Many Replies to 2 Weeks' Posts, please scroll down to find *YOUR* NAME!!

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

No: HPFGUIDX 58092

New!Becky gopotter2004 wrote:

<< After all, in the first book, if a fourth friend was to be chosen 
for Ron, Hermione, and Harry, it would likely have been Neville. >>

Some brilliantly insightful listie (but I don't remember which one) 
suggested that the Devil's Snare trap was intended for Neville, who 
is good at Herbology, as the chess was for Ron, the flying keys for 
Harry, and the logic puzzle for Hermione. IE, that Dumbledore 
expected them to take Neville with them rather than to leave him 
paralyzed on the common room floor. 

THE Barb wrote:

<< Neville was following the rules, trying to keep them in the 
common room, but his behavior was not moral, IMO. It was dangerous 
nitpicking that could have had disastrous results. (I'm still not 
convinced Dumbledore should have rewarded him for this.) >>

It occured to me while typing the above comment to Becky, that maybe 
Dumbledore had to make up an excuse for giving Neville points that he 
had *planned* to give Neville for coping with the Devil's Snare.

Maria wrote:

<< And as an extra bonus, we can have Ever So Evil Dennis Creevey, 
since without him DeathEater!Squid makes no sense. >>

Does this assume some Dennis/Squid ship, in which the poor old squid 
follows its inamorato into evil? For the squid, it had been love at 
first sight, which is why it saved him from drowning....

Jenny from Ravenclaw wrote:

<<  The only one who really suffered there was Hermione, who became 
Cat Girl for a while. >>

Becoming Cat Girl is a PRIVILEGE, not suffering. Silly unappreciative 
Hermione. 

Errol Owl wrote:

<<  It makes no sense to play one player short, especially the seeker 
position, cause then Griffindor could never finish the match. They 
would never win even if they compiled a huge goal difference since 
they would be totally at the mercy of the other team to close the 
match. >>

I have wondered if the Snitches for school matches are especially 
enchanted to get easier to catch as the time goes by, like after 
maybe 14 hours they fly right into the mouth of the nearest Seeker no 
matter how hard heesh tries to avoid it.

Patricia wrote:

<< Some people have stated that wizards live twice as long as 
muggles. Others have suggested that wizards and witches live to be 
about 200. There is supposedly some interview evidence for this, 
though I haven't seen it myself. (I would love to see it, btw, if 
anyone can supply a link.) >>

http://www.scholastic.com/harrypotter/author/transcript2.htm
Q: How old is old in the wizarding world, and how old are Professors 
Dumbledore and McGonagall?
JKR: Dumbledore is a hundred and fifty, and Professor McGonagall is a 
sprightly seventy. Wizards have a much longer life expectancy than 
Muggles. (Harry hasn't found out about that yet.)

http://www.comicrelief.com/harrysbooks/pages/transcript.shtml
Q: How old are Professor Dumbledore and Professor Snape? 
JKR: Dumbledore's about 150 years old... wizards have a longer life 
expectancy than us Muggles, Snape's 35 or 6. 

JKR's own drawing of McGonagall looking like she's 30 (with the 
black, not grey, hair mentioned in canon) in Muggle years is in the 
HPfGU Yahoo!Group Photo Section 
http://photos.groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/lst , click on 
"Harry Potter and Me" which is the second folder, click on "dursleys" 
which is the fifth pic.

THE Barb wrote:

<< in one of the schoolbooks, Quidditch Through the Ages, a letter is 
quoted that is supposed to be from a witch who couldn't vote for the 
Minister of Magic. (Something like, "If I had a vote, he would have 
lost mine." Forgive the paraphrase.) This implies that there was a 
time in wizarding society when women were disenfranchised. >>

I personally believe that she was disenfranchised by a property 
requirement for voting, not by her gender.

Anne Conda wrote:

<< any ideas what the 4 founders had in mind, when they named their 
school "Hogwarts"? It sounds so... so... dumbledory. >>

I have a totally non-canonical theory that the mountain behind 
Hogwarts was named Hogmount or Mt. Hog (possibly as "Holy" mountain 
as Susan Fox-Davis suggested, or I prefer to think it was named after 
the Caledonian Boar, a non-famous relative of the Calydonian Boar -- 
Hogwarts thinks it has enough to do with swine that it has winged 
pigs on the gateposts of the front entrance) and the surrounding 
geographical features were named after the mountain: the lake was 
Hoglake, the Forbidden Forest was named Hogwood, the grassy and 
somewhat squishy area beside the lake was named Hogmead[ow], and the 
slightly higher and drier land was named Hogwald. (My dictionary 
defines "wald" as "1. a forested area, 2. an unforested area".)

I feel that Godric was the leader of the Founders and he was going 
to call the school Hogwald School because that was where they put it, 
but Salazar whined that the proposed name included the initials of 
Helga and Godric, but not *his* initials ... or Rowena's, for that 
matter. When Helga got tired of listening to the men squabble, she 
said: "So call it Hogwarts, that includes all the initials."

However, there is an JKR interview in which she said: "a friend said, 
`Remember we saw those lilies in Kew gardens (a garden in London.)' 
Apparently there are lilies there called Hogwarts. I'd forgotten!" 
http://www.familyeducation.com/article/0,1120,22-9966-0-2,00.html 
(thanks to the Goat Pad http://www.geocities.com/aberforths_goat/ for 
finding the interview.) Maybe those lilies were growing at the school 
location, and thus the name.

Darrin wrote:

<< Draco, whose injuries were healed in a second, >>

I have previously posted in 
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/51894 "Please, 
what is the canon for the arm being painfree the same day it 
occurred? I believe that Draco was faking being still injured when he 
used it as an excuse to postpone the Slytherin-Gryffindor Quidditch 
match so that the Gryffs played Hufflepuff instead, but that was two 
months later - the injury was on the first day of classes and the 
match was after Halloween and the attack on the Fat Lady." There was 
a whole thread on this subject; maybe you can find it on the website 
with the post # I said.

Ali wrote:

<< I do not believe that Harry's protection dies the minute he is 
away from the Dursleys. I do believe though that it becomes weaker. 
It would have been at its weakest at the end of the school year - 
which just happens to be when Voldemort struck in GoF; perhaps this 
is no coincidence. >>

I think so, too. That would explain this bit at the end of GoF: "Ron 
told Harry about a meeting Mrs Weasley had had with Dumbledore before 
going home. <<She went to ask him if you could come straight to us 
this summer," he said. "But he wants you to go back to the Dursleys, 
at least at first." "Why?" said Harry. "She said Dumbledore's got 
his reasons," said Ron,>> Harry has to go back to the Dursleys to 
recharge the protective magic, and THEN he can go to the Weasleys.

Echa Schneider wrote:

<< [Binns]'s doomed to stay at Hogwarts, teaching history until the 
day comes that he finally feels that he's taught a student something 
worthwhile and that the student really cared. >>

If he bothered to notice, he has now DONE THAT: telling the kids 
about the Chamber of Secrets. 

Debbie wrote:

<< I, myself, will be surprised if it's sunny the day Harry takes the 
train. I'm expecting a thunderstorm. >>

After the deluge in GoF, in OoP I'm expecting an early snowstorm. A 
totally unseasonable blizzard.

Mecki wrote:

<< Hagrid is a half-giant -- Giantess-mother and wizard-father. My 
question: how does this work? >>

Hey, Mecki, I thought you were around the last two times that this 
was answered with one phrase: Engorgement Spells.

<< Can you imagine a human woman and a giant man? >>

Shrinking Spells? I think there *must* be a Shrinking Charm, even 
tho' the Shrinking Solution made in Potions class in PoA and tested 
on Trevor Toad made him younger as well as smaller: turned him into 
Trevor Tadpole.

Engorgement Spells on the mother or Shrinking Spells on the fetus. 

Ersatz Harry wrote:

<< Do some of the DEs get together and decide when to conceive 
children, perhaps as a way to ensure sufficient concentration of 
their progeny at a given place and time? >>

I have a Theory. That Voldemort read the stars like a centaur or 
heard a prophecy from someone more reliable than Trelawney ... 
anyway, he found out that a boy of great magical powers would be born 
around Lammas of 1980. He would rather have this child born on his 
side and raised to be loyal to him than have this child born on the 
other side, so at the approriate time he ordered all his Death Eaters 
to go out and spawn ... or perhaps it was Lucius who had the 
prediction and ordered his *particular* followers among the Death 
Eaters ... anyway, the special child was Harry and not one of the DE 
kids. 

Annemehr wrote:

<< No creativity neccessary. Dean Thomas was inserted in the 
Scholastic version; he his completely absent from the sorting account 
in the UK editions. So it was a Scholastic editor who couldn't count 
in this case! >>

So the Bloomsbury editor made a DIFFERENT mistake: Dean Thomas is one 
of Harry's roommates in the UK edition, so he SHOULD have been Sorted 
in alphabetical order.  

Phyllis wrote:

<< Which suggests that Dumbledore's silver hair appeared somewhere 
between 100 and 137. (snip) "Unlike Dumbledore, Karkaroff looked much 
younger; his hair and goatee were black." Unfortunately, since we 
don't know Karkaroff's age, it's hard to deduce much from this other 
than the fact that he aged considerably in the past 13 years. >>

Does wizards' hair turn silver because of being appointed Headmaster 
rather than because of aging?

Squee Entwife wrote:

<< You know that game where if a bunch of kids are in sleeping bags 
or on a bed, one child yells "Steamroller!" and rolls over everyone 
else?!? What would you call it in the Wizarding World - seeing as how 
they have no steam rollers? >>

I *don't* know that game, but would imagine that wizarding kids call 
it "Rolling Pins!" 

However, steam rollers were named after older human- or animal- 
powered rollers, like lawn rollers.

Andrea Ra wrote:

<< I doubt the Chamber entrance was in a bathroom when Salazar 
made it all those years ago. They didn't even HAVE modern plumbing 
then. >>

I believe that the wizarding folk had modern plumbing then, and had 
had it for some 9000 years already, even tho' Muggles didn't get 
around to copying it from them until the nineteenth century. Other 
than that, I agree with you abuot the basilisk.

Steve bboy_mn wrote:

<< Odd that both Malfoy and Voldemort use eagle owls. >>

Not odd at all: the Eurasian Eagle Owl is Bubo bubo, indicating that 
it is the most "classic" owl. It's very large and the one who says 
"hoo-woo". Presumably it's the most prestigious and expensive type of 
owl. Btw, the North American Eagle Owl, Bubo virginianus, is called 
Great Horned Owl. I learned from listie pengolodh_sc that in 
Norwegian, the Eurasian Eagle Owl is called Hubro (from its call?) 
and Horned Owl.

Audra wrote:

<< Imagine Neville having to rip the guts out of all those toads that 
looked just like his Trevor. >>

I am SURE that cruelty is what Snape INTENDED, but he and JKR got it 
wrong: he made Neville disembowel horny toads, and horny toads are 
neither toads like Trevor nor frogs: they are a kind of lizard. 

GoF, very beginning of Chapter 14: << Professor Snape, who seemed to 
have attained new levels of vindictiveness over the summer, gave 
Neville detention, and Neville returned from it in a state of nervous 
collapse, having been made to disembowel a barrelful of horned toads. 
"You know why Snape's in such a foul mood, don't you?" said Ron to 
Harry, as they watched Hermione teaching Neville a Scouring Charm to 
remove the frog guts from under his fingernails. >>

Also in GoF, early in Chapter 19: << Ron hadn't spoken to him at all 
since he had told him about Snape's detentions. Harry had half hoped 
they would make things up during the two hours they were forced to 
pickle rats' brains in Snape's dungeon,>>

Snape presumably chose pickling rats' brains as the chore for Ron 
(and Harry) on the assumption that it would be especially unpleasant 
for the owner of a pet rat, similar to Neville and toads above, but 
that suggests that he sincerely didn't believe that Scabbers was 
Pettigrew: he couldn't have thought that Ron would feel affectionate 
about Pettigrew!

Tepmurt wrote:

<< I believe that James is from an old, rich wizarding family. >>

JKR said so in an interview. I haven't been able to find that 
interview on the Goat Pad this evening (despite having seen it 
before), but it is cited in the Lexicon article on James Potter: "He 
inherited quite a fortune (AOL)." That means: 
http://www.kidsreads.com/harrypotter/chattranscript.html
Jesse Kornbluth:  Here's one from Tiger Lily:  What did James and 
Lily Potter do when they were alive?
J.K. Rowling:  Well, I can't go into too much detail, because you're 
going to find out in future books. But James inherited plenty of 
money, so he didn't need a well-paid profession. You'll find out more 
about both Harry's parents later.

Ray Heuer wrote:

<< Anyone have any idea of who the Ravenclaw master is? >>

Professor Flitwick is the Head of Ravenclaw and the Grey Lady is the 
Ravenclaw ghost. JKR said so in interviews long ago. This information 
is in the Harry Potter Lexicon 
http://www.i2k.com/~svderark/lexicon/houses.html created by Steve 
Vander Ark.

Greicy wrote:

<<  How many Prefects are there to each House? I only hear of Percy 
being the Prefect of Gryffindor when he was in school and Cedric in 
GoF for Hufflepuff. So if Harry becomes a Prefect where does that 
leave Hermione. Hermione *has* to be Prefect she is the smartest in 
her class. >>

I believe that Hogwarts has one boy and one girl Prefect for each 
House for each year of fith, sixth, seventh (Head Boy and Head Girl 
are Prefects). However, some listies have said that any reasonable 
school would want to have more Prefects to do the work (enforcing 
discipline).