Ox Notes: July 27, 2007

Dates for the So You Think You Can Dance tour have been announced. The tour kicks off on September 21 in Albany, NY, and tickets go on sale August 11.

If you're in more immediate need of a dance fix, head to Lehi, Utah on Monday for Dancing with Our Utah Stars -- an event featuring performances by Dancing with the Stars' Louis Van Amstel, Julianne Hough, Andrea Hale, and possibly Apolo Anton Ohno.

Or, if you can't make it to Utah, spend Monday celebrating one of the best weeks of the year -- Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. Yahoo! TV has a preview of this year's new shark shows. I'm most excited for Deadly Stripes: Tiger Sharks, which premieres Monday night.

The Today Show aired J. K. Rowling's first interview since the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in two parts, yesterday and today. You can watch video of the first part here and the second part here, although you won't want to if you haven't finished the book and are still trying to avoid spoilers.

I live in Naperville, Illinois, which hosted one of the largest Potter parties in America last Friday. Sixty stores in downtown Naperville participated, and more than 70,000 people attended the event. The Chicago Sun-Times has footage of the party (keep an eye out for the cool "living portraits," who moved to different frames every 30 minutes).

The event was organized by the world's best independent book store, Anderson's Bookshop, which manages to thrive despite the fact that there's a Barnes & Noble a few blocks away. The night of the book release, they handed out more than 2,000 copies of the book in less than 1 hour (customers pre-paid, of course).

Greg and I were numbers 1427 and 1428 in line, and we got our copies at 12:45 a.m. It was only mildly irritating when the girl in front of us got off her cell phone and announced that her friend had walked into the Jewel grocery store at midnight and picked up one of the 20 copies of the book just sitting on the shelf.

Here are some pics of Greg and me enjoying the Harry Potter related festivities.


I bought some Cockroach Clusters at "Honeydukes" (better known as Naper Nuts & Sweets).


Readers offer some dire predictions about the book.


Me with my new BFFs, Snape and Dumbledore.


Greg and I are two satisfied customers.