Nola.com: NewsFlash - Parts of New Orleans to open next week: “NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Mayor Ray Nagin announced Thursday that large sections of the city will reopen next week, and the historic French Quarter the week after that. ‘The city of New Orleans will start to breathe again,’ he said.”
Laissez les bontemps roulez!
HBP Chapter 20 re-read
Lord Voldemort’s Request
The low comedy with Professor Trelawney is very enjoyable and once again JKR makes sure that the reader remembers that she and Firenze are still at the school – a bit of business that could easily have been omitted except that it will be important in book seven. I thought it was funny when she tripped over her shawl.
Dumbledore’s attitude towards Divination interests me: causes “much more trouble than I could have foreseen” 
“never having studied it myself.” A bit surprising that Dd, who is such a polymath, never studied the subject at all. His basic attitude seems to be that it’s all hokum, except when it isn’t.
As I reread the passage with Dd reprimanding Harry for his lame efforts to get the memory from Slughorn, I felt myself feeling a bit sorry for Harry. After all, Dumbledore is the adult, and Slughorn is his peer (and employee). Shouldn’t it really be Dd’s responsibility? Especially since it turns out later in the book that underneath it all Dd’s real motivation is that he thinks Harry is the person best situated to emotionally manipulate Slughorn into revealing the memory. Seeing an adult pressure a minor into manipulating another adult is not especially edifying … it underlines the depth of Dd’s desperation. Not something he would do unless the need was so great.
Tom Riddle’s visit to Dd’s office is a great scene and very thought provoking. I was struck by the similarity between Harry and Riddle, both more attached to Hogwarts than any other place, their home, where they’ve both been happiest. I’m not quite sure how, but it seems sure to me that The Final Confrontation will take place on the grounds of Hogwarts.
Wonder what special powers Holga Hufflepuff’s mug has. Presumably have something to do with the Hufflepuffian qualities of friendship, loyalty, and so on (what else?)
We know a bit more about the powers of Slytherin’s locket – whatever they are, they don’t include anything to do with giving the wearer health or financial well-being, since its last owners, the Gaunts, were notably unhealthy and poor. Perhaps it enhanced Merope’s powers of persuasion and enchantment…
Dd seems to have done an awful lot of tracking down witnesses and extracting memories. That seems to be par for the course for a high-class wizard – similarly, Voldemort spends much of his time running around creating false memories. This “memory modification” mode of high wizardry does leave some room for RAB at the end of the book to be someone who has been present all along, but skillfully hiding his presence. Harry doesn’t seem to be especially good at this stuff … he will have to rely on other techniques to get the crucial 411 about the Horcruxes in book seven.
The convo bwn Riddle and Dd is classic. Riddle’s “smeared” appearance is chilling. Dd is great at telling people off in a calm cool and collected manner. I wish I could have that presence of mind when I am in such situations!
At the end where Dd asks V’s purpose, we never get a straight answer.
The existence of a jinx against the DADA position is , in my mind, proven by Dd’s comment at the end of the chapter that the subsequent history of the DADA post “proves” that Riddle was after the DADA job.
So, yes, V wanted the DADA post … but why, exactly? His followers now seem to regard the discipline as a joke. Yes, it’s a good recruiting post, but is there anything more to it? Is it possible that the person who is teaching DADA at Hogwarts has any special magical privileges while within the bounds of Hogwarts?
Buried inside the science news, this is a very important story. If we can make it through the “sustainability transition,” there is hope that someday our habitat can be larger than our one very finite planet.
Ceres: The new water planet?: South Florida Sun-Sentinel: “Ceres: The new water planet?Guy Gugliotta
The Washington PostFor years astronomers have tried to look closely at Ceres, the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt, a nearly opaque target so featureless that scientists could not even be sure of its shape.
But with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope, a team of researchers obtained enough images in enough detail to determine that Ceres is quite likely a “mini-planet” with enough gravity to make it almost spherical, and suggesting that, like Earth, it may have different layers, including a mantle composed mostly of water ice. The research was reported last week in the journal Nature.
Using Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, the team tracked Ceres through its full nine-hour rotation, and with 700 pixels in each image were able to follow a “bright spot” as it moved around the asteroid, enabling them to determine its polar and equatorial axes.
Team member Lucy McFadden of the University of Maryland said scientists had thought that Ceres was homogeneous in composition because of its smooth surface and its low-density surface crust.
‘But it was too round,” McFadden said in a telephone interview. If it had been homogeneous, she said, centrifugal forces would have collapsed the light-density material into a more ‘oblate” shape — flatter on top, swollen in the middle.
There’s something that’s keeping it from collapsing on itself,” McFadden said, and the likeliest suspect is water ice, which expands when it freezes. If that is so, Ceres — only 580 miles in diameter — may have more fresh water on it than Earth.
