Saturday 18 May 2002

Pic of the day: Visiting Harry Potter. (Harry Potter head and Hogwarts school uniform downloaded from The Hidden Tower. At least I think this is that uniform. I may download the appropriate furniture later, there is just truckloads of Harry Potter goodies at that site.)

Potter revisited

Two days off from work, and my arm is not improving. Rather the opposite. I tried to write some fiction today, but had to give it up after half a page. My arm even hurts when I sit reading. As long as I don't consciously unclench, it seems to have its own agenda. Oh well. Habits die hard.

Yes, I read a book. Actually i reread the first Harry Potter book (Philosopher's Stone, as it is called in Europe). I wanted to check against the movie I had seen the other night. And in particular I wanted to see whether the broomstick instructor had really been described in the book as such a hottie. (I think that is the American word for it. My spelling checker seems to disagree.) I find my suspicion confirmed: The book refer to her as Madam Hooch and yes, she has short gray hair. There is no hint that she would be younger and prettier than the other teachers. (Of course, Harry would hardly notice – she's still way above his age, and at eleven he has clearly not taken much interest in female beauty yet. This changes over the next few books. Perhaps I will have to read them too, to see if there is any clue. But I suspect there is not – I think they made this up. Or perhaps they asked the author, I understand she was slightly involved with the movie.)

I certainly don't remember the Harry Potter books by heart, and the initials HP still reads as "Hewlett Packard" in my mind. I don't write fan-fiction, and gave up reading it pretty soon too. It did not enrich the experience, but dilute it.

***

I may have mentioned this before, but it is slightly ironic that I wrote a couple of stories myself about young boys who came to magickal schools in isolated stone castles, and had various adventures. It's not exactly a crowded genre, and if I had done this now it would seem like a Harry Potter rip-off. But I wrote this before those books were released. Quite possibly before they were written, or even at the same time. I worry sometimes that there are forces larger than us, using us as nodes in a network of distributed processing. It is just too often that people come up with my ideas, or I with theirs. Not identical, but suspiciously similar. Oh well. I guess it is just the fact that we are exposed to the same influences.