I see dead people

Deathly Hallows Part 2 clearly wasn't the last bit of Pottery J. K. Rowling wrote.  There were too many unexplained deaths, for one thing — including every horcrux^† in the books, one by one. Truth? I didn't even care enough to pillory this dreck.

I suspect the books are much different than the movies, especially considering that Rowling seems well able to keep a sense of continuity in the few examples of her writing I actually slogged through, books I and II.  The actors were brilliant, and when allowed could save any disconnected, underwritten Kloves and Yates scene in the finales (there were two.)

Luna had a terrific line, then disappeared for so long she might as well have been killed off like half the Weasley twins.

Voldemort flaking away in the breeze? Unintentionally comic Malfoy body language? Sorry, I need to bang my head on the wall at platform 9 ³/₄...

^†Unwilling persistence of bee leaf forces us to admit the snake is a... (caff) ... "horcrux." Sweet literary bat of belfries!

Does Professor Snape teach ballroom dancing to Slytherins?

What? Must Minerva McGonagall get all the glory by her gifted Griffindors?

Apparently not! I'd have thought the potions master would have used the opportunity to distill endorphins from the pale pink fogs of interpersonal confusion, not, you know, terpsichoreate per se.

But yes, I should have realized that "Slytherins will be Slytherins."

The Conflagrations of Philosophy

One of the few nice things about getting old is having lived long enough to work out the smartass logical paradoxes bright schoolboys fling like so many snowballs at the tophats of the Age. The one that always annoyed me was an innocence-feigning question: "Can God make a weight so heavy He can't lift it?"

Not that the farrago isn't funny — it is. The issue for me was that I refused to accept the paradox. I could see the nasty class of sophistry it belonged to, but I couldn't for many decades answer the riddle on its own terms, by exposing the cunning hook inside it.

This morning, whilst humming Theme from Harry Potter† on the white throne, the dumb imps of insolence flapped their razor wings near my inner ear and It Came To Me: Imagine, if you will, a tiny ant trying to lift a silver dollar. Now suggest to yourself the equally ludicrous lemma that the ant is a silversmith who made the dollar it's trying to lift. Just so.

The answer to the riddle about God and weights is, God cannot be His own creature, unless you buy into the Trinity in which case Jesus stumbled under the cedars of Lebanon. The purest retort to the moral retards who think this stuff up with their 160 I.Q.'s and Anglo condescensions, is that they've got a bad case of Insufficient Axiom. God is Uncreate, and so — Paradox Lost is simply that She doesn't riverdance in the flickering firelight of narrative fallacy, both here and there, any more than She is bound like Andromeda to the whirling maelstroms of Time.

†Whenever I go to the bathroom
I deliver a Number 2.
My exploits would be even greater than that
But I mayn't go dumping on you.