TMR-Voldemort/TBAY notes / Sirius-Cyrus / Sorting Neville /Hogwarts Flushing

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

No: HPFGUIDX 47103

Thanks to Audra and Judy for answering my questions about sociopaths.

Judy Serenity wrote:

<< Perhaps an inability to delay gratification is why Voldemort 
tortured Harry in the Graveyard, when it would have been safer to 
just kill him outright? >>

The typical Evil Overlord scenario <g>.

<< "Dumbledore's head on platter" [someone please generate an 
acronym for this!] >>

In chat, I asked if anyone could come up with something better than 
DHOP "Dumbledore's Head On a Platter". 

I hoped for something that would come out CHOP. 

Constance_Vigilance offered "How about "Cranium of Headmaster On a 
Platter"?"

Marina wrote:

<< We do know that the older Riddles cast Tom's pregnant mother out 
of the family when they discovered she was a witch, with no concert 
for what would happen to her or her baby. Sounds like a distinct lack 
of empathy to me. >>

I think it's entirely possible that Tom Riddle Sr's parents never 
knew about Tom Jr or Tom Jr's mother. I don't think Master Tom and 
Miss Witchy ever WERE married (see below), but even if they were, 
they could have been married at a registry office in a distant town 
and lived in that town, and Tom never told his parents that they were 
married, and never told his parents that he had gotten divorced.

I have this uncanonical obsession that TMR believed the story of his 
parents, as he told it to Harry, that it had been told to him that 
way, but actually it was not the true story. I think that actually 
TMR's parents were never married in the first place. 

It was the 1920s; the young (maybe 19 years old) daughter of the only 
wizarding family in the village bobbed her hair, wore indecently 
short knee-length skirts, and had a head full of crazy ideals about 
socialism and pacifism and free love and wizard-Muggle harmony. And 
she actually believed that the handsome Muggle young man, just a 
couple of years older than her, loved her as much as she loved him...

A notion painfully disproved when she told him she was pregnant... 
she expected he would offer to marry her, or to go and live in sin 
with her in London or Italy... but he told her that it was all her 
problem and none of his own. (That's a lack of empathy, but a very 
common one, historically.) 

She had to go tell her parents that their old-fashioned, prudish, 
intolerant ideas had been right after all... She did die in 
childbirth, of a broken heart, and her parents raised the baby for 
his first few years, gave him the name his late mother had chosen 
against their advice, and told him of his illustrious descent 
(through them) from Salazar Slytherin, and told him this euphemised 
story of why he had no parents. 

They died with no wizarding friends or relatives (I speculate that 
they were killed by young Tommy's unconscious magic when he was 
throwing a tantrum about something), so he was taken by Muggle 
villagers to a Muggle orphanage. I love the irony of thinking that 
his crusade against Muggles was based entirely on a false idea, and 
it would have been more relevant for him to crusade against 
pre-marital sex.

Abigail:

<< Right now, there are practically as many theories as there are 
list members, >>

Not twice as many theories as list members? I have at least a dozen 
mutually contradictory theories myself....

Pippin:

<< If I say, 'The cat's not in the bathtub', you can't disprove it 
without looking in the bathtub. At which point the statement is no 
longer arbitrary." >>

If you say, "The cat's not in the bathtub", you are absolutely right. 
The cats are all right here on the bed with me. I can see all of them.

<< We can make a pretty good argument that Dumbledore is not a 
Utilitarian, by the way. He teaches Harry that in many cases what 
would make people happiest would actually be bad for them. >>

NO. He told Harry that what many people WANT MOST, money and long 
life, are just the things that are worst for them. You are jumping to 
the idea that what people WANT MOST is what makes them HAPPIEST, and 
a hell of a lot of non-philosophical Muggles have noticed that 
sometimes something that you intensely wanted turns out to be a big 
disappointment (especially if the reason you wanted it much was 
because of the advertising <g>). 

Anyway, there's room for enough argument about what 'happy' means to 
make Utilitarianism as worthless as any other theories. For example, 
my friend keeps telling me that Plato said that  moral virtue is a 
prerequisite for happiness, so that children and other people not 
spiritually evolved enough to really understand virtue can never be 
truly happy, no matter how much fun and contentment they have and how 
happy they think they are.
 
SophineClaire:

<< looks forward to the third movie mainly to hear how Sirius' name 
is really pronounced: Is it `Serious' or `Sigh-Russ' ala Thirteen 
Ghosts (where it is spelt as Cyrus)). >>

Cyrus is a different name than Sirius. Cyrus (Kurush in Persian) was 
the Persian Emperor who conquered the entire Middle East and allowed 
the Jews to return to Israel from the "Babylonian Captivity". Sirius 
is the name of the Dog Star, in Canis Major, and the name is derived 
from a Greek word meaning "scorching". (So even tho' JKR thought she 
was naming him for being a dog, she was really naming him for being 
a hottie.)

Janet Anderson:

<< Neville Longbottom is in Gryffindor because he 1) has courage, 
the first attribute of a Gryffindor person and 2) in all probability 
asked to be there, the same way Harry did. >>

"The hat took a long time to decide with Neville." I think it took 
the Hat a long time to persuade Neville to accept the Gryffindor 
placement he so desperately wanted; Neville surely would have kept 
arguing that he didn't deserve Gryffindor, he should be in Hufflepuff 
(poor Hufflepuff). Maybe the Hat finally said: "No rule-biding 
Hufflepuff would ever argue with an authority like Me. Your 
rebelliousness just proves you're a GRYFFINDOR!"

Jazmyn: 
 
<< (why would their plumbing empty into the lake?? Do the monsters 
there eat human waste or is the lake really disgusting?) >>

I believe that their plumbing empties into the lake via a magical 
cleaning spell that transmutes all the waste products into pretty 
flowers or such, but I fear that that mgical cleaning spell was put 
in place by the lake's inhabitants, such as the merpeople, rather 
than by the castle's occupants. Even tho' I believe that wizards 
have had indoor plumbing with hot and cold running water and flush 
toilets for over nine thousand years, I have no evidence that 
medieval wizards had a higher concern for clean drinking water and 
pleasant smelling surroundings than their Muggle contemporaries did.