What is a show/movie theory that you came up with?

Is the offcat sensitive to gravitational stress?

You know, Harry’s mother was also born of muggle parents. The thought that occurs to me is that, if that can happen, most surely a muggle can be born to magical parents. What happens then? Wizards are most uniquely unqualified to raise a non-magic child, and the child would not fit in with their parents community.

They would be reverse-mudbloods, ridiculed in the Wizarding community, and the shame might devolve upon the parents as well (if the Wizenegamot is mostly assholish). Such a child would have to be adopted out to muggles to raise, never to visit the realms of magic.

For this reason, the term “miscarriage” has taken on a sort of winking undertone.

They are called squibs.

They get menial jobs in the wizarding world, such as school janitor.

It’s amusing that Rowling uses this word-- I wonder if it’s an Americanism she chose without anticipating how widely-read the books would be in the US?

In the military, a squib is a small powder charge that makes a little “pow” sound, and some smoke, that is used in dummy bullets, and practice grenades. It’s harmless, unless you were to do something stupid, like hold your hands around one when it went off-- but even then, you’d probably just need a little field first aid for minor burns.

I’ve never heard anyone without a military or law enforcement background use the word “squib,” but sometimes people use it connotatively, like someone might nickname a little kid who like to play soldier a lot, “Squib,” or might refer to anything fake or false as a “squib.” Or even use it when you otherwise might say something like “His bark is worse than his bite.” So a person who ought to be a wizard, but can only pull off small tricks, or even just purchased tricks (like the kind Fred & George sold), is a “squib.”

The Joker, played by Joaquín Phoenix, is a descendent of the insane Abbé Coulmier, played by Joaquín Phoenix in the movie Quills.

The word has also been used for decades in film/tv production as well. As with military squibs, they are the little devices which explode on a character to indicate their being shot:

In UK usage, a squib is a small firework that makes a loud bang. I believe they are called Firecrackers in USA.

But I expect Rowling was riffing on the phrase Damp Squib, which literally means a firework that doesn’t go off when lit, or metaphorically means an anticlimax.

Chronicles of Narnia: People sometimes wonder how all living creatures in Narnia didn’t die out during the 100-year winter. My theory is that the Witch created either ready-made food, or the basic elements like wheat, the way she used her wand to create hot chocolate and Turkish Delight for Edmund. The point is, Narnia under her reign was like the former USSR. Food and other essentials were available, but there was only the basics and barely enough to go around. Unless one was in the inner circle. (And now I’m picturing fauns, dryads, dwarves and the like lining up outside a Levi’s outlet.)

That does explain what was in the parcels Mr. Tumnus was carrying.

At the end of Sunset Boulevard they mention that the director actually wanted to use Nora Desmond’s car in his upcoming film. The film was 101 Dalmatians .

“Squib” has meant both a small explosion and a short piece of writing for centuries. Which came first is not known.

In the sense of explosives, it’s been long used in many fields. It’s a common term in entertainment, related to pyrotechnics, and in mining and extraction.

There are a couple that I have shared with the SDMB before:


When I saw the Ark of the Covenant being wheeled into the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, that meant we had the Ark and the Nazis didn’t. No wonder we defeated the Axis Powers in WWII! Like Marcus Brody says in Raiders, “an army which carries the Ark before it is invincible”.


In 28 Days Later, while showing Jim the infected soldier he has chained up to see how long it takes the Infected to starve to death, Major West, the officer leading the soldiers at the fortified manor house, explains that the Infected are unable to speak.

However, earlier in the film, when Jim goes into a gas station’s convenience store, he’s accosted by a small boy who screams, “I HATE YOU!” while furiously attacking him. This is the only character Jim kills besides several of the soldiers at the manor house.

If the Infected can’t speak, that suggested to me that the boy in the gas station wasn’t infected - just scared, alone, and desperate - which means that all the characters Jim killed were un-infected humans; to me, this makes the moral of the story that there are worse things in the world than pathologically-driven hate machines that want to beat and maul you: they are your fellow men that would deceive you with offers of solace and cooperation, but then turn on you and take advantage of you when you are vulnerable.

I thought this was really deep, until I learned from the director’s commentary that the boy’s being able to make a coherent statement was a mistake that got past the editing team; he was just supposed to roar, growl, and snarl unintelligibly like the rest of the Infected.

My theory with that was that after the Second World War, the US gave the ark to Israel, partly explaining its success in wars against its enemies.

No, he got the powers from a formula, the tech box just made the costume go away and come back. At least at first. Then it was kind of stated that the tech box (which wasn’t really a proper box, more like a key fob) and the formula kind of interacted unexpectedly and he’d only have the powers from the formula when the tech was activated and he was in Creeper mode.

What are you saying “No” to.? I never said otherwise.

I’m sorry. Multiple replies there and maybe not sure who I was responding to.

I just came up with one. What do you think?
We can fanwank why the Avengers don’t get made into pudding all of the time. Thor is a god, Spiderman has relative spider strength, Iron Man has inertial dampeners, etc. But what about Black Widow and Hawkeye? Before he was recruited by SHIELD, Hawkeye was Aaron Cross. Who is that, you ask? He was part of the Operation Outcome as documented in The Bourne Legacy.

When you say “don’t get made into pudding,” you mean “don’t get their asses kicked constantly,” correct?

No, I mean get made into goo when an alien hits them in the face with a car.

The rest of the angels cast Clarence into Hell for not building a bell ringing machine when he was on Earth.