Haven’t We Been Here Before?
Headlines last week read “Vatican Condemns Twilight.” If that sounds familiar to Potter readers, it is the echo of the virtual reality experience we had in 2005 when Star Chamber Catholics in Canada created the “Pope Condemns Harry Potter” controversy on the eve of Order of the Phoenix‘ publication. That was pretty silly, because the Pope didn’t do anything of the sort. This report turns out to be the real deal. I’ve written about it over at

Guest Post: Thoughts on Snape and Horcruxes
Friends at Scribbulus sent me this exchange, which, to use the language of the Pontifical Council on Culture about Twilight, certainly borders on the “excessively esoteric.” The dialogue, however, stretches the conversation about Horcruxes in a direction I wouldn’t have taken and thought you might find interesting. I especially enjoyed the aside about Severus Snape. For your comments and corrections, then, a dialogue between ‘Rotfang’ and ‘Caltheus:’ ——————————————————

Anybody Know This Guy?
Speaker Relates Harry Potter to Contemporary Issues (H/T to David G!)

Percy Jackson Meets Harry Potter?
The LA Times suggests in an article, Is Percy Jackson’s mythology too close to Harry Potter’s magic?, that Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series is necessarily derivative of our favorite boy wizard. That seems likely; I mean, how could anyone living in in the wake of Potter-mania write a coming-of-age story about a boy learning he has mythic parentage previously unknown to him and not make readers and movie goers think of Harry and Hogwarts? When Percy is assigned to Camp Half-Blood, the reading world has associations with “Percy”

‘The Road to Hogwarts Sweepstakes’
“Register before 8 December for a chance to win a trip to the Grand Opening of the Potter Park in Orlando!” Anyone want to write a Kafka-esque fan fiction piece in which Mad-Eye Moody visits the Wonderful World of Hogwarts theme park to find a rogue Death Eater in hiding? Please forward it to me here or even just a tease for our amusement here in a break from serious reading. Who out there is going to the Grand Opening? Why?