HBP review

[Judy]

David wrote:
> Maybe you have all come across this already, but this is one of the 
> funniest things I have seen for a while.  Hours of fun.
> http://pages.prodigy.net/mike_p_smith/hbp/intro.html

My sense of humor must match David's, because I followed the link to 
this site and really liked it.  In fact, I stayed up until 6 am last 
night reading it (ah, the joys of summer vacation!) and I'm still not 
done yet.  (It's rather looooong....)

Basically, the author is in a Harry Potter role playing game but has 
never read the Harry Potter books or seen the movies, and knows 
nothing about them.  He decides to start reading the series at Book 
6, with running commentary as he tries to figure out the story.  He 
has an extremely sarcastic sense of humor and makes fun of everything 
in the books, but seeing as I'm a Snape fan, sarcasm doesn't bother 
me.

It's interesting to see what parts of the story he figures out right 
away (he immediately deduces that the Half-Blood Prince is Snape) and 
what he gets totally wrong (for some reason, he keeps thinking that 
Ron is in Hufflepuff.)  My favorite part so far is towards the end of 
Chapter 20, where the author (who had a request from a friend to 
parody the idea that "Lord Voldemort" is an anagram of Tom Riddle's 
original name) comes up with all sorts of alternate anagrams, and 
starts calling Voldemort things like "Overlord Mo, Ltd," "Mr. Todd 
Loverol," and "Dot Rollover, M.D." The author, whose name is Michael 
Patrick Smith, also creates an evil overlord anagram of his own, 
declaring, "I Am Master Hitchplick!"

This inspired me to try anagrams of my own name, but most of the ones 
that I came up with (actually, I used the anagram server at 
www.wordsmith.org) contained words 
like "hardship," "jihad," "trash," "AIDS," and "turd."  Sheesh, would 
it have killed my parents to plan ahead a little when they named me? 
The best anagram I could come up with for myself was, "It's Hip Dr. 
Joshua!" (Which would work OK if I were a guy, I guess.)

My overall opinion of this review of HBP is that it has some very 
good parts, but it also has quite a bit of boring stuff and filler.  
Oddly enough, that is exactly what the site's author thinks of Half-
Blood Prince. 

-- Osiris Jutah, Ph.D.