And a shovel, just to be accurate.
I’ve wondered what the basis of the wizard community’s economy is. They don’t seem to have any activities that actually bring in money from the outside, not even the outside of their own wizard groups. You can’t run all the towns on dentists and government agencies. Someone has to be in manufacturing so that the money will come back into town. Every decent-sized town is providing a service to other towns: growing food, building refrigerators, designing airplanes, cutting lumber, etc. None of the wizards seem to be in anything but service jobs to other wizards.
Bwah! thanks for the chuckle.
We DO know they like to ski–that’s something.
And if Hermione’s parents can go to Diagon Alley–why not the Dursley’s? And I don’t believe that Petunia hates Harry all that much–it’s all very Roald Dahl-ish.
Upon graduation from Hogwarts, everyone seems to go right into the wizarding work force for the rest of their lives.
There doesn’t seem to be a College at all.
What would be the point of having a broomstick if you cannot use it out in the real world because muggles could see you?
What do young wizards and witches do for schooling before Hogwarts?
What are Neville’s toads special powers suppose to be. He seems mostly useless.
Does the Wizarding Community have a voting system? Was Cornelius Fudge elected into office by the people or what?
Or “Harry Potter and the Shower of Gold” :eek:
I can answer this one for sure because I just saw it on JKR’s website.
Wizard children are homeschooled, because (as we saw with Harry before he got into Hogwarts) the emotions growing up can cause magical things to happen even without the child intending them to, so Wizard parents homeschool their children to keep that under control.
The animated photographs… are they looped?
Yeah, I always wondered about this one. I mean, what do ya think all the wizards and witches do? Solve problems… with magic! :eek:
Actually, it would be hilarious if they did abruptly join society. You’d have all of these mighty wizards and witches being derided in public for their provincialism. Man, that would piss them off royally.
Let me add:
:eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:
and
:eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:
I’m afraid to ask, but … could someone explain this one to me? I’m afraid to google the term.
No one would believe them. And they’d get in lots of trouble from the ministry. Two different characters in the sixth book do something along these lines, and the ministry comes down pretty hard on them both. (The best I can say without giving anything away, I think)
What happened to Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans in the sixth book?! If I’m not mistaken, they weren’t mentioned once. HBP spoiler: Perhaps JKR thought the reader would associate them with Dumbledore, and meant to foreshadow his death.
How does spell-casting work? I mean, everyone’s wand does the same thing when you say “lumos” – how do all the wands know what that means exactly? Are all the spells written in some sort of universal magical programming language? Most of the spells seem loosely based on latin (e.g. lumos = light, wingardium leviosa = something to do with wings and levitation, etc.) so are the spells different in countries with a non-latin-based language? When a new spell comes into use, is it discovered or invented? Are there a finite number of spells that will work?
It seems from that one nasty spell Harry got from the HBP’s old spellbook that you can, in fact, create a new spell. I expect it’s because the magic doesn’t come from the wand, it comes from the witch or wizard wielding it, and they know what they want the spell to do. How that becomes a fixed spell so that someone who doesn’t know what it will do can achieve the same effect…okay, I don’t know.
The homeschooling all kids thing doesn’t make sense to me. It’s totally impractical! The lack of wizard university is also bothersome to me. Do you really think Hermione will never want to go to university, that she’ll be fine with ending her education at 17? I can’t see it.
Harry Potter is like a celebrity in the wizard world since he survived an attack on his life by Voldemort when he was just a wee bairn after He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named offed his parents. If he so chose, could Harry use this celebrity status to act like a real celebrity, e.g., have an entorauge of lesser Hogwarts students cater to his every whim and so on? Could Harry have a secret assasin to do a little “adava kadavra” on anyone who looked at him funny, similar to how it’s been said that Bill Clinton supposedly had folks off his enemies?
Errmm . . . Teenagers gradually losing their childhood interest in candy?
Allow me to develop further on this. The photographs in wizard world are all animated and the characters are moving, right? This, however leads up to some intriguing possibilites. I mean, fine if you’re just flipping pages and duly notice that the pictures have movement in them, but what if you would look at them for an extended period of time? I give some possible scenarios:
- The pictures actually loop, like if you would have a movie file on the computer put on “repeat”.
- The pictures have complex AI (magic personaliy programs) that keeps randomizing itself but without losing context.
- The photographs are actually living beings! This seems unlikely, 'cause they would lose context pretty quickly, unless they are really dense and the context of the photo is all that they know of.
cactus waltz. Photographs seem to loop, particularly massed produced images in trading cards, wanted posters, magazines and newspapers. Most portraits seem imbued with a independent life force that allows them to live in a world within their own portrait, recall their former lives, interact with beings outside the portraits and to visit other portraits. Ghosts trapped in oil paint.