Overanalysing Harry Potter

... well it’s worked for me once, why not try again?

Overanalysing TV, books, movies etc. is one of my all-time favourite pastimes. I respect that for some people, this is classified as “ruining”, but for me it is a true expression of my own enjoyment of a text. Now, I’m sure you guys will be stunned to hear this, but I’m currently re-reading the Harry Potter series. I’m about a third of the way through the Chamber of Secrets and already my brain is buzzing with some of the big questions. Please keep in mind that I am analysing from an ‘in-universe’ perspective, that is, I am looking for answers in the stories as if they are for real, and making assumptions where there are gaps. I am not suggesting that J.K. Rowling has any flaws whatsoever, because she is a perfect human being.

Why are all Slytherins jerks? I mean I’m not sure that we ever get a fair representation of them, given that we usually see them from Harry’s perspective, and Harry’s first encounter with Slytherins is Draco, who sucks at being a human. Harry then sees all things Slytherin though this lens, and understandably, that house is tainted with a whole lot of bad shit. But there is no real evidence to suggest this perspective is wrong. Even Slughorn, who is mostly harmless, is kind of a dick. He’s cowardly, insensitive, prejudiced against muggleborns in a really dangerously subtle way. And of course there’s Snape, hero, double agent, eternal sufferer; surely he bucks the trend? No, he’s still a douche and besides, Dumbledore himself says that Snape’s good qualities suggest that Hogwarts “sorts too soon”. That is to say, that Snape perhaps never belonged in Slytherin to begin with.

So I propose one of two answers to this conundrum. Either 1. Slytheriness is hereditary or ingrained or 2. Sorting people into Slytherin makes them douches. I’m inclined to go with option 2, because it seems to me that there can’t be four kinds of people in the wizarding world, but segregating children, bringing them up with four limited world views *creates* four kinds of people. I hope that some time in the future, Hogwarts thinks about reviewing the sorting process. I know that houses are a big part of their history, and that tradition is important, but I would suggest that certain dark traits could be gently discouraged and harmony and cooperation better achieved without this archaic practise.

Where the flip does all the food come from? We know that food is the first of the five principal exceptions to Gamp’s law of Elemental Transfiguration. Right? You guys all knew that right? Basically, you can’t make food out of thin air. Other exceptions likely include money or precious stones and other wealth. This makes sense, if you could conjure that shit up, there’d be pretty much no need for economy or education or like… anything. If you could sit around making food and money all day, you’d never leave the house. BUT we do know that you can summon food from elsewhere if you know where it is: we know that House Elf magic can teleport food between say, the kitchens and the Great Hall. You can also make more of it if you’ve got some already. So presumably, if you had to feed 100 people, you could make a couple of yummy dishes and then just multiply them, or make them bigger. But this isn’t my question, my question is, where does that original food come from?

Are there wizard farms? Wizard grocery stores? Wizard farmers’ markets? Would you become a primary producer if you could be an auror instead? Would you farm the land if you could be the Knight Bus inspector? I feel like there are probably speciality food producers, the kind of people who make magic sweets and chocolate frogs and stuff, but who is growing the corn? I guess the answer is probably muggles. While most witches and wizards would not be able to cope with muggle money and muggle shops, there are probably some who are savvy enough to buy from muggle suppliers and then use Geminio or something and sell it all at a hefty profit.

I was having this discussion on facebook and my friend Blake made the rather amusing suggestion that some pure blood families wouldn’t like this idea, and that there are “muggle-free” ranges that can be purchased by those not wanting their food tainted by non-magical hands. I like to think the shop owners would have to be pretty subtle about this, to avoid being condemned as muggle-haters. I bet the labels say things like “mud free” and “pure bread”.

 Can I go to magic school? I mean, no I can’t, because I’m 24 and a muggle, but where do Australian witches and wizards go? Where do all the non-British, non-French, non-criminal wizards go (sorry Drumstrang, but let’s be real). There’s reference to the Salam Witches Institute, but that seems to be for grown-up witches in America and Bill had that Brazilian pen-pal. I just want to knooooow. I bet the Australian school is somewhere in the outback, and the kids get to it on the magical equivalent of a Greyhound bus. I think magical and non-magical Indigenous people lived together in harmony before Europeans came and mucked it all up. The school would be underground maybe, and Quidditch would be played in the dust and the haze. Mail would be delivered by Tawny Frog-Mouths and Care of Magical Creature class would be even more dangerous than at Hogwarts. In short, it would be awesome.

Incidentally, if J.K. ever felt like releasing An Appraisal of MagicalEducation in Europe like she did with Quidditch through the Ages and The Tales of Beedle the Bard I would be all over that shit in a heartbeat. 

Hey you guys guess where today's blogspiration came from...

Why I Voted for Thrift Shop

I first heard Thrift Shop by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis on Triple J a few months ago. Yeah that’s right, I was into it before it was cool, what up. I couldn’t work out what they were saying at first: “pop some what?” it sounded like a drug reference or something. But the sexy sax and ridiculous hook (yeah I know rap terms, come at me!) had me looking it up as soon as I got home.

Boyfriend and I have been singing and dancing to Thrift Shop for months now, bopping along to it in the car, learning the words, getting all excited when it comes on. I don’t listen to commercial radio (well not by choice anyway… hashtag hipster), but I heard it in the post office and giggled because it was uncensored. All these little old ladies in line with their packages trying to ignore it was a sight to behold. In fact, I would go so far as to say it was fucking awesome.

The film clip is hilarious, a piss take on the hip-hop and rap culture of excess with a fun dance break in an op shop, what’s not to love?

Apparently, everything.

A quick look at twitter the day before the countdown revealed tweet after tweet of “if Thrift Shop wins the top spot I’m going to punch something”, “I will pull my own teeth out”, “I will lose all faith in humanity”. When it did win, the feed exploded with people suggesting that the "wrong kind of people" had voted, that "music was dead", that this was the fucking end of days or something. I know twitter is not always an accurate representation of reality, but I couldn’t get over how much hate there was. So I revisited the video.

Yep. Still good, still hilarious. It’s poppy as all hell but the rap is still actually very good. The beat is brilliant. I like a lot of stuff they play on Triple J, but you’ve got to admit not much is as upbeat as Thrift Shop. In fact for a while during the middle of the Hottest 100 I was dangerously close to napping. There’s a lot of quiet, introspective stuff around at the moment. Which isn’t a bad thing, but it’s refreshing to find something so fun. And what’s more, Thrift Shop has a great message. Op shopping is a really great thing to do for charity, for the environment, for your own wardrobe. More and more people do it, and come on hipsters, TELL me you aren’t proud of your thrift shop bargains, isn’t this what we do? Buy cheap ridiculous things and try to pass them off as fashion? I know I do.

If the number one song was something I liked, but a not very “Triple J”-type song, I could understand the backlash. But like I said, I heard it first on the Js and I’m fairly certain they were the first in Australia to play it. Yeah the mainstream stations picked it up pretty quickly, but that’s because it has a broad range of appeal. And besides, why would a popular song *not* win a popularity contest? It’s science! 

The popularity of Thrift Shop has led people to discover other music by Macklemore. Same Love, an anthem in support of same-sex marriage made it to number 15 in the Hottest 100 and is at the top of multiple charts in many countries. Can you even process that? A song about gay marriage, about tolerance and support, about how we shouldn’t say “gay” in youtube comments or call kids “faggot”? That’s what’s topping charts right now. And that’s a bloody good thing. And while the song is great in its own right, I am certain it would not have found as much popularity without riding in the wake of Thrift Shop. And THAT is fucking awesome. 

Top Ten Ways to not Die of Heat this Summer

So unless you’ve been living in an ice-cave for the last few weeks, you know Australia has been experiencing the hottest summer like… ever. Even if you are currently overseas, you’ve heard about it through constant facebook updates like these:

“just walked outside, worst mistake of my life”

“Something smells good. I think my neighbours are cooking something… or it might just be me.”

“Send help”

“omg”

Etc.

Dalby has been having consistently hot days, usually above 35 degrees, with little to no relief overnight. The water coming out of our taps is hot, my car is an oven on wheels now, things are just spontaneously catching fire. 

like that time the sky was on fire

The hottest day we’ve had so far reached 41, it was 37 yesterday. I know, I know, people who live out west are scoffing at that, with their 48-degree weeks. For goodness sake, SYDNEY has had it hotter recently, but I think we can all agree that hot is hot and once it gets above a certain temperature, everything else is gravy. Disgustingly hot, absolutely gross gravy.

So here are my top 10 tips for keeping cool this summer:

10.            Step 1, empty fridge, step 2, get in fridge, step 3, close door.

9.              Create a shirt made from icepacks. For best results, make three and use on a rotating roster.

8.              Wet the bottom of your feet before bed. My feet are always the hottest part of me (bow chicka wow wow) and when it’s so damn hot I can’t sleep, it helps if I wet the soles and put the fan on really high. Is this weird? Is hot feet not a thing? Nothing to see here -move along.

7.              Come visit me in Dalby. I have air-conditioning in my lounge room. Sure, it’s a long drive just for air-conditioning but you’re getting me as well. What a bargain.

6.              Have an ice bath. Not just a trend amongst the medical profession in Victorian England, ice baths are now a fashionable way to stay cool whilst treating maladies such as “crooked backs”,  “sickly dispositions” and “tuberculosis”.

5.              Befriend a person with a pool. You may have to perform sexual favours but isn’t it worth it? Isn’t it?

4.              Move to England. Didn’t you see they had snow the other day? They also think 28 degrees is a heat wave. Bless.

3.              Get a cushy office job with air-conditioning. Most dedicated employee ever.

2.              Don’t do anything. Ever. Never leave the house. It’s better this way. What’s outside anyway? Only death. Not worth it.

1.              Be this guy:

Source

Floodiversary

Tuesday, the 11^th of January 2011 felt like just a normal Tuesday. Sure, I had to wear gumboots to work *again* but that wasn’t so strange, given I’d done so almost every day through December. It was a particularly rainy Summer, which was frustrating, but no one seemed to think it was weird. On Tuesday the 11^th I walked across New Farm Park to my work at the Powerhouse, sloshing through puddles, hoping that our regular Tuesday meeting wouldn’t be too boring. I don’t remember if we ever had that meeting, because Tuesday the 11^th of January, 2011 was the day Brisbane started filling with water.

I don’t remember how we first heard about the flood, but I do remember that work basically stopped happening after we did. I brought up news sites and twitter feeds and sat glued to them for about 20 minutes. Then we made the decision to move all the lighting and sound equipment up from the lower levels. I ran around with everyone else, moving equipment in an impractical dress. At some point my mum called. To be honest at this point I hadn’t really thought about my family home. My workplace and house were in New Farm, I was confronted with the issues in front of me, and I had no clue about the ones that were to come.

Mum and Dad were frantically driving back from a holiday in New South Wales, a holiday cut short by literally hundreds of phone calls from friends, worrying about my parents’ home in Sherwood. Mum asked me if I could go across town to rescue their dog from a kennel, the staff there weren’t sure if they could get all the animals to higher ground (spoiler: he was rescued, it was fine). I think that’s when I first started panicking. Later I found out that my response to mum, that unfortunately I couldn’t because I was needed at work, and my housemate and I were desperately trying to work out whether or not we were going to evacuate, was when mum started properly panicking too.

I ran home across the sodden park in my dress and gumboots. One of my housemates was overseas, but my other housemate and I sat on our lounge room floor and tried to make a plan. We still didn’t really believe it was all that bad, but we were worried about her car, and about what would happen if we got stranded. So I put my birth certificate and some other prized possessions on top of a bookshelf, we packed up a bunch of our food and clothes, and went to our friend’s house in Bardon.

Some parts of that week are completely etched into my brain, and other parts are a big blur.

Blur:

1.     How long we stayed, it was almost a week I think?

2.     What we filled the long hours with?

3.     Did we even talk about anything other than floods?

4.     Why did we think it was ok to go to that party in the middle of the week? That was weird. I had a panic attack.

Etched:

1.     Going for a walk near a swollen creek and being convinced that the guy randomly standing on it was going to get sucked under and die in front of me.

2.     Watching press conference after press conference featuring Anna Bligh

3.     People coming to visit us like we were some kind of flood coping epicentre.

4.     Twitter

5.     The phone call from my mum on the Wednesday.

You know how in movies, people sink into chairs after receiving bad news? Even as I was doing it I was conscious of how dramatic I must have looked, sinking into a chair. I’d last spoken to mum on Tuesday afternoon, there was water in their backyard and they were evacuating. I thought they were going to get water in the bottom storey, an area largely devoted to concrete, storage and washing machines. But on Wednesday morning my mum said she’d gone down at 5am and the water had reached the top floor, and it hadn’t peaked yet. The next day it got to about waist height on the top floor.

I don’t know why I hadn’t thought this could happen. Even while watching other houses go under on the news, even though the area had gone under in 1974, even though I knew they had evacuated, I still somehow thought that it’d get a bit wet under their house and we could all move on. But no, actually this happened:

The water reaches the top story (the house is on a hill sloping backwards)

The water is slightly lower than it's highest point here

  

Our house in New Farm was unscathed, though we didn’t have power for more than a week. I went back at some stage, to get some things and to throw out the food we’d left behind. The whole suburb stank of rotting food, thrown into skips left around by the council.

We joined the clean up in Sherwood on Saturday. Me, my housemate Samara, our evacuee saviour Mim, my boyfriend Jeremy and our friend Chris. We couldn’t get there any earlier, and it took us more than an hour and a half to drive from Bardon to Sherwood. It was hot, it was stinky, but in some ways it was fun. Production lines of volunteers tried to remove the actual sewerage from the yard, walls were ripped out, photos were salvaged. I had to keep doing things; otherwise I think I would have cried. Everything was grey, muddy, it looked like a war zone instead of a suburban street. There was a pumpkin in my parents’ yard. A pumpkin. There was a metal barrel stuck in a tree next door.

Who needs walls anyway, right?

Clean up in the back yard

It’s the 13^th January 2013 today. It’s been two years and two days since the flood came, two years and one day since I dramatically sunk into a chair, two years to the day since the flood peaked. My parents have rebuilt, have repainted and returfed. They have replaced the things they lost, and are in many ways I think stronger for what happened. Sometimes I almost forget it happened, and other times I see a photo of floods and get all weepy. I know that we had it lucky, no one died or was seriously injured, the house is in a nice area and lots of people came to help and clean and be supportive.

I know that in poorer suburbs and towns, people felt neglected, felt forgotten and abandoned, and that this isn’t fair. But the flood was the hardest thing I’ve had to cope with in my short life and was one of the biggest things my family has ever gone through together. I guess I just wanted to tell you about it, because it’s kind of the anniversary, and I’ve never really spoken about it on my blog before. You can’t take much from this story except “well floods are shit” but I am glad you’re here, reading my blog, and I hope you stick around into the very exciting year that is 2013. I promise it won’t be this serious too often.