Remember, remember, the 5th of November,

Gunpowder, treason and plot.

I see no reason

Why gunpowder treason

Should ever be forgot.

Today marks a not infrequent coincidence of the first Tuesday in November, the American election day, and ‘Guy Fawkes Night‘ or ‘Bonfire Night’ in the UK.

This year’s simultaneous observation of civic duty to vote in one country with the public observance of fidelity to the Crown (and derision of treason) in another, though, seems laden with meaning, a trope I suspect that many others have written about ‘Over There’ (as few here in the States know about Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot).

Those that do know about it here may have first heard about it in the opening chapters of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, in which a teevee weatherman assumes that the fireworks the Wizarding World are setting off to celebrate the disappearance and seeming death of the Dark Lord are actually Muggles who have confused the date of Bonfire Night. My bet is that those who know about Guy Fawkes and the Fifth of November remember it from the 2005 dystopian film V is for Vendetta.

An anonymous writer, ‘A Midwestern Doctor,’ who posts his (or her) thoughts on ‘The Forgotten Side of Medicine,’ connected the three dots of the Presidential election, Guy Fawkes Night, and V is for Vendetta today in a post titled, ‘I Would Like to Take This Day to Honor a Masterpiece.’ Her (or his) understanding of the film as a kind of prophetic warning about the Covid years and the totalitarian over-reach we are experiencing today under the present oligarchy, not to mention the idea that Donald Trump’s campaign and his ardent followers represent the last best hope to subvert this oligarchy, make the piece well worth your time.

Enjoy this Fifth of November, be it in the UK or US, and let us hope that those committing treason or who are guilty of that crime for a generation will be held accountable to a popular revolt at the ballot boxes rather than fire in the capital and violence elsewhere. Lord, have mercy.

Hope springs eternal in the Potter Movie Fandom’s breast.

Well, no, this isn’t a trailer for the teevee adaptation. It’s an Artificial Intelligence generated fan parody of sexploitation films, borderline pornographic movie trailers that are nothing but cleavage and swarthy men, and, yes, the Potter film franchise.

As funny as that may (or may not be) to some, the ‘All Women Cast!’ parody film short does raise the question of how much Rowling’s feminist beliefs will be fore-staged and highlighted in this new version of the Hogwarts Saga. Imagine if, a la Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers, the series were really really abut ‘Harriet Potter,’ a true gothic heroine?

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Chapter Two: The Vanishing Glass

1. How much time had passed from the Dursleys finding Harry on their doorstep, and the present day?
2. What special day did Harry realize he’d woken up to?
3. What color is Dudley’s hair that made him look, to Harry, like a pig in a wig?
4. True/False: Dudley thought received only thirty-six presents for his birthday, but then is shown a thirty-seventh that slightly pacifies him.
5. What did Mrs. Figg, their old neighbor who usually baby-sat Harry, do that allowed Harry to come to the zoo with the Dursleys?
6. Mr. Dursley’s complaints while driving reminded Harry of a dream he had had about what?
7. At the zoo restaurant, Dudley had a tantrum because his knickerbocker glory lacked enough what on top?
8. What kind of snake does Harry begin to talk to in the reptile house?
9. True/False: Dudley punched Harry while trying to look at the snake, causing him to make the glass of the cage vanish, and then reappear after Dudley had fallen in and the snake escaped.
10. What is the only thing Harry can remember seeing when he thinks of the time his parents died?

For Your Reflection: The word ‘glass’ is an archaic English word for ‘mirror’. How does Harry’s misadventure with the ‘glass’ and snake at the story’s beginning parallel or reflect, inversely, his trial in front of the mirror at the story’s finish?

Answers: 1. (Nearly) 10 years( 18); 2. Dudley’s birthday (19); 3. Blonde (21); 4. True (21); 5. Broke her leg (22); 6. A flying motorcycle (25); 7. Ice cream (26); 8. A boa constrictor (28); 9. False: he only made the glass disappear (28); 10. A blinding flash of green light (29).

Please, Can We Just Stop The ‘Harry Potter’ TV Series Now?

There is no greater demonstration that the global effort — especially by the leaders of Harry Potter fandom — to cancel and forever defenestrate J. K. Rowling in the Trans Panic Years has failed than the HBO+-Bronte Studios adaptation of the Hogwarts Saga for television. Their Confundus Charm (curse?) has all but lifted and the world is recognizing at last that Rowling is not and was never a transphobe bigot but a sacrificially courageous defender of young confused people and of women. Just as in a Rowling novel (or two), it turns out that the mob whipped up by the Daily Prophet Regime Media attacked the hero of the story and lionized the villain.

I’m confident that the Elle piece, an article which pro forma repeats the shibboleths of Rowling’s defamers as undisputed facts without any mention of the Cass Review, etc. that upset their narrative-cart of spoiled fruit, is not the last we will see in the popular press. But it is the first one I saw outside of the project’s announcement stage. Please let me know of other Potter holdouts on the losing side of the Trans Wars that you spot decrying the new teevee programs. I suspect, given the intense ideological indoctrination of these SJWs on this particular progressive partisan talking-point, there will be remnant Gender Extremist soldiers in the jungles of far-off internet islands for as long as there were Japanese soldiers who fought on despite their Emperor’s surrender in 1945.