Several topics

[Catlady]

No: HPFGUIDX 2555

1. If the audience, or even the judges, could see Task 3, why didn't
they see "Moody" interfering? If the audience couldn't see Task 3, why
did the Champions' families come all the way there to watch?

2. I keep saying that Ron needs to seek his glory in a field that none
of his brothers have. It has to be a field that supplies glory, not one
which is merely vitally useful like healing or strategy. I keep
recommending music, pop music, on a portable instrument like guitar or
Celtic harp, since it is a skill people always gather around to admire.
The example of the Weird Sisters indicates that some people even make a
living at it. If Ron survives long enough to finish school, perhaps he
will become a bigger celebrity than Harry and all children will dye
their hair bright but natural-type red to be like him. With so much
speculation on-list about the magical value and importance of music, it
might not even be a digression from fighting the Dark Side.

3. Thank you, Blaise, for the fanfic recommendations; I laughed my head
off at "Marriage of True Minds".

4. Dumbledore could not have been the one performing the Fidelius Charm,
or he would know that Peter had become the secret-keeper.

5. Actually, we don't KNOW that Tom Riddle, Sr, ever MARRIED Tom Marvolo
Riddle's mother. Suppose young Mirella Magicker  (I made up all these
names except Marvolo) lived in Little Hangleton in the 1920s with her
elderly (Victorian) parents Marvolo and Mercy Magicker, and Mirella fell
in love with young Master Tom, the son of the big house. She was
convinced that he loved her reciprocally, and that she knew better than
her old-fashioned parents about everything, and, in the name of free
love, she let her beloved seduce her into an hot sexual affair of
adolescent physical passion (I remember!) behind hedges and haystacks,
until she noticed she was pregnant. She told her beloved, confident that
he would respond by marrying her, and was quite shocked when he told her
that she's an emancipated modern girl who doesn't need a man to take
care of her, so she can just take care of this problem herself. She then
turned to her parents, who said "I told you so" but arranged the
old-fashioned remedy of elderly mother and adult daughter go on vacation
together and come back with a baby that they tell everyone was birthed
by elderly mother. The parents disapproved very much of giving the baby
the surname Riddle -- does she want to whole village to know whose
bastard the boy is? -- but when she died in childbirth, they named him
as she had wished because they viewed it as her last wish. When the
child was old enough to ask questions like "You're my grandma and
grandpa, where are my mum and dad?", they didn't tell him he was a
by-blow, but rather made up the story that Master Tom had married his
mother, and then divorced her because she was a witch. Not until they
died of old age (or of baby TMR's uncontrolled magical anger at some
normal piece of parenting) was TMR sent to a Muggle orphanage.

6. **IF** there is a certain physical resemblance between Harry and Tom
Marvolo Riddle and **IF** the resemblance means that they're related,
the relationship would have to be through James, not Lily, because Harry
so much resembles James. I don't think the resemblance means that
they're related, but only that JKR automatically thinks of a tall, thin,
man with messy black hair whenever she thinks of a charming man.
Charming young Tom Marvolo Riddle, charming young James Potter, and to
some extent also charming young Sirius Black (tho' I have the impression
that his black hair is somewhat less messy and his build is somewhat
less scrawny). If they ARE related, it could be that TMR inherited his
looks from his biological father and that James's mother was yet another
by-blow of Master Tom's (by a different mother), tall, skinny and
black-haired herself. Altho' for V to be Harry's grand-uncle on the
Muggle side wouldn't be such a great dramatic revelation....

7. Yew is the tree of death, depicted on Victorian mourning cameos
showing a woman weeping at a gravestone next to a tree. I know that yew
berries are poisonous and that yew wood is the natural composite that
made the English longbow so deadly, and TEX AND MOLLY IN THE AFTERLIFE
says that yews are planted in graveyards because they 'thrive on
corruption' i.e. eat rotting corpses.

While holly  has much more life-oriented associations. It is a symbol of
Christmas, which is not only the birth of their Savior for Christians,
but the time when the amount of sunlight in the day starts to lengthen.
Holly, ivy, and pine got that Xmas gig because, as evergreens, they are
among the few plants still green and visibly alive in the snow. My
friend showed me a medieval Tristan and Iseult tale in which King Mark
makes a compromise with Tristan: one will have her when the trees are
green and the other will have her when the trees are bare. King Mark
chooses when the trees are bare, since then the nights are longer, more
time for bed fun with his reluctant wife, but Tristan triumphantly
points out that Mark NEVER gets her, since the holly and the ivy are
NEVER bare.

8. I never understand why people who have Web browsers ask the e-group
questions that they would get faster answers if they asked a good search
engine. I remember that I saw that Cliodna is an Irish Celtic goddess on
a page of Celtic gods and goddesses that I found millennia ago when I
was looking up something else. I did a Web search just now and found
wide disagreement: Cliodna is goddess of beauty and/or the afterlife, a
minor sea goddess who was drowned by her father the sea god Manaanan Mac
Lir, the banshee of a couple of different named clans, the daughter of
the last High Druid before St Patrick.....

9. Pegg Kerr wrote: "Think of how Snape's anger over the trick Sirius
played on   him affected the events in the Shrieking Shack in PoA--he
wasn't willing to listen to Lupin and Sirius because he was still
nursing that old grudge--" I believe that the 'practical joke' was the
least of it: Severus already hated James and Sirius a great deal, and
probably hated Remus a lesser amount for being their friend, before that
happened. Sirius wouldn't have sent Severus off to be killed by a
werewolf if he hadn't had an on-going emnity with Severus, also known by
the grown-up Sirius's remarks about what an unpleasant child Severus had
been.
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