Mordicus Egg / Hexadecimal / Fatima's Sweets / Beauty Potions and WW History

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

I am properly horrified by the Hurricane Katrina destruction, pray for
the people, donated to the Red Cross, etc, but what I want to say
here is:

Why is there a St Tammany Parish? Who is St Tammany? 

Amanda wrote in
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/28778 :

<< which would you read cover to cover *first*?

The Philosophy of the Mundane: Why Muggles Prefer Not to Know, by
Professor Mordicus Egg. Because I like to understand. >>

I bet Professor Egg's explanation has nothing to do with reality. Does
his name indicate that he's a bad egg, perhaps making his living from
the obtuseness of Muggles, as a fake psychic or something?

Cyndi wrote in
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/28777 :

<< (By the way, how are you with binary and hexa decimal 
conversion?! >>

You can buy a pocket calculator that does hex conversions, maybe also
binary and octal conversions. (By the way, hex conversion has nothing
to do with jinxes and curses, but is short for hexadecimal. Many
wargamers play on maps gridded into 'hexes', in their case short for
hexagons, and once I heard some loony claim that all wargamers are
'witches' because they use hexes!)

For more money, you can buy one that does arithmetic in hex (instead
of converting the two hex numbers to decimal, adding or subtracting or
whatever, then converting the result back to hex). 

I *am* a COBOL pgmmer and kept myself supplied with pocket calculators
that had that feature, from the first one I got for $80 in 1979 to one
I got for $15 (and it had statistical, trig, and other functions that
I've never even *heard* of) around 1995. It died recently, as they all
do, so I had to buy a new pocket calculator.

It was a painful emotional blow to realize I might as well buy a
4-function calculator for $4 because now I only need it to balance my
checkbook: I have no need for hex conversions because I have nothing
to do with COBOL or the mainframe anymore. So much for my *identity*. 

I had a similar realization this Friday, that if I threw out all the
COBOL and Mainframe and MMS manuals and textbooks and guides from my
shelves (in my cubicle), I'd have someplace to put the piles of loose
papers and M3 manuals covering all flat surfaces except my keyboard.

Lee Storm wrote in
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/28797 :

<< "Charmed By Chocolate: A Comprehensive Guide To Spell-Binding
Sweets" by Fatima Corpulant. >>

I want to read it, then save my Knuts to buy some samples at her de
luxe shoppe. Except I don't think her surname should be Corpulant.
Fatima Zaftig? Fatima Zuckerman-Kremer? Fatima Roundbottom? Fatima
Hoggs? Fatima Brown? 

There was a Witch of the Month named Sacharissa Tugwood (I had to look
her up in the Lexicon; my memory is not good). Sacharissa is a sweet
(!) name but she wasn't a confectioner: "Tugwood, Sacharissa (1874 -
1966). Chocolate Frog Card. Inventor. Pioneer of Beautifying Potions.
Discovered pimple-curing properties of Bubotuber Pus. The words on her
gravestone read, 'Thanks to Sacharissa Tugwood, the world is a more
beautiful place'"
 
I have a big problem with the history of the wizarding world. To me,
if Ollivander's was founded in 382 B.C. (altho' maybe it was founded
somewhere else and later moved to Britain) and has retained the
records of the date of the founding, the wizarding world has a long
enough history that a lot of what they do should have been invented a
long time ago, but JKR gives dates of stuff being invented quite
recently. Sacharissa Tugwood is basically twentieth century! and
Cheering Charms were after the end of the Middle Ages, maybe even
after Columbus landed in Hispaniola:

"Summerbee, Felix (1447 - 1508)
Inventor of Cheering Charms (JKR).
"felix" = Latin for happiness.
Summerbee was Wizard of the Month on JKR's website for May, 2004 (the
month the site opened), and again for May 2005."  

I think Cheering Charms should have been invented BEFORE the Middle
Ages -- people needed them.

Anyway, getting back to Beautying Potions, they must have existed in
some form before 1874, because another Lexicon entry records medieval
use thereof:, 'Grymm, Malodora. Hag. Medieval, dates unknown. The
famous hag Malodora Grymm, using a beautification potion to conceal
her true form, married a king and used a charmed mirror to reinforce
her self-image. She became jealous of the most beautiful girl in the
land and fed her a poisoned apple to get rid of her. (fw) The story of
Maladora Grymm is a nod to the fairy tale "Snow White," which was part
of the collection of the Brothers Grimm, hence the last name
"Grymm."' 

If S. Tugwood's vivat was 1*7*74 - 1*8*66 (what happened to wizards
living longer than Muggles?), I could fit her into some Potterverse
history that I had previously invented: In the 1800s of my private
Potterverse, the Brewer sisters, Wilhelmina and Alexandra, went into
business making and selling Hair Potion from an old family recipe.
They started making it in their kitchens and selling it by word of
mouth, but the business expanded into many more beauty products, a
large-ish factory, and three retail stores: Hogsmeade, Diagon Alley,
and at the factory. They wrote the legal papers under their married
names, Mrs John Comfort and Mrs Erasmus Joy, so the company is named
"Comfort & Joy". Sacharissa Tugwood could have been either their
mother (under her maiden name), whose recipes were the very beginning
of the company, or the person they hired as chief inventor when they
expanded.