The Felix Felicis photo

[Carol]

zanooda wrote:
> 
> Right, only I imagined that "walrus-like moustache" should hang down
a little more than in Grand-Pre's illustration. It should be something
like this:
> 
>
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bristol/content/images/2006/05/11/carwardine_walrus_470x350.jpg
<snip>
>
Carol:
I was looking at the tusks, thinking that a walrus mustache must
relate to them. It took the third photo (presumably of a female
walrus) to make me realize that--oh, yeah!--walruses have *mustaches*
and that's what "walrus mustache" refers to. (Slaps forehead.)

However, if I'd thought about the mustache drooping downward like a
walrus's rather than curving upward (I guess GrandPre's Slughorn has
more of a handlebar mustache), I'd probably have pictured something
more like this caricature of Grover Cleveland:

http://members.graphicsfactory.com/Clip_Art/People/Government/pres22-24_Grover_Cleveland_bw_157926.html

or this photo of Theodore Roosevelt, if only he looked less squinty,
near-sighted and grumpy!

http://blogs.ancestry.com/circle/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/Theodore%20Roosevelt.bmp

Just for fun and totally OT, it's fun to look at the portraits of the
U.S. presidents in chronological order to see how men's hairstyles,
especially facial hair, have changed over the decades:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/chronological.html

Slughorn's mustache would have been fashionable from Chester A. Arthur
through William Howard Taft (1881-1913). Arthur, Cleveland, Roosevelt,
and Taft all had some variation on the walrus mustache. (Harrison had
a full beard and McKinley was clean-shaven, anticipating the modern
look--no president from Wilson onward has had facial hair.)

No doubt a similar line-up of British prime ministers would show the
same thing. (The two British kings of the era are no help.) Slughorn
would have been fashionable among Muggles, portly body and all, a
hundred years ago but today would be as out of date as Ron's dress
robes are in the WW. Among Witches and Wizards, whose fashions seem
considerably more conservative than ours, he might still be in style,
along with Snape's fifteenth-century hairstyle (with the exception of
Henry IV, who had a thin mustache, the Lancastrian and Yorkist kings,
along with Henry VII, the first Tudor, were all clean-shaven, several
of them with shoulder-length hair) and Dumbledore, who would not have
been out of place alongside Merlin in the legendary court of King Arthur.

The films, of course, to bring my post back on topic, seem to place
the fashion preferences of the adult wizards (Snape, McGonagall and
Dumbledore excepted) somewhere between 1920 and 1945 (along with their
Victrolas and Lupin's uncanonical but presumably magically powered
"electric" train), with the kids, even the pure-bloods, somehow in
touch with 1990s Muggle fashions.

Carol, who strayed rather far from walruses and walrus mustaches in
this post!