A butterbeer for Harry

Column

You Muggles might want to hold it down a bit this morning.

It was a long night for wizards and the millions who have dreamed of being a part of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The midnight showings of "The Deathly Hallows Part 2,'' the last in the decade-plus saga of Harry, Ron and Hermione growing up to be real wizards, must have kept wizards of all ages up long past the witching hour.

Can it really be all over? I read the first of the seven books I guess a dozen years ago, mostly because our three boys were caught up in the Harry Potter stories and because I figured there had to be a column in there somewhere. But the truth is I can't tell a Hippogriff from a Dementor.

At the very least the books were imaginative and intelligent. Our boys could be seen reading in nooks and corners of our house instead of propped in front of a video screen.

It got a little more difficult this week with all the Harry Potter movies being shown on the tube and my wife, the Frau, watching them with two of our boys -- who no longer are boys but still were wrapped up in the lore of the stories.

The Frau is not someone you want to sit next to during almost any movie with a plot that requires explanation. And when you are not into the world of wizards there is a continuous stream of questions that only the most novice of Muggles would ask. I finally left the room in search of something close to a butterbeer.

Now it mercifully is over and just in time. Reading apparently is about to become extinct and I don't know what we'll do with those books.

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Sometimes government does listen and thanks to reader Donna Olmstead, our country's gradual movement to a paperless society does not extend to interstate rest stops.

You might recall an item in this column back in May from Mrs. Olmstead, a former Hillsborough County employee who now travels with her family in an RV. She had noticed a decided decline in the quality of toilet paper at rest stops in Florida and fired off a letter to Gov. Scott, suggesting the state was involved in some kind of "Wipergate'' tissue issue.

Now she reports receiving a call in June from someone with Florida's Department of Transportation, asking questions.

On July 4, she says, she stopped at the rest area in question.

"The paper was great,'' she writes in an email. "It was two-ply tissue. I was really excited but managed to stop short of accosting the other women in the room so they could adore the tissue with me.''

She goes on to write that she since has heard from FDOT, which proclaimed private companies with "performance based contracts'' were responsible.

"Now you can think of me every time you stop at a Florida Interstate rest area and use toilet paper,'' she says. "That's not the path I would have chosen to go down in perpetuity, but whatever works. At my age you can't be too fussy.''

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Finally from the mailbag comes this comment from retired educator and long-time reader "Teacher Joe" on Wednesday's column about Congressional perks that are creating a special class of "public servant.''

"Steve, Weren't we by now, supposed to have accepted the Orwellian truism that some animals are more equal than others?''

sotto@tampatrib.com

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