Well, not quite, but not far off. In the Boston Globe this week, The Book of Harry.

Eisenstadt sees Dumbledore and Harry, in different ways, as Christ figures – perhaps Harry representing the human Jesus, and Dumbledore the divine. And she posits that the New Testament depiction of elements of the Jewish community is represented by the goblins (unappealing bankers) and the Ministry of Magic (legalistic and small-minded).

But I am much more attracted to a quote near the end of the article.

“Rather than decrying as wicked certain elements of the series – as far too many Christians have done – we ought to be inviting our communities into deeper appreciation of both the similarities and the contrasts between the stories and our Christian faith,” Mary Hess, of Luther Seminary in Minnesota, writes in the journal Word & World.

Mary in the mainstream! And in an article linked to one of her favorite blogs no less. Yeah, Mary!

I ran across a story about a cool iPhone apparatus that makes scanning documents with the iPhone simple. This is a neat idea, the iPhone can make a serviceable scanner in a library or at home, a great alternative to copying costs.

But even better was the service the creator of this apparatus had used to build and sell it. Called Ponoko, it is a website that lets you build almost anything you can imagine. You design it, you price it. Ponoko makes it, ships it, your customer assembles it.

I love sites like Jakprints where I can print almost anything and CafePress where I can design and sell t-shirts and other swag. Now I can come up with a crazy idea for a physical object and have that instantiated in the world. Cool.

Nathaniel really loves Green Day and he and Mary cooked up a plan for me to take him to the show here even though Mary is out of town. I’ve been to folk concerts galore, but I don’t think I’ve ever been to a rock concert, much less an arena rock concert before. I went armed with earplugs!

I actually really like Green Day’s 21st Century Breakdown. I was already a fan of American Idiot, but the integrated lyric and sound of this new album works even better for me. I’m a fan of The Wall, and the new Green Day has enough of a hint of that kind of story telling to work for me. So I my biggest disappointment of the night was that Green Day does not seem as enamored of that story telling as I am. The concert hopped across the 21st Century Breakdown hits, but didn’t take the time to play out the whole cycle. Still, technically the show was fantastic and there were a few elements that I really loved.

Sonically I’m happier listening to music in the car or with headphones, where I can control the volume and hear the subtleties. This experience (earplugs firmly in place) was a bit like listening to the music underwater. But to experience the music blasting right through my body, the lights in tight sync with the sound, the excitement of the crowd, the joy of singing along full throated… that was all something I don’t get in the car or beneath my headphones. It was a blast.

The band was tight, the staging (especially the lighting) nicely integrated, the backdrop screens really well executed. The whole thing added up to a full sensory experience that made time slip away. There were pyrotechnics throughout that more or less worked, though those sometimes felt superfluous to me, more gimmick than gritty. But when Billie Joe jumps and the stage explodes as his feet hit the ground, you can’t help but be impressed. There was never only one thing happening, the sound or lights or screens or pyro were always working together. I could only sense one or two missed cues during the whole show, it was an impressive piece of theater.

My favorite parts of the show were when Billie Joe invited fans out of the pit to join him on stage. A twelve year old played a parishioner to Billie Joe’s missionary during East Jesus Nowhere. Three fans came up on stage to take on the lead Longview lyrics. But the real highlight of the night for me was when Billie Joe invited a fan up to play Jesus of Suburbia. He quizzed the crowd, “who can really f***ing play this? What key is it in?” When he picked a girl onto stage he didn’t lighten the load: “You better be able to f***ing play this!” He handed her his guitar, sat her on a stage monitor, and set off on the song. Every once in a while he’d crouch near her and check her fingering or share the mic with her for a lyric, but wow! She really nailed the song! She hit those chords with power and the band backed her up. I couldn’t help but imagine with awe the thoughts going through her mind as she sat at the center of this arena playing this song she must have practiced a thousand times in front of a thousand fans and (more importantly) with the band. I’m amazed she didn’t melt into a puddle in front of us, instead she blossomed, stronger and stronger, only handing the guitar back for the final chords as Billie Joe wrapped up the song. “You were f***ing amazing!” he said as he hugged her and sent her off in a stage dive.

The politics also worked for me. Billie Joe would point out that songs were “not anti-American, but anti-war!” He introduced East Jesus Nowhere with a cry of “gimme your tired, your hungry, your poor, and we’ll see how godless a nation we’ve become!” Know Your Enemy was introduced with a local angle: “We recorded this song on the first day of the Republican Convention, that was here, right? … We got those m*****f*****s out of office!”. The crowd, an amazingly diverse group of people from 7 to 57 right around our corner of the balcony, ate it up. We were among friends. Nathaniel today remembered the feeling by saying, “you know, the vibe at the concert was so great… you could just feel the happiness.” Indeed.

So even though it was not what I was looking for from Green Day, it was an absolutely wonderful way to spend an evening with my son. I’m glad he and Mary conspired to get me to go, and I thank Green Day and all the fans, including our neighbors with whom we carpooled to the concert, for a bringing the energy to the evening. It was great! All that’s left is buying some swag from Cinderblock because I was too cheap to get it at the concert.

So you don’t think you are a musician? Give this a try. You may change your mind, or at least spend a fun hour trying! (Hat tip, who else: Andrew.)

I love this example of Twitter users passing along data despite themselves. It pulls together so many threads: Processing for visualization, data mining for gathering facts from Twitter, geolocation via MetaCarta, even a bit of Wolfram to round it all out. Though there are all sorts of legitimate critiques about the role of Twitter data for tracking disease vectors, the interesting fact, for me, is that one person was able to leverage free form Twitter entries into a visualization of non-trivial data in just a few days time. This is a new world.

There are rumors that Apple is interested in buying Twitter. Alex thinks this may be an attempt by Apple to shore up its aging and less-than-reliable iChat infrastructure. I think it may be about data. Whoever makes Twitter less of a fail-whale service will be sitting on an unprecedented hoard of realtime data, the commercial possibilities of which are as yet unimagined. We are just giving our lives over to this massive dataset. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, but I do wonder what it will create.

I was just bowled over tonight. This evening we went to the Performers for Peace concert Mary mentioned a few weeks back. Katie Korpi did this as a senior project at her school, but this was so much more than a project. It was an evening of peace, prayer, and performance that lifted my spirits and gave me a raft of new performers to listen to. If you have not heard of Ellis, Chastity Brown, Chances R Good, or Colleen Buckman, now is your chance. Give them a try. But for me, the song that turned me upside down was Ellis’ “How Would It Be” (also at iTunes). Enjoy.

Whitney Sorrow brings you Dracula in real time. Ars Technica credits the public domain with stirring the creative pot. Libraries and archives should be all about growing the public domain, let us be the fertilizer of the world’s creative flowers!

Next time I need to build a color palette: kuler.

There is a lot of handwringing about the death of the newspaper these days. But I found myself arguing, a couple weeks ago, that a newspaper could still be viable. I thought it would take some real embrace of the medium, the opportunities a printed page offers to one-up the experience of the screen in resolution, beauty, and context. Little did I know there was already such a pathfinder out there.

I love how Utko focused on the constraints of the printed page, and then pushed up to those boundaries. He does not let any of us off the hook, anyone, with or without budget, with or without staff, anyone can push to be better than good.

A cry of dismay from a friend upon seeing pictures of his childhood haunts in Detroit brought this site to my attention. It is impossible for me not to look on these pictures and wonder just how much of our society will fall into this kind of ruin. I state glibly, from time to time, that our American way of life is unsustainable. Is this what unsustainable looks like after the fantasy fades?

See Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre Photography for more.