random thoughts of a gardener

[rja.carnegie at excite.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 19036

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., "Stephanie Roark Keener" <sdrk1 at y...> wrote:
> So today, I was working in the garden and I was thinking.  And you 
> know how it is when you're gardening, you think about all kinds of 
> crazy stuff
  

Pleased to say that I'm ignorant of it ;-)

> 1. Cheering Charms.  Is it okay to put a cheering charm on yourself?  
> Why not just put a cheering charm on yourself all the time.  Seems to 
> me a cheering charm is really just a big fat magic Doobie.  Lucky 
> they have lunch right after Charms.  BTW, I am NOT one of those 
> people who thinks HP teaches kids to use drugs.

Cheering Charm = Prozac, maybe?  Using it all the time isn't a good
idea, I dare say.

> 2. Magic Babies.  If I'm a witch and know how to brew a sleeping 
> draught, is it okay to use it on a baby?

Same as Muggle sleeping drugs, I suppose - generally inappropriate,
and it may not work on their digestion.  Again, shouldn't be over-used.

> Joywitch's Poopus 
> Gowayus – the Teletubbies toilet spell – how about one to get their 
> feet to stop moving when you're trying to jam on those teeny-weeny 
> socks?

The Leg-Locker Curse (PS)

>  And can they do things back to you?  Can they magic off their 
> diaper if they don't want to wear it?

And you find where it went six months later.  But I suppose if
examination papers can be charmed against cheating, a diaper can
be charmed so that it can't be zapped off - or even so that baby
_likes_ wearing it.

> Can they force you to hold them all the time?  
> (2a. The Durselys.  I've had to convince myself that Dumbledore 
> bewitched Harry so that he didn't need rocked at night, and was 
> particularly good at feeding himself so that he was an easy toddler 
> and didn't really need the Durselys too much.  It's the only way I 
> can cope with them.)

I've been worrying about them too.  Has anyone written them up in
fanfic?  Last night I sat up trying to get them out of my system.

> 3. Hogwarts Food.  Very old fashioned.  Why don't they ever get pizza 
> or pasta?  And have you noticed all the bacon? 

Pizza?  Does the Shrieking Shack in Hogsmeade deliver?  They'd need
pretty big owls.

IRL British boarding schools cater for an expatriate community,
which perhaps has certain old-fashioned expectations of British
culture - none of this Italian nonsense.  (American tourists are
pleasantly surprised that they can get pizza in Italy.)
Our hospital food only just got revised now since, um, 1947?
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/ - their food correspondent is a vegetarian,
are you?  It would account for noticing bacon particularly, from what
I hear.)  And JKR's own cooking may be limited.  (Does she read
here?  Or does she have people who read here?)  My mother, god rest
her soul, did a good pizza - at least, we thought so.

> 6. Mandrakes.  Hilarious.  But it made me kind of queasy that they 
> were so human-like and got sliced up.

I used to worry about eating jelly-babies and gingerbread men.
The mandrakes are an excellent piece of writing over the heads of
younger readers for the benefit of grown-ups - something to look
forward to, the tenth time through (either at bedtime or on audiobook
in the car).

> 7. My Wand.  If  I were a witch, I would keep my wand stuck in my 
> hair bun.  It's were keep my pencils, much handier than a pocket or 
> belt and more of a fashion statement too.

Turns out I've been imagining wands longer than Ollivander makes 'em (PS),
more like samurai swords than hairpins, you gave me a rather different
mental picture at first.  Re-reading, Hagrid's at 16 inches (40 cm) is 
he longest by some way, but Hagrid is large himself.  (I suspect that
acromantula bites cause acromegaly - that their bite passes on the
spell that created them.)  That suggests several interesting and
irrelevant thoughts, such as that young wizards outgrow their wands -
perhaps in GOF?  And V's wand is bigger than Harry's - but Freudianism
is so passé nowadays.  Perhaps another nod to the grown-ups coming there...=


> 8. Magic and Nature.  And this one is serious.  But I've not got it 
> totally worked out yet.  Somehow, magic is a part of pure nature and 
> technology that Muggles use is extremely perverted and that why it 
> doesn't work around powerfully magical people or in very  magically 
> charged places.  Because technology is unnatural.  Thoughts are 
> swirling in my head, I can't quite reach them
.  Grasp Grasp
.
> Excuse me, I have to go read some Thoreau now.  (And NO Unibomber 
> jokes, please).

If you get on to Montaigne, worry :-)

Is it just electronics that doesn't work, specifically?  A strong
magical field possibly interferes with the Hall effect.  (From high
school physics of the transistor, I remember only that there's
something called the Hall effect.)  So a vacuum cleaner or a washing
machine would work.  Wizards don't use these things because with magic
they don't need them, and they mostly don't understand them - before I
read any HP I'd gathered that playing practical jokes on Muggles was a
major theme, but up to POA that's hardly there - it seems that wizards 
keep to the wizarding world.

It's interesting that wizards' spell technology (what I've seen)
seems to have developed, historically, approximately in parallel
with Muggle industrial and scientific progress.  (The books are
mostly set in the early 1990s, don't expect recent problems with
railways to feature.)  I think this is probably just to avoid
unintended subtext - either that wizards are a secret society
far cleverer than Muggles and probably running the world in secret,
or that wizards actually have fewer resources than Muggles and are
really inferior.  Instead of either of these, they've always been
more or less the same - wizards are far less numerous, but somewhat
technically advanced compared to their Muggle neighbours.  But
mediaeval wizards have mediaeval-type spells, for instance.
The Chamber of Secrets - I've just realised that "chamber" is
a toilet joke - and Hogwarts' plumbing is one huge exception -
but then, Britain was (mostly) in the Roman Empire long before
Hogwarts was founded, and maybe wizards simply didn't lose knowledge
of ancient Roman technology, as Muggles did.  The Romans actually did
quite a lot for us (or to us, arguably).

Technology _is_ nature, applied.  So is magic - half of the magic
bestiary isn't natural, but the result of wizards mucking about with
epigenetic modification.

I gather that Hogwarts is in my Highlands, some way north of Roman
Britain, I suppose, and on top of a mountain, which I'd say makes it
fifty-fifty as to whether you'd get a mobile phone signal or not.
These days, we get a lot of people lost or stranded climbing our
mountains who phone for help - it happens my brother-in-law is one
of the volunteers who goes up to fetch them home.  This may have
helped to persuade him and my sister to let their kids have their own
phones, too - the kids don't climb, I think, but they ski, snowboard,
etc.

There's a good deal of fantasy that touches on magic and science not
co-existing - where one works, the other doesn't.  I know Roger 
Zelazny's used the idea several times; his _Changeling_ and _Madwand_
which I just re-read, deal with actual conflict between the two forces
and their users.  For an author, the practical benefit is that you
can get on with telling what amounts to a fairy-story with a modern
hero without being obliged to consider that the hero could do a lot
more with, say, a machine gun.  It's something you have to do to make
a story stand up, like writing out the parents so that children can
have adventures.  On the other hand, mixing science and sorcery is
also fruitful.  I understand (I may be wrong) that "the new Harry
Potter", Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl series-presumptive, inclines that
way.

(I hope that HP and AF don't come to blows.  I was irreversibly
disgusted by the Borribles ( www.theborribles.co.uk ) upon learning
that they made a living by mugging Wombles.)

According to Zelazny, a gun works in magical places _if_ you have the
right explosives, and, clearly, magical explosives exist.  And things
blow up nicely in Potions classes.  However, we might presume that,
as in _Dune_, there are also widely available defences against
projectiles - although they're probably not legal against Bludgers on
the Quidditch pitch.

Don't knock technology, without it you couldn't send e-mail from your
garden ;-)  And I believe that's "Unabomber", although google.com
gives the contrary opinion a relatively large share of the vote.
The Internet is so democratic...

Robert Carnegie
Glasgow, Scotland

"I read them all when I was seven and I hated them" - unnamed American 
office worker on the Harry Potter books (www.dilbert.com, List of
Stupid Things Overheard)

- on reflection, one also wonders why she read them _all_, in that case