to figure out how to how to negotiate any contracts with publishers, you should consider picking the book/PDF up.

Herre are some before and “almost after” shots of our soon to be Living Room and the built in shelves we had installed. My goal was to have the room painted and prepped before the shelves were to be installed, but the carpenter actually finished the shelves about a month early and that threw my plans and schedule off. This is the last room on the first floor that needs a full overhaul (obviously). As you can see in the first few photos, I am in the process of painting the 1970’s monstrosity that is the fireplace to make it somewhat more visually appealing. The prospect of ripping that out of the house entirely is just too scary for me.

Its been almost two months since Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince hit the bookshelves, and I am amazed, almost dissapointed in myself, for not posting anything about it. And in the time since the release of “Prince”, I have managed to read it twice plus sneak in a second reading of Order of the Phoenix for good measure.

I found “Prince” to be one of my favorites of the Potter series. I think it did a great job of bringing together several plot lines into a very cohesive story. Without giving too much away, the various lessons that Harry had with Dumbledore were very interesting and did a great deal to address several questions regarding the relationship between Harry and Voldemort. I did think the lecturing from Dumbledore was a little long at times, but overall it added immensely to the story. It was also interesting the way Rowling was able to tie in the normal teen angst of “puppy love” into the story and make it work. And the end of “Prince” was amazing, with Dumbledore & Harry’s trip to the cave as they attempted to acquire one of Voldemort’s Horcruxes. I am convinced that the initials R.A.B in the note they found in the cave are that of Regilus Black, Sirius’s brother and former death eater. I theorized that as soon as I read it. And I had my theory validated on from The Leaky Cauldron’s PotterCast podcast…we shall see. I am very much looking forward to the last book to see how this wonderful series ends.

And to add to the Harry hysteria, the next movie installment of the series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is coming out in November!! The pre-movie buzz I am hearing is that it is an amazing movie and may be the best of the series so far.

It should be a very fantasy driven Christmas movie season with Goblet coming out in November, followed by the movie adaptation of the classic C.S. Lewis book The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Looking forward to both movies!!

I recently finished reading Digital Fortress by Dan Brown (famous for The DaVinci Code). I am actually on a Dan Brown kick these days as I am in the middle of reading Angels & Demons, the prequel to DaVinci. And I just purchased his other book Deception Point which is next on my list…holding off on DaVinci until it comes out in paperback.

Digital Fortress was a pretty good book. I felt that the storyline was a little predictable, similar to the Jack Ryan type stories that Tom Clancy made famous in the 1980’s, where the focus of the story was on the CIA and the Government Intelligence community. The basic storyline is about a computer whiz who created an unbreakable encryption key and how a team of computer whizzes at the NSA were trying and failing to take control of the encryption key for the US Government’s own motives. While I liked the story, it just felt too familiar and I fairly easily figured out how the story would end.

Angels & Demons is completely different, as I am sort of flying blind with this story. There are some interesting twists so far and I am having a hard time figuring out where the story is going, which is a good thing! Its keeping me interested and that is what a great book does. And, its prepping me for the DaVinci Code. Lets hope it comes out in paperback before the movie comes out!!

On a recent post on The Movie Blog, it is noted that Ralph Fiennes has been cast as Lord Voldemort! in the Harry Potter movie series. I must agree with The Movie Blog that this is a fine choice for this role. He is diverse enough of an actor and intimidating enough to effectively pull this role off for the Harry Potter series. I am already looking forward to the next movie!

Last night I went to see an exclusive pre-release screening of “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”…a benefit of working at AOL which is owned by Time Warner, which owns Warner Brothers, which distributes the Harry Potter series. The third movie installment of the wildly popular book series was directed by Alfonso Cuaron, a well respected but fairly unknown director.

Well, I must say that “Azkaban” is a wonderful movie and a significant step up compared to the previous two installments (which I very much enjoyed). The pace of the movie was quick and smooth, and Cuaron did an outstanding job of transitioning between scenes and plot lines. He did an effective job of focusing on the key elements of the storyline, rather than trying to have the movie go exactly by the book. I think he was effective in making the not-so-bold assumtion that the majority of the people seeing the movie will have either already read the book (if not the entire series to date) and/or seen the previous two releases and therefore, are well versed in the basics of the story (that Harry lives with his muggle relatives, that he hates living there, that he goes off to school for another year, etc.). Yet, with that said, I do think he could have put a bit more time on the movie to build out some of the storylines a bit more. I got the feeling that the critical scene in this book (you know what it is – rats and warewolves) happened far too early in the movie. All in all, a fine effort and a movie well in keeping with my favorite installment of the series to date.

I finished the fifth Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Overall, it was an extremely long book and was a bit tedious…however, the ending is fantastic and the last three/four chapters made up for the rest of the book. It definitely will make for great reading as the series winds down with years 6 and 7!

I finished the first four books of the Harry Potter series in a little less than a month. It was very easy reading, I must say. The books got progressively longer and progressively more interesting, with the fourth book being the most interesesting to me.