Having read the Harry Potter books three times now (once myself, once to each of our kids), I’m glad to hear that the Order of the Pheonix will finally be out in June. Some coverage, incredibly, doesn’t include this excerpt: “Dumbledore lowered his hands and surveyed Harry through his half-moon glasses. ‘It is time,’ he said, ‘for me to tell you what I should have told you five years ago, Harry. Please sit down. I am going to tell you everything.'”

Massachuessetts, like a lot of states, is running a nasty budget deficit as tax revenues decline from the roaring nineties. The projected shortfall for next year is $3 billion. In November, voters nearly passed a resolution killing the state’s 5.8% income tax, so raising taxes doesn’t appear to be an option.

Unfortunately, state and local officials don’t make a very compelling case for their services as they argue against budget cuts. They talk vaguely about “horrible scenarios,” but we get very little concrete argument. An article in yesterday’s local paper, the Hampshire Gazette, offers a case in point.

“Area officials said they believe the general public does not realize the full implications of the cuts to come, and that some people would not be so opposed to a tax increase if they did. ‘It’s hard for me to understand why we can’t make an argument to support a moderate increase in the income tax, because the alternative is your neighbor gets laid off,’ said Robin Crosbie, administrator for Hadley.” Ahh, so that’s why we pay taxes.

Core prices for businesses fell 0.4% last year, with a particular sag in the fourth quarter, reports CNN. “Excluding volatile food and energy prices, ‘core’ PPI fell 0.3 percent [in December] after falling a revised 0.3 percent in November.”

To beat my old drum: Pop historians usually start a new decade a few years after the calendar. If The Sixties started in 1963 with the Beatles and the Pill, will the 00s open in 2003 with closed wallets and free 64 MB memory cards? If the nineties roared like the twenties, will the 00s now sink, tumble, flounder, flush and drizzle like the thirties? If so, nothing but cash will be worth more tomorrow.

Elizabeth Spiers does a mirror-true interview with a coke buyer about her dream of “the perfect dealer.” Blog reportage at its best.

We went to a friend’s house last night for pizza. In her studio, there were nine 15-30 inch Piaste gongs she’d been given after hanging out a decade ago at the factory in Germany. I’ve always thought of gongs as things that go “boom” or “bong.” Turns out that if you mallet a good big gong repeatedly, a series of harmonic permutations emerge. It’s a kind of layer cake of sound; it’s like you are peeling peals off an orchestral onion. I swear that her big gong gave a twenty second French horn tone and later produced a clear trumpet peal and then a flute… all while roaring and groaning and sizzling and screaming. I’ll add a big Piaste gong to my “list of things to splurge on if I ever win the lottery.”

Am I the only person who saw the Two Towers without first seeing the Fellowship of the Ring? (I was marooned in France, and babysitters were expensive and… )

Gee, I was appalled by TT. I was a bonefide Tolkeinite in my teens but have to say that TT, seen in a vacuum, was trite, juvenile and plastic. I’ve seen more believable characters and gripping action in a dubbed Godzilla movie.

So I rented Fellowship of the Ring on video and saw where TT was coming from. But let this be said, oh mortal moviegoers, the second act does not hold water on its own.

While everyone focuses on the elimination of the dividend tax, it seems that capital gains taxes will also fall under Bush’s plan. The WSJ explains: “Say a share is bought for $100 and the company has $6.50 a share in fully taxed profits that year. The company will notify the shareholder of this. Then, suppose the share is sold for $110, for a $10 profit. The capital-gains tax will apply only to $3.50 of the gains ($10 minus $6.50.) Each year, a holder will be able to increase his “basis” — the cost for figuring out his gain on shares held, for tax purposes — by the amount of the company’s taxed profits.” This will be a bookkeeping nightmare for shareholders, but I guess their pain will be well compensated.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden, an editor at scifi publisher Tor Books and a blogger, has bought rights to publish a new book by John Scalzi, a consultant and blogger. Patrick read the book, called “Agent to the Stars” on John’s site.

Asked whether this “already published” status could hurt the book’s sales, Patrick comments: “What it seems to me that we’re learning about online free (or cheap) distribution of fiction e-texts is that, sometimes at least, it doesn’t hurt the sale of print editions and may even help it. Data points: Scott Card giving away e-texts on his website. Baen Books’ various promotions and sales of e-texts. The latest David Weber hardcover extravaganza included a CD-ROM bound into the back cover, containing e-texts of all the previous books in the series. I will bet you lunch that this caused the sale of more David Weber backlist print editions than it cost. With fiction, at any rate, people mostly don’t say ‘I don’t need a printed book, I have an e-text.’ I’m sure some do. But mostly they say “I’m intrigued by the taste I got from this e-text, so I’m going to go buy a more-comfortable-to-read printed book now. But you know something? Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe all this is just an artifact of a temporary ‘comfort gap’ between e-texts and printed books. Maybe ten years from now it will be all different. Maybe aspiring writers should be entirely wary of letting their prose onto the net. What I know is that I liked Scalzi’s book and, in the two minutes I spent considering the fact that it had ‘already been published’ on the Web, my basic conclusion was ‘so what.’ Right now, in his case at least, this seems not so much a bug as a feature. Applicability to other cases? Unknown.”

The Columbia Journalism Review asks 13 teams of young journalists to imagine their dream newspaper. Seems they want blogs, but just don’t know it.

eBay has launched its program offering health insurance to its elite sellers and their families. As the Internet continues to both atomize traditional corporations and empower new classes of entrepreneurs, we will see more programs that deliver corporate-style benefits to affiliated individuals. Yes, that means I would love to see Blogads health insurance some day. (I found this on auction news site Auctionbytes, which is itself a brilliant example of Internet publishing entrepreneurship.)

As many as 115,000 people sell more than $1,000 a month on eBay and could qualify as Powersellers, says Ina Steiner, editor or Auctionbytes.