The Squeee

JK Rowling has finally made her Pottermore announcement: What is Pottermore? Pottermore is a free website that builds an exciting online experience around the reading of the Harry Potter books. Come back on 31st July to find out how you can get the chance to enter Pottermore early. So, let’s see if I’ve got this straight: The official launch is in October this year, but on 31 July, a lucky few can help with starting to populate the site. And beta test it, presumably. It sounds like it’s part social network (seriously? Yawn!), part encyclopaedia (hooray!) and part fanficion site (err, okay?). If I understand it correctly, we the fans of Harry Potter help shape the future of the characters and the world by submitting stories to the site. JK Rowling herself will be adding things as well, such as all those facts she’s been hoarding over the years.

In an hour, JK Rowling will announce what Pottermore is . Speculation has been rife. Is it an MMO? The mere thought made me tingle the other day . Other suggestions is that it's an eBookstore ... but she's not going to write more books about the Potterverse? Three leaked pictures of what appears to be screenshots show a shop front, a library and some books. Looks very good, except the thought of a site built entirely with Flash turns me right off. Perish the thought.

Today is the longest day of the year, the Summer Solstice - or Litha, as it's known in the Neo-Pagan community. The celebration of the longest day of the year has fallen out of fasion since Christianity was introduced ... except for in Scandinavia, where we're still stubbornly heathen in our ways and insist on celebrating Midsommar ("Midsummer", go fig) the first Friday after the solstice. Meaning back home, on Friday, there will be much merriment (read: drinking), and the traditional eating of new potatoes and matjessill (a particular spicing of pickled herring). If you've got children, it's likely there will also be dancing around the traditional midsommarstång - midsummer pole. If you needed convincing that the old solstice celebrations were a fertility ritual, look no further:

'Ere be the Horrible Histories crew on ITV's Daybreak , from Monday 20 June 2011. Thanks to "hannouille" for uploading! :) It also has a very interesting piece of news at the end, grabbed from Daybreak site : They are also appearing at the BBC Proms on 30 July. Free tickets will be available from 8 July online, by phone and in person at the Royal Albert Hall box office. Featuring songs from the series and things. Ooh I hope they tape it and show it on telly. But they normally do with the proms, don't they? Can't wait to see it! :)

Fans of Harry Potter are falling over themselves - correction: OURselves - recently because of a mysterious happening. I saw "MORE POTTER" trending on Twitter last Wednesday and wondered what it was about. Apparently, there was some sort of treasure-hunt going on to find various letters, spelling out a word. As it turned out, the word wasn't "more Potter", it was "Pottermore". This led to Pottermore.com and the @Pottermore Twitter account . On Thursday, this tweet came out: Looks like the owls are getting ready to deliver some exciting news: www.youtube.com/JKRowlingAnnounces #pottermore It links to a YouTube video page, where it counts down to an announcement by J.K. Rowling - set to be delivered on June 23. Question is, what the hell is Pottermore?

Earlier in the year, I posted about Wollaton Hall and mentioned there's another hall further south which has been modelled on it. They filmed bits of the new Batman movies there and said they should use Wollaton Hall as a filming location. My wish has been granted! Probably the fanciest council house in Nottingham Starting on Monday, rumour has it Hollywood are coming to town! It's the worst kept secret in Nottingham right now: Wollaton Hall is to be Wayne Manor in the next Batman movie: The Dark Knight Rises (due out in 2012). There have been casting calls in town for an "unnamed project" and all, apparently. (Why didn't I know this beforehand so I could've given it a go?!) Nottingham has taken a step up from Magicians , shot at the Theatre Royal in the city. Holy heart of England, Batman! If I hear anything more I'll let you know. Also: I wrote this on my Kindle, so apologies for spelling being worse than normal. Will edit and add links and p

Work is very hectic at the moment and haven't been able to write any reviews at home in the evenings either, so in the mean time, here's the final trailer for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 , which is out July 15. Which also happens to be my birthday, so I'm getting a pretty awesome present! ;D Really. Can't. Wait. Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!

All this week, I've seen peculiar names trending on Twitter. They've all turned out to be names of horses, and that's how I found out that this week is Royal Ascot week. For those not acquainted with Ascot, it's a place near Windsor in Berkshire where there's an old horseracing track. Every year in June, there's a week of races where the Royal Family show up. I think it's normally the Tuesday where it's Ladies' Day, and this is supposed to mean "women only" but is in fact ... well, far from it. On Ladies' Day, you get women dressing up, wearing poncy hats or fascinators . Men get dressed up too. Seeing as how I've actually been to Ladies' Day at Royal Ascot once, I thought I'd write about that today, instead of reviewing something. 1 (Not trying to procrastinate finishing off the Lady Chatterley's Lover review, or anything ... *cough*) The reason for being there was because it was my then to-be-sister-in-law's

...has put this song firmly back in my head: Cheers for this, Erwin Beekveld . You legend, you. Also, I've started re-reading The Hobbit . Bilbo is whiny, Thorin is a know-it-all and the dwarves are generally incompetent buffoons so far, and they have just encountered some trolls.

News media reports another quake has hit Christchurch (New Zealand), which is of course where the filming of The Hobbit is taking place. Not in Christchurch per se , but New Zealand. Home of brilliant people like Sam Neill and temporary home of brilliant people like Richard Armitage. Not too long ago, I wrote about how the Richard Armitage fandom went into their pockets for the Rise Up Christchurch telathon . To be perfectly honest, I think Tolkien fans in general - or actually just people in general, regardless of their fandoms - should do the same. Dig into pockets, that is. You can donate to Rise Up Christchurch here (VISA/MasterCard only - 1 NZD = ca £0.50 GBP or $0.80 USD/CAD) To reward your generosity, have a look at this clip from a trailer inhabited by a group of handsome dwarves, courtesy of RACentral: Now go be generous, aaight? :)

Thanks to BrontëBlog for the tip! Here's the UK poster for the 2011 version of Jane Eyre : (With hugs to The Guardian ) I like it, I really do. I like the colours and in general I just find it more appealing than the US one, to be honest. Beautiful photos and beautiful artwork. They've also released a UK version of the trailer, which is different from the US one! They seem to do a lot more talking, and it summarises the book as well.

Driving to work this morning, we ware listening to the BBC Radio 2 Breakfast Show with Chris Evans. I realised they were live from the Hay Festival of Literature & Arts (must remember to go there in the future) when Alex Jones (the Welsh lady on The One Show ) was reading a story as the radio was switched on, and I remembered they'd been talking about going to the Hay Festival on yesterday's show. They were reading out the stories of the runners up in the under 9's 500 word writing competition , and Alex read a story about a knicker-pinching dog - didn't realise at first that it was written from a dog's perspective, so someone hiding a little girl's knickers in their bed was slightly confusing, as you can imagine! "Stop looking at me like that!" A bit later on, when we were coming up to turning off the A52, the next reader was introduced ... Ben Willbond, a.k.a. Henry VIII (and others) from Horrible Histories . In my head, I went bouncing up

While we're waiting for this afternoon and the new, exciting series of Horrible Histories , let's write a few words about the DVD for series two, which is out today. Hooray! Well, actually, I had it on pre-order with Amazon so it arrived last Friday. I've had all weekend to watch it. Or rather, that's what I did on Friday evening after work. Couldn't pass up the opportunity of watching deleted scenes and outtakes! The series two DVD comes with the twelve episodes from TV, outtakes, deleted scenes, a quiz (haven't tried it yet), and "Savage Songs" (aired on TV as episode 2.13), which is a collection of nearly all the songs from the series with the addition of the four King Georges' Born to Rule from series one. The outtakes is a basic gag reel, where the actors fluff up lines, get the giggles and such. The one that made me giggle the most was Jim Howick as a viking drummer losing his drumsticks.

Been far too long since I last did one of these , and I'd like to thank Leffe for the idea. It had me laughing out loud! If Richard Armitage and Elijah Wood had a love child, this is what he'd look like: Ladies and gen ... uh, ladies , Daniel Radcliffe ! :D When I saw clips from Between the Sheets the first time, my response was "OMG, he looks like Daniel Radcliffe! That's just ... weird. I don't really fancy Dan Radcliffe that much and Richard Armitage, number one hottie, looks like his older brother! I'm confused." Wishing you a good weekend!

Recently, I wrote about the Tobathon arranged for charity by the Toby Stephens fandom . In the same post, I also mentioned the generosity of the Richard Armitage fandom. Time for an update on that one, because the Armitage admirers have found another way of backing charitable purposes and it must not go unreported! At 9pm/21:00 GMT (for easy reference, for UK add +1, for western Europe +2), there will be a telathon in New Zealand in support of rebuilding Christchurch in the aftermath of the earthquake there earlier this year. Even before the event has started, the Richard Armitage fandom has already raised about NZ$1000. Well done! To begin with, Servetus said she would donate money for everyone commenting on a particular post on her blog , up to a certain amount. RAFrenzy countered with matching her amount , and judiang and others have offered to do the same ! How kind of them! Very admirable ladies, all of them. :)

Just before tonight's Doctor Who episode, there was a trailer for Horrible Hero ... which was not just funny - it was a trailer for series three of Horrible Histories . Hooray! Finally! Play the Horrible Hero game on the CBBC website Set your V/Sky+ or any other DVR or video recorders (unless you're at home at the time) for CBBC at 17:15/5:15pm on Monday 30 May , because they're back, baby! Ooohhhh I can't wait! :D

Just about to head off to bed after having seen the biggest international music spectacle this side of the Atlantic Ocean. Sweden came third and United Kingdom didn't come last. A good result overall, I feel. Might make a post about it more in detail at some other point. Meanwhile, Azerbaijan won. Do you agree with that result? Was it your favourite song? Wasn't mine. I can't even remember how it went now! After every Eurovision Song Contest, the question asked in Swedish newspapers is: "Did the right song win?" So, I'm asking you, dear Reader. Did the right song win?

The good news is that Blogger has finally come back. Hooray! On Wednesday, there was supposed to be a one-hour downtime due to some maintenance work, but something went awry and the system was really buggy. I could post things as normal yesterday, and the only thing I struggled with was trying to get the system to save the edits I had made to the New Moon review. And for some reason, it wouldn't save it, it just eventually said "you're about to leave this page, are you sure you want to do that?" which then lead to "page not responding". In the evening, when the Squeeze was clicking on a link on Facebook to see a blog post, it wasn't there. And on closer inspection this morning, as it turns out, Blogger had switched off the Blogger Dashboard access and reverted to a backup done before their maintenance work, which meant every post and every comment made until that time were temporarily gone. At the moment, the posts I was missing have returned, and the

Fabolaktuko at White Rose posted something funny earlier today: her results on a numerological compatibility test with Richard Armitage. I'm a sucker for silly compatibility tests, so I immediately had to go and do the test to see how I would fare. Before I get to the result, it was the same regardless of if I used Traxy Thornfield or my legal name, so I guess it goes by your birthdate for comparison, rather than names. You can never be too sure with numerology, as there are different ways to calculate it. Anyway. The result had me giggling excitedly:

One of the things that quite amaze me is how fandoms pull together not just for themselves and the object of their appreciation, but for other people. For instance, the Richard Armitage fandom has (at time of writing) raised an impressive £11,234.07 in a year to the four charities officially supported by him on JustGiving . That’s a lot of money. Toby Stephens. You might know him as Mr. Rochester with the gravity-defying hair. Swoon! More recently, I joined a Toby Stephens fan forum and in April, we all got an email notification about his birthday. In celebration of it, the fanforum have an annual event called a Tobathon in his honour. First, I thought this was some sort of massive Toby Stephens movie marathon, but no. It’s way more impressive than that. Here’s what (part of) the email said: 'Oldies' will also know that every year at this time we have what has become known as the Tobathon : a virtual fun run/walk/hobble where we all get out in the sunshine and compl