Not so very clever Albus...

[errolowl]

No: HPFGUIDX 45356



Dicentra in message 45230:
>>"Dumbledore is often amused by his own
cleverness, as seen in PP/PS when he confides to Harry that hiding the
Stone in Erised was one of his better ideas." <<

Yes, old Albus is frequently amused by his own cleverness. In fact he 
frequently seems to go out of his way to complicate things so he can 
solve them cleverly...though those solutions are debatable.

Yes, yes, I know, we've all been through this a thousand times, but 
I'm in just the sort of bad mood to grumble about this a little. 
First lets start with hiding the stone in the mirror of Erised. yes, 
that works perfectly when the baddies need to get at the stone 
doesn't it? Voldmort would just see himself drinking the exlir, just 
as Quirrel saw himself presenting it to his master. But how long 
would it have held out? Don't you think that as voldmort got more 
frustrated and angry, a terrified Qurirrel would have panicked? He'd 
no longer be so taken by the glory of presenting the stone to his 
master, but get a desperate case of "Oh my God! I've GOT to find the 
stone, or I'm dead!!". And once that was his overriding desire, 
couldn't he have then found it?
Looks to me like that mirror was just a short term barrier, designed 
to delay voldmort till Dumbledore could get there....and what if 
Albus couldn't get back in time? Was there really no more foolproof 
way? At least it turned out right that time....

Looks like a similar goof-up with the age line around the Goblet. It 
didn't fulfill its purpose, did it? You'd think that the most 
powerful Wizard in the world could be more thorough in his 
precautions. True, he thought he just needed that device to withstand 
the deviousness of a few 'ickle students...but those same students 
could have come up with the unexpected (oh, come on! we've seen 
students write the maurauders map, turn into illegal animagi, 
preserve memory in a diary,  conjure the patronus, etc...all advanced 
magic, I'd say). It might take a powerful wizard to confuse the 
goblet into including a fourth school, but not necessarily require 
such power to cross the age line.  And did that age line prevent any 
of the older students from acting as an agent for the younger ones 
and dropping their name in? or the use of say, a catapult, to flick 
the piece of paper into the goblet from a distance? we don't quite 
know.....

Errol
who seems to have worked off the bad mood, and has suddenly run out 
of steam.