random thoughts of a gardener

[Rita Winston]

No: HPFGUIDX 19041

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., rja.carnegie at e... wrote:
> --- In HPforGrownups at y..., "Stephanie Roark Keener" <sdrk1 at y...> 

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

The wizarding folk seem to be very old-fashioned in general (except 
for a modicum of gender equality). Would Ron react to pizza the same 
way he reacted to bouillabaise?
> 
> 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.

And the WB website makes them shorter than Ollivander does -- 11 
inches seem pretty typical for Ollivander and 8 inches for WB. I 
think an Ollivander wand wouldn't fit in a hair bun, both too long 
and too thick, but I don't stick anything in my mess of an improvised 
hair bun (to get the hair off my neck when I'm boiling to death), so 
I don't really know. 

> Freudianism is so passé nowadays.

The one that really got to me was Mrs Weasley cooking dinner, 
squirting white sauce from her wand. 

> 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. 

My theory (posted in more detail a few millennia ago) is that at 
first Muggles used technology to try to achieve the things they had 
seen when visiting wizarding places. (That is what Hermione was 
taught in Muggle Studies.)   

Indoor plumbing with flush toilets and hot and cold running water is 
something the wizarding folk have had, in this theory, since 
Atlantis, and all Muggle inventions of plumbing were attempts to 
imitate wizarding plumbing. Gaslight was an attempt to imitate those 
self-lighting candles that illuminate Hogwarts and presumably many 
other places. Steam engines in mine pumps, steam ships, railway 
engines, and very early automobiles were attempts to imitate magic 
self-working devices such as the ships and carriages that move of 
themselves.

But then Muggles got into inventing original things, from telegraph 
to Internet, and it was the wizarding folk's turn to use magic to try 
to imitate Muggle technology (which they don't admit in Muggle 
Studies class). However, there would no reason for the Wizarding 
Wireless Network to be called "wireless" if it weren't an imitation 
of Muggle wireless, which got that name to contrast it with telegraph 
*wire*. Btw, the wizarding folk should previously have invented a 
magic imitation of telegraph, which I named Spellegraph.

As for the statement that 'technology' doesn't work at Hogwarts 
because the magic field there is so intense that it knocks them out, 
I take it that that applies only to electricity and electronics (such 
as computers, mobile phones, vaccuum tube radios, battery powered 
flashlight, the generator and electrical system of 1950s automobiles, 
the walkie-talkies and 'bugging' devices that Harry suggested and 
Hermione shot down, etc.)   Not to purely mechanical devices. Knives 
work at Hogwarts, so how could scissors not work? Eggtimers (like 
hourglasses, the sand trickles). Wristwatches -- the old fashioned 
clockwork kind that had to be wound with a winding stem and was full 
of gears and no electronics. I believe that gas lights and steam 
engines would also work at Hogwarts, if there was any use for them 
there, where their results cam be better achieved by magic.
> 
> Technology _is_ nature, applied. 

Hooray! This is a forbidden "I agree!" post!