Letters From Home

Warning:  Possible spoilers ahead, don’t read if you don’t want to speculate

So, as is my custom before a new Harry Potter book comes out, I’ve been re-reading the previous books, refreshing my memory.  I just finished Half-Blood Prince this morning and spotted a clue that was hiding in plain sight.  So I thought I’d make a record of other things I spotted, and wait and see if any of them will be significant in the last book.

Clues:
When Dumbledore questions Harry after his battle with Voldemort in Goblet of Fire and Harry tells him about Voldemort’s using Harry’s blood to revive himself, “For a fleeting instant, Harry thought he saw a gleam of something like triumph in Dumbledore’s eyes.”

Sirius Black’s brother Regulus “was murdered by Voldemort. Or on Voldemort’s orders” according to Sirius in Order of the Phoenix.  Regulus had been a Death Eater and tried to get out.

While cleaning out the glass-fronted cupboards in Order of the Phoenix, they find “a heavy locket that none of them could open.”

The note that falls out of the fake Horcrux in Half-Blood Prince is signed with the initials “RAB.”

Hagrid reports in Half-Blood Prince that he overheard Snape and Dumbledore having a bitter argument over something that Snape did not want to do and Dumbledore insists Snape has to do anyway.

Just before Snape sends the Avada Kedavra curse at Dumbledore, Dumbledore is telling Draco Malfoy “He cannot kill you if you are already dead.  Come over to the other side, Draco, and we can hide you more completely than you can possibly imagine.  What is more, I can send members of the Order to your mother tonight to hide her likewise.”

Snape screams “DON’T CALL ME COWARD” and “his face was suddenly demented, inhuman, as though he was in as much pain as the yelping, howling dog stuck in the burning house behind them.”

Oddities:
In Goblet of Fire, Dumbledore says that when a wand meets its brother, one will force the other to “regurgitate spells it has performed, in reverse.”  But Harry’s father emerges from the wand battle before his mother does.

Why didn’t Madam Pomfrey (or Harry, or anyone else) ask Fawkes to shed tears on Bill Weasley’s face in Half-Blood Prince?

What exactly was the archway that Sirius was thrown through by Bellatrix Lestrange in Order of the Phoenix?

If you enjoy my posts, I hope you'll sign up for my

Submit this post to:

Hide Sites

This week’s library book is Bruce Dern’s memoir Things I’ve Said, But Probably  Shouldn’t Have.  I’ve been a fan of Bruce Dern’s for ages, even though the years when it looked like casting directors were looking at scripts and saying “Whoo boy, this guy’s nuts–see if Bruce Dern is available.”

He made a pretty good career out of playing wackos and nut jobs, but two of my favorite films are “Support Your Local Sheriff” and “Middle Age Crazy” where he actually gets to be funny.  And he’s just as good at comedy as he is at being nuts.

The book is a stream-of-consciousness kind of thing.  He uses a lot of personal terminology that I sometimes find hard to figure out.  He’s obviously intensely devoted to his craft.  He’s known a lot of equally interesting people in his lifetime and sometimes I found myself wishing he’d talk a bit more about them. But it was the story of his life, after all.

One of the chapters I was most interested in was devoted to the movie “Tattoo.”  Now, that movie has a lot of strikes against it.  The plot is pretty sick.  The tattoo sequences wouldn’t pass muster with anyone who’d ever set foot inside a tattoo parlor and watched for more than, oh, 30 seconds.  The ending is absolutely, positively, anatomically impossible (don’t take my word for it, rent it and see for yourself).  Dern’s character is even more psycho than most, and Maud Adams is gorgeous but she’s not much of an actress.

But ohhhh…  the sequence near the end where you have two fully inked people making love…  my god.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything more erotic than that.  I sat through the whole sick rest of it multiple times (in the days before personal movie players) just to see that scene.  And that was many, many years before I got my own first tattoo.

Dern is candid about what did and didn’t happen when they were filming that scene (including the fact that he and Maud Adams had to walk around naked on the set for days on end because putting on robes would smear the painted-on tattoos).   After reading what he had to say about it…  I think I’ll put it on my Netflix queue and just fast forward to the end.

If you enjoy my posts, I hope you'll sign up for my

Submit this post to:

Hide Sites

We lived in Wichita, Kansas, from 1974 to 1984.

The killer who came to be known as BTK claimed his first victims before we moved to Wichita and had gone into a dormant period by the time we left.

Since his capture, I’ve been reading books and watching TV shows about him.  I think it’s my way of trying to go back in time and reassure the myself-that-was, that I was going to make it through.

It’s impossible to describe how profoundly frightened I was during our years in Wichita.  I was a young woman who was often alone.  For a while I worked nights on the WSU campus, where BTK was known to make copies of the letters he wrote.  Later on I was the full-time parent of two small children and was home alone with them all day.   I had no car during the daytime, no money, and no place to go other than the public library.

Where, of course, BTK was leaving letters.   I probably saw him there.  Thank goodness I didn’t attract his attention.  As far as I know.  Apparently he stalked many women whom he eventually left alone.

We finally made it out of Wichita, only to arrive in Los Angeles during the middle of the Night Stalker’s killing spree.  It seemed like our “promised land” wasn’t such a great place after all.

Nearly 20 years later, I put “BTK” into a Google search and was astonished to find that he’d never been caught.  I thought perhaps they’d finally found him but the news hadn’t made its way to LA.  Like many, when I saw that he was still out there somewhere, I figured he’d probably died or moved somewhere else.  When BTK hit the national news a few years later I watched with great interest.  I felt a profound sense of relief when Dennis Rader was finally caught, even though I hadn’t set foot anywhere near Wichita since the day we left it.

Now it seems I can’t seem to stop re-living those days.  I want to find out what was going on that the entire town didn’t know about.  It wasn’t till I read Unholy Messenger that I found out that Dennis Rader neither knew nor cared that he was scaring the bejeezus out of an entire city.   Nor that he ruined so many people’s lives.  I watched “48 Hours: Hard Evidence” the other night and my heart broke for poor Steve Relford, who can’t help thinking he was responsible for what happened to his mother because he opened the door.  He was only five years old.

Steve’s house was half a block from the grocery store we always shopped at.

There’s another BTK book coming out, written by the reporters at the newspaper in cooperation with the police and some of the victims’ families.  I wonder what it will add to the other books, articles, web sites, and so on.  I probably won’t buy it.  But I’ll keep my eye out for a copy at the public library.

Maybe it’ll  help me work this all out.  I hope so.

If you enjoy my posts, I hope you'll sign up for my

Submit this post to:

Hide Sites

I’ve often said that I wish there were some kind of cosmic law that mandated that everyone in the world spend one full year being dirt poor with no outside resources (assuming that they weren’t already living under those conditions, of course). It would take place at whatever age would make the deepest impression on the individual.

That might cut down on the number of Paris Hiltons in the world. Spend enough time to see how life works when your parents can’t buy you out of everything (or buy you everything, either) and maybe, just maybe, you’ll get a bit of real life perspective.

I must admit I felt a bit sorry for her when she got yanked out of her house and hauled to court in handcuffs. That must have truly felt like the end of the world. She had absolutely no resources to prepare her for something like that. She’d always had people to take care of life’s little ickies for her before.

But then again, when the snide remarks were made about her while she was sitting in the audience at the music awards show must have really hurt, too–and the snide laughter at her expense. Bet she never really had a clue how people outside her own circle of suck-ups felt about her before. Well, she knows now.

The fact that people in general are sick and tired of rich people getting away with just about everything probably played a part in the judge’s decision to say “Serve the time.” Maybe he was overly harsh on her. But then again, if any ordinary Jane Doe had done all the stupid things Paris Hilton did while she was on probation (let alone the stupid things she did to get probation in the first place), Ordinary Jane Doe would have had her fanny in the slammer ASAP. Maybe Ordinary Jane Doe would have gotten released after a few days and sent home with an ankle bracelet (apparently this is quite common in the overcrowded LA jail system) but I doubt she’d have gone in with any expectation that she’d get off so easy.

I know people who did dumb things and got arrested and had to deal with the consequences all on their own. I also know that those people’s lives were changed for the better because of it. Get smacked in the face with reality… yeah, it works.

Now, about that cosmic law….

If you enjoy my posts, I hope you'll sign up for my

Submit this post to:

Hide Sites

I was in 8th grade on November 22, 1963.  Like most people who are old enough to remember that day, I can recall most of the hours surrounding 1pm Central time with near photographic clarity.

I was watching TV when they were going to transfer Oswald and had just assured my mother that I would turn the TV off when it was over, when there was a bang and a yell.  I thought Oswald had tried to escape.

In the years since then I have read many books about the Kennedy assassination and watched many documentaries.  Have I made up my own mind about what happened?  Not a chance.

Vincent Bugliosi, whose books I have read and whose opinions I generally respect, has just come out with a monster book called Reclaiming History, that lays out the clearest and  best documented case for the Oswald-as-lone-nut theory.  Of course, Bugliosi had to go through all the Warren Commission volumes while preparing his “prosecution” of Oswald for a BBC documentary years ago, so he obviously knows his stuff in that regard.

I plowed my way through that book last week.  I’m a fast reader, but I must admit I didn’t manage to read every single word of it.   Still, though, I was impressed by his logic.

However…  I have also read Murder In Dealey Plaza, which lays out the most thorough and non-hysterical case I’ve seen for the assassination-as-conspiracy point of view.   While Bugliosi came up with plausible explanations for a lot of the conspiracy-theorists’ questions, he didn’t answer them all.

All of which leaves me pretty well where I was before.  I doubt we’ll ever get a definitive answer.  But the books still make entertaining reading.

If you enjoy my posts, I hope you'll sign up for my

Submit this post to:

Hide Sites