Louisiana Pictures...at last!

Photos from my New Years trip (12/30/06 - 1/8/07) down to see some friends from Louisiana, traveling all over the state from Baton Rouge to Lafayette to New Orleans...

The Costs of War Remembered...

Yesterday marked the anniversary of the first atomic bomb dropping on Hiroshima 62 years ago, with the second bomb hitting Nagasaki 3 days later on the 9th of August, 1945. Mitsuyoshi Toge,* a survivor from Hiroshima, left us with the following haunting poetic images of his experience:

How could I ever forget that flash of light!
In a moment, thirty thousand people ceased to be,
The cries of fifty thousand killed
At the bottom of crushing darkness;

Through yellow smoke whirling into light,
Buildings split, bridges collapsed,
Crowded trams burnt as they rolled about
Hiroshima , all full of boundless heaps of embers.
Soon after, skin dangling like rags;
With hands on breasts;
Treading upon the broken brains;
Wearing shreds of burn cloth round their loins;
There came numberless lines of the naked,
all crying.
Bodies on the parade ground, scattered like
jumbled stone images of Jizo;
Crowds in piles by the river banks,
loaded upon rafts fastened to the shore,
Turned by and by into corpses
under the scorching sun;
in the midst of flame
tossing against the evening sky,
Round about the street where mother and
brother were trapped alive under the fallen house
The fire-flood shifted on.
On beds of filth along the Armory floor,
Heaps, and God knew who they were …
Heaps of schoolgirls lying in refuse
Pot-bellied, one-eyed, with half their skin peeled
off bald.
The sun shone, and nothing moved
But the buzzing flies in the metal basins
Reeking with stagnant ordure.
How can I forget that stillness
Prevailing over the city of three hundred thousands?
Amidst that calm,
How can I forget the entreaties
Of departed wife and child
Through their orbs of eyes,
Cutting through our minds and souls?

Let us never cease seeking after the peace that our broken world needs ever so badly.
____________
* "Mitsuyoshi Toge, born in Hiroshima in 1917, was a Catholic and a poet. He was in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped on the city on August 6, 1945, when he was 24 years old. Toge died at the age of thirty-six. His first hand experience of the bomb, his passion for peace, and his realistic insight into the event made him a leading poet in Hiroshima. This poem is from Hiroshima-Nagasaki: A Pictorial Record of the Atomic Destruction (1978)." (www.sojo.net)

Surprise, surprise...Wal-Mart found to be exploiting poor kids in Mexico.

A interesting story comes from Newsweek recently about thousands of unpaid teenage "volunteer" workers in Mexican Wal-Marts:

Wal-Mart is Mexico’s largest private-sector employer in the nation today, with nearly 150,000 local residents on its payroll. An additional 19,000 youngsters between the ages of 14 and 16 work after school in hundreds of Wal-Mart stores, mostly as grocery baggers, throughout Mexico—and none of them receives a red cent in wages or fringe benefits. The company doesn’t try to conceal this practice: its 62 Superama supermarkets display blue signs with white letters that tell shoppers: OUR VOLUNTEER PACKERS COLLECT NO SALARY, ONLY THE GRATUITY THAT YOU GIVE THEM. SUPERAMA THANKS YOU FOR YOUR UNDERSTANDING. The use of unsalaried youths is legal in Mexico because the kids are said to be “volunteering” their services to Wal-Mart and are therefore not subject to the requirements and regulations that would otherwise apply under the country’s labor laws. But some officials south of the U.S. border nonetheless view the practice as regrettable, if not downright exploitative. “These kids should receive a salary,” says Labor Undersecretary Patricia Espinosa Torres. “If you ask me, I don’t think these kids should be working, but there are cultural and social circumstances [in Mexico] rooted in poverty and scarcity.”

Even if Wal-Mart is "going green" and efficient in many good ways, this type of exploitation is still downright despicable.

Colbert and Harry Potter

Rowling reads the opening chapter of Deathly Hallows...

Here's a link to a video of Rowling and fans at midnight BST in London's Natural History Museum, where she read them the entire opening chapter of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, titled "The Dark Lord Ascending." Yes, you can listen to it all right now!

Given this, I decided to download the PDF version of the so called leak, and I must say, this reading matched it almost verbatum, minus 10 words or so. Unfortunately, I haven't seen the "leaked" image files of the book's pages that are out there, so I can't compare it to those. At this point then, it's hard to say whether the entire thing is legit or not. It's already off by a number of words -- several that shouldn't have resulted from a copyist error and also didn't seem likely to have been accidentally skipped over by Rowling in her reading -- which makes me wonder why the mistakes were there. Did this copy not come from the final draft? I'm not reading any more of the PDF version, but I will do some comparison after I pick up my book tonight, though by then I'm sure the full scoop will already be all over the web. Oh well. For now, enjoy Rowling's reading.

One more Rowling Q&A before Deathly Hallows release...

A few more questions were answered by Jo today in a Q&A with children on the BBC show Blue Peter (it was actually recorded back on July 5th)...

Part 1:


Part 2:


Note that she's also doing a midnight reading of the Deathly Hallows at 12:01 BST, which is supposed to be available in streamline format on the British publisher Bloomsbury's website. I'll post a video/audio file if I come across one before midnight EST.

The Deathly Hollows, Alchemy, and the Simpsons

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Well, we're just about a week away from the final Harry Potter book and I'm sure every fan of the series is in a state of frantic anticipation. Here are a few things to hopefully tie you over until the 21st. Let's start with some tantalyzing quotes from Jo Rowling herself.

ROWLING ON THE OCCULT AND CERTAIN CHRISTIANS

First, to dispel the wild idea coming from various Christian and Wiccan corners that suggests these books are seriously intended to encourage and/or will greatly entice children to practice real witchcraft:

"I don’t believe in witchcraft, though I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been told I’m a practicing witch. Ninety – let’s say ninety five percent at least, of the magic in the books in entirely invented by me. And I’ve used things from folklore and I’ve used bits of what people used to believe worked magically just to add a certain flavor, but I’ve always twisted them to suit my own ends. I mean, I’ve taken liberties with folklore, um, to suit my plot.

"Witches and wizards are a huge part of children’s literature. It’ll never go away, I don’t think it will ever, ever, ever go away, 100 years, 200 years time there’ll be another kind of wizard’s story...

"Not once has a child come up to me and said, ‘Due to you, I’ve decided to devote my life to the occult.’ People underestimate children so hugely – they know it’s fiction.

"When people are arguing from that kind of standpoint I don’t think reason works tremendously well. But I would be surprised if some of them had read the books at all."

"Harry Potter and Me," A&E Biography, 13 November 2002.

And one more Jo quote from 2000:

"I don't believe these things and I'm certainly not encouraging any child to take an interest in the occult... In America, I've had practising witches coming up to me and saying thank you. I tell them not to. I don't consider them evil but I don't believe in what they do."

Anne Johnstone, "The hype surrounding the fourth Harry Potter book belies the fact that Joanne Rowling had some of her blackest moments writing it - and that the pressure was self-imposed; a kind of magic," The Herald (Glasgow), 8 July 2000.

ADDRESSING CATHOLIC & THE SO-CALLED PAPAL CONDEMNATION

And for those Catholic that think Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict) actually came out against Harry Potter, I strongly recommend reading the following John Granger article for the full story on those unfortunate and silly events that ensued a couple of summers ago: “Pope Opposes Harry Potter”? Hardly.

Now, on to the fun stuff...

REAL PROOF FROM THE AUTHOR HERSELF THAT ALCHEMY IS KEY TO UNDERSTANDING THE STRUCTURE AND SYMBOLISM OF THE BOOK SERIES:

"I’ve never wanted to be a witch, but an alchemist, now that’s a different matter. To invent this wizard world, I’ve learned a ridiculous amount about alchemy. Perhaps much of it I’ll never use in the books, but I have to know in detail what magic can and cannot do in order to set the parameters and establish the stories’ internal logic."

Anne Simpson, "Face to Face with J K Rowling: Casting a spell over young minds," The Herald, 7 December 1998.

So, just where is this alchemy? Well, the best introduction I've come across to this topic has to be the 2-part essay, "Alchemy and Harry Potter" (click here for part II) by Arianhrod, located over in the Leaky Cauldron's Scribbulus essay archives.

After that, you may want to check out another Granger article, "Alchemy: Jung, Burckhart, or McLean?", as well as anything else found within the "literary alchemy" category on his blog, hogwartsprofessor.com (though not positive, I'm pretty sure Granger was the first to key in on the alchemic influences).

LAST BUT NOT LEAST, VIDEOS GALORE TO KEEP YOU ENTERTAINED

“Hidden Secrets of Harry Potter” A&E show:

The 1st part (of 5, all available on YouTube) from a recent documentary speculating on what will happen in the 7th book:



This second video clip is part 1 (of 2, again, both on YouTube) from a fun British interview of Jo regarding the new book and movie:



"J.K. Rowling" A&E Biography (the title says it all):



Click on here for parts 2, 3, 4, and 5 of this special (all about 9 1/2 minutes long). There are some neat sketchings of her own visions of what certain characters look like at the beginning of the second clip, so you know.

The Simpsons "Wiz Kids" Potter Parody:



And if you liked that one, be sure to also check out these other two Simpsons clips:

"Flanders Reads Harry Potter"
"J.K. Rowling Appears on the Simpsons"

PREDICTIONS ANYBODY?

Let me just close this post with two predictions: (1) sadly, Hagrid will die; (2) trust Snape (he's not as bad as he so often seems to be).

Feel free to share your own speculations and findings.