Half-blood/soul-mind-Diary!Tom/SpectatorSports/DE MoMemployee/Sieve/PS-dream

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

Why did Dumbledore tell Harry to tell only Ron and Hermione about the
Horcruxes, not Ron, Hermione, and Ginny? Did he not know about H/G
ship, did he think Ginny is too underage to be involved, did he
think Ginny retains a link to LV from CoS? 

I, too, like Randy's King of Pain filk.

Kneasy wrote in http://groups.yahoo.com/group/the_
old_crowd/message/3018 :

<< like a Half-blood!Snape as a DE. Doesn't seem to match the DE
ethic, does it? Why would Half-blood!Snape be Head of Slytherin House?
That seems a bit odd too, a bastion of the Pure-blood conceit headed
by an example of what they hate. >>

I'm usually wrong about everything, but I still think that the Death
Eaters and other pure-bloodist snobs of recent centuries have nothing
aagainst Half-bloods. It is *Muggleborns* whom they hate. When JKR
answered the question about Snape's blood-status, she said
"Snape's ancestry is hinted at. He was a Death Eater, so clearly
he is no Muggle born, because Muggle borns are not allowed to be 
Death Eaters, except in rare circumstances."
http://www.jkrowling.com/textonly/news_view.cfm?id=80

I can't imagine circumstances in which a known Muggle-born would
*want* to be a Death Eater.

It seems to me that the blood-snobs of the wizarding world have a
strict social hierarchy, like a caste system: the top is pure-bloods
with old money, followed by other pure-bloods, followed by what Steve
bboymin calls "full-bloods" (people who can't *prove the purity of
their ancestry for the set number of generations, but no one else has
proved that one of their ancestors was a Muggle), followed by people
with admitted Muggle ancestry (ranked by their percentage of Muggle
ancestry, as Americans once categorized people with partially African
ancestry into 'a touch of the tar brush', octaroon, quardroon,
mulatto). It differs from the fortunately discarded American system 
by where it puts the 'color line': only the Muggle-borns are the
Untouchables, everyone who is part-pureblood is, umm, allowed to be a
Slytherin racist. 

While this is not the view that Binns attributed to Salazar, that
magical teaching should be kept in all-magic families, Binns could
have been a bit wrong or Salazar's intellectual heirs could have
modified their beliefs. 

Judy agreed with Neri in
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/the_old_crowd/message/3042 :

<< Lupin:
"You can exist without your soul, you know, as long as your brain and
heart are still working. But you'll have no sense of self any more,
no memory, no ... anything. There's no chance at all of recovery.
You'll just ... exist. As an empty shell."

Well, Lupin definitely seems to be saying that the soul and the mind
are the same thing. But then, how can Lord Voldemort retain all his
powers and memories, as Dumbledore says he does, if his has ripped
his soul into small pieces and has hardly any of it left? >>

I think Lupin meant that the mind and the sense of self cannot survive
without a support-system, normally a soul, but possibly a mind could
be transferred to a magical device like the diary without transferring
a bit of soul with it. And that memories cannot survive without their
support-system, normally a mind, but we have seen them survive in
Pensieves and bottles. But it a Dementor sucks out your soul, there is
no time to transfer your mind and memories to a magical artifact
before they die for lack of their support-system.

Constance Vigilance wrote in
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/the_old_crowd/message/3052 :

<< wondering if LV knows that his horcruxes could gain a life of their
own, re: Diary!Tom. Having your horcruxes come back to challenge your
Ultimate Evil Supremacy -  >>

JKR didn't think it would be bad for Voldie:
http://www.jkrowling.com/textonly/faq_view.cfm?id=17
<<Q: In 'Chamber of Secrets', what would have happened if Ginny had
died and Tom Riddle had escaped the diary?
A: I can't answer that fully until all seven books are finished,
but it would have strengthened the present-day Voldemort
considerably.>>

I don't agree that the other Horcruces could regenerate. I agree with
Judy in http://groups.yahoo.com/group/the_old_crowd/message/3030 :
<< Here, I agree with Pippin that the "soul" that
gets divided into horcruxes must be somehow distinct from the self --
although the way I was thinking of it was that the soul must be
distinct from the *mind*. My thought was that although Voldemort cut
off bits of his soul and put them in various objects, this didn't
involve removing any of his mind. He did not lose any memories or
knowledge -- presumably -- each time he made a Horcrux. (Actually,
Dumbledore tells Harry something like this, that Voldemort's soul is
diminished, but not his skills.)

So, Voldemort's entire mind stayed with his body, along with the bit
of soul that had been stored there. When his body was destroyed, his
mind was not, and was available to force his soul -- sleeplessly,
endlessly, second by second -- to stay cohesive until he could
acquire physical form through various means such as possession. The
other horcruxes, however, were soul without mind, and therefore
dissipated (or whatever) when their containers were destroyed.

Now, the diary is a bit of a special case. It clearly has some form
of intelligence, but I assume this is contained somehow in the
physical object, rather than being a non-corporeal entity the way
minds apparently are in the Potterverse. So, when the diary was
destroyed, that version of Tom Riddle was, too.

By the way, I don't believe that the ring, locket, etc. could acquire
a personality and possess someone the way the diary did. The diary
contained some of Tom Riddle's memories -- Dumbledore implies that
Riddle actually wrote an account of opening the Chamber of Secrets in
the diary, even though the words were no longer visible when Harry
got the book. The ring, etc., presumably did not contain anything
like the same amount of information; therefore, they don't have
enough of Voldemort's memories to create a new version of him. >>

Sorry, that was too good to snip. 


Pippin Wrote in http://groups.yahoo.com/group/the_
old_crowd/message/3054 :

<< now that we know JKR's real opinion of spectator sports,  >>

Excuse me, what did I miss?

Eloise wrote in http://groups.yahoo.com/group/the_
old_crowd/message/3063 :

<< Do we have any evidence for current DEs in the MOM? >>

Macnair is a current Death Eater and a current Ministry employee. I
think executioner is not a very high rank in the Ministry, but he's a
proof of concept. Btw how did he avoid being convicted of Death
Eating?

Geoff wrote in http://groups.yahoo.com/group/the_o
ld_crowd/message/3070 :

<< the word "riddle" has an older and less frequently used meaning
of "sieve"; I still hear local people using it in the rural area
where I now live. >>

Which is now commonly used in a verb and adjective form e.g 'riddled
with wormholes' or 'bullet-riddled'

Eloise wrote in http://groups.yahoo.com/group/the_
old_crowd/message/3071 :

<< Now this may mean very little in this particular context however it
is interesting that he witnesses the flash of the curse, accompanied a
vision of both Malfoy and Snape. Was Malfoy (sr) there, too,
accompanying his master and later retrieving his wand? >> 

Altho' I'm almost always wrong about everything, I've always thought
that PS/Ss dream was a clue that Snape and Lucius were present with LV
at Godric's Hollow. But Pettigrew was there, too, as JKR said
somewhere (I can't find it in Quick Quote Quill) that the way Lord
Voldemort got his wand back was that Pettigrew picked it up from the
wreckage and hid it somewhere and picked it up on his way out of the
country to Albania. I always thought Pettigrew was there because LV
was afraid that Pettigrew was a fake traitor, leading him into a trap,
and he was going to make Pettigrew enter the house in front of him to
make the trap, if there was one, would catch him. But the revelation
that LV really is an excellent Legilimens screwed that -- he could
tell Pettigrew was an honest traitor by looking into Pettigrew's
mind.