And I thought, “What if there was something from a previous culture that was innately powerful, and then people picked it up to make a buck from it and ended up disseminating some really dangerous piece of information?” Like nuclear waste. What’s to say that, in God knows how many years, some culture isn’t going to pick up our nuclear waste and start making jewelry out of it? There’s this big government project in Nevada, for artists to create a sculpture that will be frightening enough to keep people away from the nuclear-waste dump for the next 10,000 years. Supposedly, there’s never been a form of semantics, a language, that has existed that long. They’re trying to find something that will function as language beyond our civilization, that will keep people away from there forever and ever. I just think that’s a glorious idea.

From a review of the new Harry Potter movie:

Like its predecessor, Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets works perfectly well as a cinematic corollary to J.K. Rowling’s adored children’s fantasy series….But try imagining a universe in which the Harry Potter series existed only in film form. Would audiences still find themselves transported by such thinly drawn characters? Would the imaginations still leap for the nonstop assault of impressively realized but creatively pedestrian special effects? And would the two-and-a-half-hours-plus trek toward an unmasking straight out of Scooby Doo seem quite so satisfying?”