prillalar | The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things.

HP: The bit of the JKR interview I found most interesting was the question about pre-Hogwarts schooling: wizard children can either go to Muggle primary schools or be taught at home, as the Weasleys were. How would sending your kids to Muggle school work? How do you keep a child of five or six from talking about magic? Or do they just assume that nobody will believe the kid if he does?

Stargate: I watched Inauguration. My total reaction: meh. I've been holding off watching Lost City until I have both parts. Cause I hate waiting for part two.

Jeremiah: I finished up the S1 DVDs. The downloading of S2 must commence soon! I found that at about disc 4 I started to get much more into it and now I'm a hopeless adoring fan where I was a cautious fan before. I'm shipping Jeremiah/Kurdy but I must note in passing that Markus has a very pretty mouth and I had to watch the "Markus gets drunk" scene twice. Seems like there should be some drunken slash there, doesn't it? Also: Ezekiel is my boyfriend. Of course. *sigh*

Gundam Wing: I watched Endless Waltz again last night, this time the movie version, which seemed to have some extra bits in the middle. I think Duo had more lines than Heero, Trowa, and Wufei all put together. Duo certainly is growing on me, though he will never (never!) supplant Wufei in my affections.

Movies: I was thwarted in my attempt to see Triplets of Belleville yesterday. Today I saw The Station Agent, which I enjoyed a lot. Dear god, Peter Dinklage has a nice voice.

Books: Recently, I tried to read a book on deconstruction. It made my brain hurt. So I got out the next thing on my stack instead: The Golden Ratio by Mario Livio. It's all about the number phi, which is quite unusual.

If you take a line AB and divide it at C so that the ratio of AB to AC is the same as the ratio of AC to CB, then the line has been cut in the Golden Ratio, phi. I'm not a math geek, by the way, but the book has been written for the layperson so I followed things OK.

There's a lot of interesting stuff about how phi (and Fibonacci numbers, which are related) are found in various places in nature. And I thought there was going to be other interesting stuff about where it could be found in art, etc, but it turns out that those reports are greatly exaggerated, so most of that part of the book was debunking. (For example, there's no evidence that the Golden Ratio was used in the construction of the Great Pyramid.) Which isn't as interesting.

There was one bit about the Platonic solids, which are five regular polyhedra whose properties I won't go into. But I looked at the diagram and lo! they were dice: d4, d6, d8, d12, and d20. (Sorry, d10!) So a bit of gamer geekery there.

I do plan to get back to deconstruction at some point.

Beer: I like beer.

I haven't been doing any writing, though I should do a bit tonight. I've been feeling like my input/output ratio was a bit unbalanced, so I'm trying to take in more media of various sorts. Hopefully that will give me new ideas and help me to focus more.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I figure that Muggle schooling would only be for Muggle-borns (duh) or halfbloods, who have one foot in both worlds to begin with. For one thing, given how hopeless the Weasleys are with the most basic details of Muggle life, I can't imagine a wizard or witch being able to successfully register their son or daughter for Muggle school without a Muggle's assistance.

I think you're right, though it's possible there are a couple of pureblood families who make a point of it as well. Muggle immersion, like French immersion, so the kids will learn how to pass.

I can see a witch or wizard with a Muggle spouse and living among Muggle neighbors concealing most magic from his or her kids until they're old enough not to blurt out every damn thing they hear or see.

Like Seamus. That makes sense. This seems like a really interesting thing to explore. Really, it's the day-to-day stuff of the wizarding world that I find most interesting, not the epic Harry vs Voldemort stuff.

I think you're right, though it's possible there are a couple of pureblood families who make a point of it as well. Muggle immersion, like French immersion, so the kids will learn how to pass.

Can't see that myself. Look at how even the "good" wizards treat Muggles: Arthur Weasley seems to view them as clever savages, and collecting their technology is a hobby like collecting fossils; and Tonks&151;one witch who really ought to know better—seems to find Privet Drive a curiousity and generalizes her father to the entire Muggle world. Unless the child is a Squib and the parents are fairly enlightened, I don't imagine they'd have any any reason to want their kids to "pass" among Muggles.

Really, it's the day-to-day stuff of the wizarding world that I find most interesting, not the epic Harry vs Voldemort stuff.

That's how we know the world of the books is good; when we really, really care about the small stuff. :-)

Unless the child is a Squib and the parents are fairly enlightened, I don't imagine they'd have any any reason to want their kids to "pass" among Muggles.

I certainly don't have any textual evidence, but I can imagine a pureblood wizarding family so paranoid about other wizards (long history of feuding with another family?) that they would like to be able to hide. Or that fear the destruction of the wizarding world by Voldemort or similar and want to be prepared for a new way of life. Or are just highly eccentric. So, not very likely, but it could happen. :)

I'm a little unclear on the definition of pureblood anyhow. Sometimes it seems to mean old wizarding families, like the Blacks. But other times, simply someone whose parents are both wizards, like Harry, whose mother was Muggle-born.

I'm a little unclear on the definition of pureblood anyhow. Sometimes it seems to mean old wizarding families, like the Blacks. But other times, simply someone whose parents are both wizards, like Harry, whose mother was Muggle-born.

Actually, Dumbeldore refers to Harry as a half-blood in OotP. So the only criteria can't be that both parents are magical.*

JKR hasn't given us very good clues about the definition, tho. We know that certain families count as purebloods: the Weasleys, the Malfoys, the Blacks, the Longbottoms and the Crouches come to him. We know that Harry, whose mother was Muggle-born, and Seamus, whose father was a Muggle, are halfbloods. When Ernie Macmillan thinks Harry's going to sic a basilisk on him in CoS, he insists his family is magical unto nine generations, apparently to confirm his "pureblood" status. I believe it's sort of implied that the Diggories are purebloods, and Krum has to be to attend Durmstrang—but Hagrid says in GoF that Harry winning the tournament would prove that "you don't have to be pureblood to do it," with the odd implication that Fleur the quarter-Veela is also classified as "pureblood," but that Hagrid the half-giant is not. Then again, even racists have their preferences: it's more acceptable in the US for a white person to date or marry an Asian or Latino than a black, so perhaps there's an analogy there among wizards.

Of course, in all truth most words don't have precise and carefuly definitions, especially a word that seems to carry as much social and cultural baggage in wizarding society as "pureblood." It's easier to talk about connotations than denotations: a pureblood wizard has a long and uninterrupted magical heritage, and if it's not entirely human, it's at least an acceptable sort of non-human. No limits on how far back the bloodline has to go, but certainly the longer the better; still, so far we haven't heard any purer-than-thou posturing going on. Further, a pureblood witch or wizard is assumed to belong to a certain social and political set, with certain (conservative) values, which helps explain the low standing of the Weasleys.

*It's not possible to have two wizard parents without magical assistance. Normally one of them has to be a witch. ;-)

Actually, Dumbeldore refers to Harry as a half-blood in OotP.

D'oh! You're right. I think I was remembering Harry and Draco's conversation in Madam Malkin's, where Draco asks if Harry's parents were "our sort".

There's this whole muddle between half-blood and Muggle-born. Especially since in PoA it's only the Muggle-born who are targeted by the Heir -- it makes it seem as though he's just fine with the half-bloods. Though I suppose he could have got on to the other half-bloods once the Muggle-born were wiped out.

but Hagrid says in GoF that Harry winning the tournament would prove that "you don't have to be pureblood to do it," with the odd implication that Fleur the quarter-Veela is also classified as "pureblood," but that Hagrid the half-giant is not.

I wouldn't go by Hagrid's implications on anything, though. After all, he did say There's not a single witch or wizard who went bad who wasn't in Slytherin. Which would imply Sirius Black was a Slytherin. (How I wish he were!)

I wonder how the wizards (and witches :P) in other countries feel about this sort of thing.

Well, I think Hagrid does a good job representing what the "wizard on the street" would think about most things, regardless of strict accuracy, and his inclusion of Fleur in the pureblood category seems to indicate a double (triple? Poly?) standard for wizards and witches of non-human descent.

I imagine that attitudes are much the same in other Western countries--I can imagine a New England wizarding family bragging about their "WASP" background and meaning "white Anglo-Saxon pureblood."

The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things.

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