Sugar Covered Quills

Thanks to Cinereplicas via harrypotterspage.com, we have new images of promotional products from The Half-Blood Prince movie. They include new photos of Harry, Dumbledore, Ron and Bellatrix. To view them, you may proceed here.

***thanks to harrypotterspage.com***

jediyoda

As it is already July 23 in the UK, we would like to wish Daniel Radcliffe a very HAPPY BIRTHDAY! Mr. Radcliffe turns 19 today.

jediyoda

Mod Note: In behalf of the staff and members of SCQ, we would like to wish Dan a very Happy birthday. We wish him success in his career and of course, long life!

In a BBC documentary about degenerative disease, Harry Potter author JK Rowling expressed her regrets about not telling her mother about Harry Potter. Ms. Rowling’s mother died of multiple sclerosis at the age of 45 in 1990. According to the author,

“I started writing Harry six months before she died. That’s obviously a real regret, because I never told her I was even writing it. She never knew anything about Harry Potter at all.”

“When I left home, she was walking unaided. By the time I graduated, she was in a wheelchair and in the house she needed a walking frame. It was awful to watch.”

She also expressed her frustration about a lack of funding for MS research and interest about the condition, which affects about one in every 500 people in Scotland.

“It’s a Cinderella of illnesses, you hear this all the time, because it’s under-funded, because it’s ignored,” she said. I think it’s possibly common to a lot of neurological conditions. It just seems to be an area that has not seemed very sexy for funding.”

“People get diagnosed and sent home. It’s a frustration to those of us whose family members do have MS that so little is being done, because it is a life-altering condition and a lot can be done now, so why isn’t that happening?”

Ms. Rowling is a staunch supporter of different charities that do research and aid multiple sclerosis. She is also a patron of the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Scotland.

The documentary “Scotland’s Hidden Epidemic: The Truth about MS” will be aired today, 23 July 2008, at BBC One Scotland, 22:45 BST.

You can view a snippet of her interview here.