Thank you Natalie and Alexa for baking and icing such a beautiful good-bye cake!

Today I’m back in New York.  After a few months going between Albuquerque and Roswell, New Mexico, it is nice to see my East Coast family again.  The task of my LSATs came to an end on the sixth of December and whether or not I do very well in the end is pretty much a coin toss.  I sort of botched the first of the two games sections and one of the two games sections will be counted—one just as likely as the other—while the other was the experimental section used to field questions for future tests.  Truthfully, it is nice just to be done, and I will deal with the next step when and if there is one.  For now, there is just waiting.

On the other side of the States, Greenport is looking a lot the same so far.  Some road work has been done, some signs replaced, but all in all it looks the same.  I’ll miss my studio apartment in Albuquerque, its constant mid-eighties air temp., and I’ll certainly miss all my family in Roswell, but other family, old friends, warm tea and a mother’s cooking are all very nice as well.

Guanajuato, Mexico has interesting trees.  This is from 2004.

I have been receiving so much spam that I had to add a verification field to the “post a comment” form.  I don’t really know what is going on in some parts of the world, but it appears that every hour for the rest of my e-life a blog terrorist organization planned on terrorizing me with sex enhancement medication and gobbledygook.  I hope that it was in fact only a computer and not a real person, and I’ll know the truth of it soon enough.

Anyway, please notice that to comment you will have to fill in a text field with whatever characters might appear in the graphic box, and while you are trying to figure out if it is an “I” or an “L” or a “1″, try considering the reasons not to bomb everything east of New England and west of Hawaii and hopefully you can come up with more than the Premier League and the wild life of Madagascar.

Now, I know that some people might say that these are children’s books and that magic doesn’t exist (how can you assess a magical world of witches and wizards?) and these sorts of things; however, the book does establish certain rules and uses the world that we live in as its model.  For instance, gravity still exists—it can be defied though not ignored, and likewise, the body remains the same, bones break, people bleed, Harry Potter has bad eyes, even if these things can be more easily mended.  Life and death do as well.  God knows Harry wishes his parents were alive, but their lives seem out of reach.  Time is no different.  The time in these books is not unlike our own.  Also, while this book is meant for children, that isn’t justification for a lousy time-travel sequence not to receive criticism.

Anyway, to get to the problem, simply: Harry died and the book should end, but it doesn’t because we pretend that he doesn’t die so he has the opportunity to save himself.  That might seem a little dense, but I’ll explain.

Towards the end of the book Harry and Hermione are at the shore of a lake, witnessing dementors attacking Sirius Black from afar.  Dementors then attack them as well.  Harry, Hermione and Sirius are, nonetheless, saved by Future Harry.  Dying Harry witnesses this, though not completely accurately, and he mistakes Future Harry as his own father.  This is a particularly troubling and inexplicable example of a predestination paradox.  Critically, Harry is saved by Future Harry; however, it is very important to understand that Future Harry can only come to be if Harry survives.  If Harry, who has no one from his own time to save him, doesn’t survive the event of the dementors’ attack, he cannot possibly live to the point in time where he uses the Time-Turner to return in time and save himself.  It is—unfortunately— very clear from Professor Snape’s account that Harry could not possibly have survived without the Patronus Charm that Future Harry casts, and therefore—again unfortunately—his survival depends on a Future Harry, and Harry, at this point, has no future.

Sometimes a diagram is worth a thousand words:

A =============[C]====== B

                              C ====== [B]>>>

Event “A” is three hours before midnight (the supposed start of the events and the time the Time-Turner returns Harry and Hermione to).  Event “C” is Harry dying to dementors.  Event “B” is Harry and Hermione using the Time-Turner to go back in time.  To make it from point A to point B, Harry must survive point C; however, Harry cannot survive point C without already having made it to point B and, only then, traveled back to point C to save himself.

This problem is very hard to overlook.  It is the most fundamental problem, but it is certainly not the only problem.

In the case of Hagrid’s hippogryph, simply too much time passes between the event of the execution and the rescue.  Consider that Harry and Hermione make it back in time and rescue the hippogryph: the hippogyph lives, and in the several hours that follow this, this becomes known.  Again we are stuck with a predestination paradox.  It is at dusk—let’s say nine o’clock for the sake of a timeline (I know it’s late! but we are told they travel three hours before nearly midnight with the Time-Turner)—that the hippogryph is to be executed yet it doesn’t die.  In fact, nobody witnesses the hippogryph die, including Harry, Ron and Hermione.  Everyone, of course, is forced to accept that it managed to free itself or was freed.  If the hippogryph is known to survive, why then at just before midnight, when Hermione and Harry use the Time-Turner, would they ever consider freeing the hippogyph that everyone already knows escaped?  It is more than likely that they would have heard of its escape.  Or, for that matter, a better question is perhaps: why would Dumbledore even suggest that its life could be saved? It has already been saved by this time!

So, I’ve been facing frustration with this for hours, and I don’t think it had to be this way.  While time-travel posses many problems, it is possible that it could have at least been ambiguous enough as to allowed room for plausibility.  Maybe Snape could have saved Harry without the help of the Patronus Charm?  Maybe Harry could have been alone at the lake with the dementors and Hermione could have done something to assure that he survived the event and thus enabled him to go back in time?  In both cases the Patronus Charm might have appeared, perhaps to save Sirius Black from dying (which is to say becoming a sort of zombie, since they don’t kill the body just the self).  Would that not be reason enough to travel back in time?  Returning to the diagram, only Harry technically has to make it from A, through C, to B to go back an do any number of beneficial things at C.  It is just critical that he live long enough to go back in time…

All in all, I just wish a little more were given to this.  For being such a popular book and having so much potential in a quite rich storyline, I merely wish it were better worked out…

This picture is from Trinidad, Cuba—an old dog at a baseball field—from 2006.

Also, I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving.  I don’t expect to post much this week, since I have a lot on my plate; however, things are wrapping up here in Albuquerque.  I’m back to New York on the sixteenth of December.

I once got to pack every book on those shelves into boxes, alphabetically, and move them into a trailer.  Recently, we got to unload them from a storage shed and unpack them all.  Nick didn’t help at all, but he is sleeping like he did.  A lazy dog would never get around to posting the day before Thanksgiving…

The Sunday before last, I was driving away from Eber’s place in Roswell when he called to tell me that my taillight was out.  The Taillights have four bulbs, side and back on both sides; the back left was out, but it didn’t seem too much of a problem since the back left side was still working.  Anyway, I had to get gas and checked it out at the gas station.  It was too dark and too difficult to fix there.  It was also cold.  I thought about going to Wal-Mart and getting a new bulb but ultimately decided it could wait until the next day.

Anyway, in Vaughn, New Mexico, which is the first town north of Roswell but about an hour and half away, I was pulled over.  I had to pee so bad, I’d been thinking about Vaughn for a good thirty, forty minutes before I got there.  I thought it might have been for speeding, getting pulled over, since there is often a speed trap, but it was of course the taillight.

The officer asked me if I had any guns in the car and asked me for all the paperwork: license, registration, insurance.  I didn’t have the most recent insurance card, only an expired one, but I had the rest of it.  He commented on my New York State driver’s license and asked me what I was doing in Vaughn.  Good Question.  I went on to explain.

He had pulled me over in the parking lot of the only gas station and convenient store for about fifty miles.  People stopped to stare.  It was exciting for them.  There wasn’t much else going on.  It was also cold, and I still had to pee.  The officer told me that it would be a ninety-eight dollar fine and that I could mail it to the address on the back of the ticket.  I asked him if it weren’t possible to get it fixed and appeal the ticket or something of that nature.  He said it was my right, took back the ticket, asked me if that was what I wanted to do and then went on to write a court date for me.  It was nearly impossible to read.

The following Wednesday at 1:45pm I arrived in Vaughn.  I didn’t know where to go, but I did have fifteen minutes.  I drove around, and I think I saw the whole town.  I ended up at the elementary school before town hall while looking for municipal-style buildings.  There was a little tailgate party with a cop in the elementary school parking lot.  The old policeman was telling a story, so I asked a woman in that group where to go for my ticket, and she told me that Judge Sanchez might be in the building with the red roof, pointing across town, but that she also might not be in on a Wednesday afternoon.

I went to where she’d pointed.  There was a police car with its engine running out front.  I found her and the young officer that issued me the ticket.  Judge Sanchez was a cheery woman in her fifties.  She asked me where I was from and, accordingly, what I was doing in Vaughn.  The young officer asked, “Get ‘er fixed?”  I said that I had.  I showed them both.  She said that I was dismissed and wished me a good day.  It was 2:03pm when I made it back in the car and started heading back to Roswell.

All in all, it wasn’t that bad, and I’m glad that I decided to fight the good fight.

I can’t remember if this picture is from 2004 or from 2006.  Anyway, it is in Guanajuato, Mexico.  There are a lot of houses in the city painted in bright colors.  This is one of—and perhaps the brightest of—the pink houses.  Last I checked, 2008, it is still there and still the same.  It can be found on the walk up to Pipila, the long southern route.