tricksy pixie

i’m not even talking about only thanos. every time thanos said his plan to kill half the galaxy (because it’s “finite,” lol ok one-semester-of-econ guy) the other characters were like “no!” or “you can’t!” or “that’s madness!” instead of… counter-arguing, or saying anything like “couldn’t you just… double the resources with a snap of your fingers?” obviously, nobody wants thanos to murder all those people, but it’s also as if everyone tacitly accepts his framing of the problem. “i want to kill half the universe because of resource scarcity,” he says, and everyone says “no, that’s too cruel!!” instead of “wait… wait just a fucking second there, paul ryan.” they don’t even have a line like that even when they’re talking amongst themselves, just musing at how twisted his worldview is, that he can only imagine infinite power as an infinite power to kill. no time is spent imagining an alternative.

and i can’t help but think about how we in the quote-unquote “first world” treat the resource consumption of the so-called “developing world.” we, who have enjoyed the pleasures and benefits of fridges and air conditioning and televisions and cars and convenience food and all that shit for generations: we look at the growing energy & plastics consumption of the developing world and go “uh oh, they’re really running the tab up over there, we can’t let this happen, think of the…. trees!!!” we have the audacity to act like people living in poverty in the tropics wanting window fans is selfish and short-sighted for the environment, and meanwhile we use and waste all the energy and resources we can get ahold of, like a continent full of montgomery burnses.

infinity war could have taken thanos’s approach to scarcity somewhere bigger: somewhere that was useful as a parable for our hypocrisy. the way that ragnarok was brave enough to make a parable of empire; the way that black panther could explore diaspora and identity; the way that the winter soldier actually had something to say about the surveillance-terror state. but for all the moving pieces of infinity war, i don’t think it knew where its central ethic rested. certainly, its characters showed the desire to preserve and protect life. but that’s true of any superhero film.

what it comes down to for me, is that it’s not enough for this movie’s theme to be “let’s protect people, because killing people is bad!” or even, sorry steve, “we don’t trade lives.” it’s not enough. thanos basically says, “there’s one bowl of soup and one spoon and two hungry people, so one of them has to die.” so what i needed was someone to openly reject that whole proposition. not just “no, you shouldn’t kill trillions,” but “no, that is fucking ludicrous, i reject that worldview. i reject human life as a brutal competition. group survival, even in the face of scarcity or hardship, is exactly what the fuck we developed culture for.” like, we could use that message. that message, delivered palatably in a blockbuster action movie, could do some good.

And don’t think for a fucking minute that Thanos is not an unreliable source for what’s happening on Gamora’s planet.

I am not a fan of college-student overpopulation rhetoric.

I am … Even less a fan of this big-budget franchise choosing it as a motive in 2018.

There have been many genocides in human history, and not one of those populations has bounced back with a cheery “Gosh, with all THOSE fuckers gone, I can finally stuff my face with croissants and accumulate wealth!”

The only way that killing some people results in other people getting more stuff is if you kill the people who hoard disproportionate amounts of The Most Stuff, and take their stuff on behalf of people who have less stuff. And that is called a Revolution, and that is frowned upon and considered antisocial in most circumstances. Stuff is distributed unequally. It’s a fact. Killing half of people does not magically free up 50% more stuff.

I don’t know how seriously people take the “finite amount of energy in the universe” thing, but it’s something that creationists attempt to use to bully everyone else. The idea is that it makes evolution seem improbable, “because entropy.” Under creationism, “entropy” means “things inevitably getting worse” and it fits in well with their view of the world. They think it’s physics. Creationists say “energy in a system dissipates”, and ask how life could evolve and be complex without God to power it.

The gentle stock response is that Earth is not a closed system. It receives a constant source of energy. This energy comes from the Sun. We have a direct conduit to a sufficient amount of energy to power the life force of the planet, in terms of Making And Eating Stuff. The Sun shines on the Earth, it grows the plants, and everything eats the plants or each other. (All of the other stuff happening on Earth is basically recreation.) but while the Sun will one day burn out, the plants do not eat up the Sun. Even if every square inch of the sinful earth was covered in greedy trees and cabbages, the Sun would continue to shine on it. That’s the energy source. It’s. The Sun. It’s usually up there somewhere.

So, like, if people are justifying genocide with “oh well, there was limited energy in the universe” then, like, do these Marvel movies take place somewhere without anyone having heard of the Sun? Does their planet have a plug leading out the back, that’s plugged into a big pot of fossil fuels? Does everyone have a mild concussion that makes teenage-philosophy-Discourse sound edgy and deep? Is the Sun in their universe actually just a Chris in a very large hat? This piece of lore worries and vexes me

Why are dogs dogs?

The long question is “given the extreme diversity of morphology in dogs, with many subsets of ‘dogs’ bearing no visual resemblance to each other, how am I able to intuit that they belong to the ‘dog’ set just by looking?”

The reason that this is a Good Big Question is because we are broadly used to categorising Things as related based on resemblances. Then everyone realized about genes and evolution and so on, and so now we have Fun Facts like “elephants are ACTUALLY closely related to rock hyraxes!! Even though they look nothing alike!!”

These Fun Facts are appealing because they’re not intuitive. So why is dog-sorting intuitive?

Well, because if you eliminate all the other possibilities, most dogs are dogs.

To process Things - whether animals, words, situations or experiences - our brains categorise the most important things about them, and then compare these to our memory banks. If we’ve experienced the same thing before - whether first-hand or through a story - then we know what’s happening, and we proceed accordingly.

If the New Thing is completely New, then the brain pings up a bunch of question marks, shunts into a different track, counts up all the Similar Traits, and assigns it a provisional category based on its similarity to other Things. We then experience the Thing, exploring it further, and gaining new knowledge. Our brain then categorises the New Thing based on the knowledge and traits. That is how humans experience the universe. We do our best, and we generally do it well.

This is the basis of stereotyping. It underlies some of our worst behaviours (racism), some of our most challenging problems (trauma), helps us survive (stories) and sharing the ability with things that don’t have it leads to some of our most whimsical creations (artificial intelligence.)

In fact, one reason that humans are so wonderfully successful is that we can effectively gain knowledge from experiences without having experienced them personally! You don’t have to eat all the berries to find the poisonous ones. You can just remember stories and descriptions of berries, and compare those to the ones you’ve just discovered. You can benefit from memories that aren’t your own!

On the other hand, if you had a terribly traumatic experience involving, say, an eagle, then your brain will try to protect you in every way possible from a similar experience. If you collect too many traumatic experiences with eagles, then your brain will not enjoy eagle-shaped New Things. In fact, if New Things match up to too many eagle-like categories, such as

* pointy * Specific!! Squawking noise!! * The hot Glare of the Yellow Eye * Patriotism?!? * CLAWS VERY BAD VERY BAD

Then the brain may shunt the train of thought back into trauma, and the person will actually experience the New Thing as trauma. Even if the New Thing was something apparently unrelated, like being generally pointy, or having a hot glare. (This is an overly simplistic explanation of how triggers work, but it’s the one most accessible to people.)

So the answer rests in how we categorise dogs, and what “dog” means to humans. Human brains associate dogs with universal categories, such as

* four legs * Meat Eater * Soft friend * Doggo-ness???? * Walkies * An Snout, * BORK BORK

Anything we have previously experienced and learned as A Dog gets added to the memory bank. Sometimes it brings new categories along with it. So a lifetime’s experience results in excellent dog-intuition.

And anything we experience with, say, a 90% match is officially a Dog.

Brains are super-good at eliminating things, too. So while the concept of physical doggo-ness is pretty nebulous, and has to include greyhounds and Pekingese and mastiffs, we know that even if an animal LOOKS like a bear, if the other categories don’t match up in context (bears are not usually soft friends, they don’t Bork Bork, they don’t have long tails to wag) then it is statistically more likely to be a Doggo. If it occupies a dog-shaped space then it is usually a dog.

So if you see someone dragging a fluffy whatnot along on a string, you will go,

* Mop?? (Unlikely - seems to be self-propelled.) * Alien? (Unlikely - no real alien ever experienced.) * Threat? (Vastly unlikely in context.) * Rabbit? (No. Rabbits hop, and this appears to scurry.) (Brains are very keen on categorising movement patterns. This is why lurching zombies and bad CGI are so uncomfortable to experience, brains just go “INCORRECT!! That is WRONG!” Without consciously knowing why. Anyway, very few animals move like domestic dogs!) * Very fluffy cat? (Maybe - but not quite. Shares many characteristics, though!) * Eldritch horror? (No, it is obviously a soft friend of unknown type) * Robotic toy? (Unlikely - too complex and convincing.) * alert: amusing animal detected!!! This is a good animal!! This is pleasing!! It may be appropriate to laugh at this animal, because we have just realized that it is probably a … * DOG!!!! Soft friend, alive, walks on leash. It had a low doggo-ness quotient! and a confusing Snout, but it is NOT those other Known Things, and it occupies a dog-shaped space! * Hahahaha!!! It is extra funny and appealing, because it made us guess!!!! We love playing that game. * Best doggo. * PING! NEW CATEGORIES ADDED TO “Doggo” set: mopness, floof, confusing Snout.

I love this!

The organic definition of a Species is a group of organisms that can interbreed and have fertile young. Odd as it may be, dogs can all interbreed, although some pairings (chihuahua/Great Dane) might boggle the imagination, dogs mate and have dog kids. This is how new breeds are made.

This does have a problem in that the borders are fuzzier than you may think, because Dogs can breed with wolves. This gets even more complex since wolves can breed with coyotes, and although I have never seen a dog/coyote mix, there is actually one group of thought that they may all be one species.

One opinion is that dogs should be considered a subspecies of wolves, Canis lupus familiaris.

how do we see a pug and then a husky and understand that both are dogs?

Which I rephrased it as:

given the extreme diversity of morphology in dogs, with many subsets of ‘dogs’ bearing no visual resemblance to each other, how am I able to intuit that they belong to the ‘dog’ set just by looking?

Or, as you rephrased it: “this may be a good way for us to recognize a dog if you meet one in the street”

Yes

Yes it is

Unfortunately you have answered the question “what is a dog” (which wasn’t asked) by describing “some characteristics of dogs” and concluding “dogs are a species of dogs.” That was never a question in this post, and it is not the answer to this question either, and you’re not quite correct about what a “species” is. But I am endlessly happy to talk about this at GREAT LENGTH. because your understanding of a species COULD BE BETTER. And by the end of this LONG POST it damn well will be. We are now going back to class.

Press J to skip it on your dash.

The answer to the question “what makes a species a species?” is not, as you put it, “well you see actually, a species is a species.”

A species is actually defined as a bundle of particular characteristics, which include what it can make babies with - but which remain a distinctive identity regardless of what that organism can fuck.

We don’t know how blurred the sexual/reproductive boundaries between the different types of prehistoric beasts were, on account of how you can’t intuit that from a single gatdamn fossil, but we sit down and give ‘em their own binomial names anyway, because we define species based on specific characters.

The reason we use the concept of “species” to begin with is because we need it to communicate; we know that domestic horses and wild zebras are necessarily distinctive, and we intuit that even though they can interbreed and produce occasionally viable offspring, they are not the same animal, and each has a discrete identity. Part of this is because technically they might breed, but they wouldn’t normally. (Nor would wolves and coyotes.) Another part is that they fulfill different niches and exhibit different natural behaviors. And still another part is physical characterisics; the adaptations of a zebra to its environment are unique, and it’s reasonable that they should contribute to the overall definition of “zebra.” Thus, if you were describing “a specific species of zebra” you reach for the traits that are distinctive - “A specific population of zebras, sharing characteristic appearance/behavior/territory/social structure/genetic quirk” - not a list of everything that they could conceivably fuck, and not an argument that two distinctive species of zebras are actually both horses. Animals within a species have more in common with each other than animals that don’t. Given all of the blurring that occurs around issues of reproduction, this is a fundamental part of the definition of a species.

Thus, stating that the complete and entire definition of a species as “animals that can breed” is itself extremely problematic, and shied away from by anyone who’s ever stood on the other side of the lecture podium.

Here’s what you say instead, when you’re an official adult scientist:

A species is a defined population of living organisms with a group of distinctive characteristics, which include the ability to exchange genes to produce fertile offspring that share those characteristics. Individuals within the same species have more in common with each other than they do with individuals outside of the species.

If you don’t hit every single one of those points in your definition, then you’re not going to get the right answer.

The better answer to the question “What is a dog” is actually more like:

“A domestic canine, Canis familiaris, is a terrestrial carnivore selectively bred over generations from a common ancestor shared with the modern gray wolf (Canis lupus) to suit specific human needs. The domestic dog exhibits extreme morphological diversity and has been bred for a large array of behaviors and characteristics, from herding other animals to providing medical aid. While dogs can breed with other canids and produce viable offspring, the domestic dog has distinctive characteristics, including a delayed period of childhood compared to wolves, increased attention and understanding of human nonverbal cues, increased ability to coexist with low aggression in close quarters with other species, and the ability to live on pet food made largely out of grain, which wolves can’t do, and which is pretty bloody weird if you think about it.”

That way, you’ve covered your goddamn ass. Because otherwise some perky undergraduate is going to put their hand up and ask “but what about wild coydogs?” And now you can answer, “Coydogs in wild settings, despite having domestic dog ancestry and being capable of breeding with other canids, are not considered domestic dogs because they do not share enough key characteristics with domestic dogs.”

“What about coydogs in domestic settings? Or my Aunt Maud’s wolfdog?”

“If a wild canid/domestic canid crossbreed meets enough criteria for domestic dogs, it would be considered a domestic dog. Your Aunt Maud’s wolfdog was in all probability just a husky with weird eyebrows anyway, but if it ate kibble, was allowed around children, and was completely emotionally fulfilled by living with humans in a house, it did not share the traits of wolves.”

“But what about black wolves?” will come a question from a reasonably well-informed kid at the back. “Black wolves are only black because of domestic dog ancestry. Does that make them dogs?”

“If they fulfill the role and function - the niche - of wolves, then we call them wolves,” I say with utter serenity.

“But what about infertile dogs that can’t breed with anything?”

“If they share the characteristics of domestic dogs, they remain dogs,” I reply, “Regardless of what would happen if they theoretically fucked a wolf.”

“What about beings that reproduce asexually, or without having sex?” asks a smart and clever student.

“Excellent question,” I say. “Aren’t you glad that our nice big definition of a species includes those awkward outliers too? Otherwise there’d be no point in having the word, now would there? We will note, though, that organisms such as bacteria are not usually defined by species, but by strain - a different word - since bacteria divide asexually and live everywhere at all times with no real regional differences, so ‘species’ no longer means much when you zoom in that far. After all, ‘species’ is only meant to be a useful concept for humans to sort animals with; it isn’t actually engraved in the genetic code anywhere, like a serial number that actually means something.”

The predictable hand goes up: “What if, like, dogs keep evolving? Like in the future, if people all evolve to live underwater and so do our pets?”

I answer first, “That would be weird,” in the traditional looking-over-the-tops-of-your-glasses flat affect; then I continue, “The current understanding of dogs is ‘terrestrial carnivore,’ so if they became fully adapted as aquatic carnivores I suppose we could call them their own species - a seadog descended from terrestrial dogs; or simply still call it a dog and expand the definition of dogness, like how we speak of ‘dialing’ a number even though phones no longer have physical dials. Both are legitimate; species boundaries are constantly being re-evaluated and redrawn, based on scientists learning new information about the species.  Because the definition of a species is simply not limited to what it makes babies with.”

I pause, feeling like it would be irresponsible not to add a personal safety announcement here. “Also, do NOT presume to BEGIN to have this conversation with birdwatchers or Bird People. For your own safety, if you ever meet an ornithologist in a dark alley, forget COMPLETELY about this idea that the concept of a species is based even REMOTELY on “producing viable offspring.” The subtleties of different bird species can be characterized based on minor variations in song. People have meetings about this, at which they throw chairs. DON’T GET INVOLVED.”

“What’s the point then?” says a petulant student. “Like, if we all know what a dog is.”

And I reply, “Exactly! We invented language to communicate, and we impose it upon the natural world, drawing distinct and arbitrary boundaries in order to communicate, despite the natural world being a teeming, nebulous, essentially un-quantifiable n-dimensional hypervolume that resists such boundaries; Nature abhors a vacuum, and loves a grey area, but humans prefer to articulate abstract concepts using concrete language forms, even if doing so is fundamentally inaccurate.”

“But what if a Chihuahua fucked a wolf AND THEN-”

“RING SPECIES,” I bellow suddenly, interrupting a discussion that always degenerates into someone’s contorted furry/wolfkin/OC fantasies, by forcibly moving to the next slide: “ARE SAID TO OCCUR WHERE A POPULATION RINGING A GEOGRAPHIC OBSTACLE, SUCH AS THE SEAGULL POPULATIONS AROUND THE NORTH POLE, CAN BREED WITH THE POPULATIONS ON EITHER SIDE OF THEM BUT NOT WITH POPULATIONS ACROSS THE CIRCLE. EVERY DISTINCT POPULATION IS USUALLY CONSIDERED A SEPARATE SPECIES, AND -”

In conclusion, there is no shame in being wrong, but see how much easier it is to teach others, once you lay the groundwork for being correct?

“When a woman thinks that her house is on fire, her instinct is at once to rush to thing which she values most. It is a perfectly overpowering impulse, and I have more than once taken advantage of it … A married woman grabs at her baby; an unmarried one reaches for her jewel-box.”

Holmes uses this social norm and order to stage an attack and find out where Adler hid the photo in her house. He drops his guard and is so proud of himself because he knew that this would work, he knew that if he created disorder,  “natural” order would attempt to counteract that disorder.

Adler defies those social orders and norms: she is an untitled American woman who earned her own money through a career as an opera star, instead of relying on a husband or family to have financial security; she outwitted Holmes because she cross-dressed and indicated that she frequently did so, allowing her to have a lot more freedom roaming around London on her own terms, and her stage career aided that so that she could act like a man easily; and she didn’t care one bit about her reputation or being a “pure” woman, had several boyfriends, and was known for being an “adventuress”. More importantly, she had the ability to defy those social norms while simultaneously being able to present herself as the ideal respectable and under-estimable Victorian-era woman.

Adler literally defeats Holmes by dressing in drag then happily goes off with her new husband whom she loves very much. And Holmes respects that and is thoroughly impressed. Not only does he respect that, he realizes that he was on the wrong side of things, that he shouldn’t have agreed to take on the case for the King of Bohemia. This is the exchange that follows after Holmes, Watson and the King read Adler’s letter.

“Would she not have made an admirable queen? Is it not a pity that she was not on my level?”

“From what I have seen of the lady she seems indeed to be on a very different level to your Majesty,” said Holmes coldly

Holmes takes Adler’s side and realizes that the photograph is her protection from the King, not something she intended to use as a weapon against him. Adler never exploited the King to get what she wanted, only kept it as a safeguard of her own happiness. She made sure she had a way of ensuring that she alone guided her future.

Irene Adler is “the woman” to Sherlock Holmes, not because she was sexy or he was in love with her. She was a reminder that real life doesn’t always follow what social norms and order are to be expected, that people shouldn’t be taken on face value or respected just because of their title or apparent respectability and ability to follow social order and norms, and that there are two sides to every story.

This is the case where Holmes was the bad guy - and he realised it. This is a powerful commentary on his character; the moment where, in flippant pursuit of a puzzle, he realized he was simply acting as the cat’s-paw of a malicious little man. That moment when a fun puzzle of matching wits shows the other side; where the fog of the thrill of the hunt shows the perspective of the fox, desperate, cornered by the blind brute malice of a hound, saving her own life. That’s all she wants; not revenge, not a long con, but her own life. It isn’t punched home hard enough, but it’s still a punch: The Great Literary Hero, trapped in his own narrative, realising that he has more fellow-feeling for the fox than his master.

The only reason Irene kept the photograph was to protect herself. She wasn’t blackmailing the King for wealth or influence; she just wanted to lead a normal life without being stalked, kidnapped, robbed and/or killed. She was a good person; she had a fiancé she loved and a plan for a nice life; she never planned to bother the King. The King planned to obliterate that, simply to save himself from potential embarrassment.

Holmes as an archetype has few classical ideals, but a moral code is one of them. Gutting that from the story simply shows you haven’t read it.

give me starship captains like the sailors of old, weathered and wary of the vast beast that is deep space, who religiously keep their own personal traditions and rituals to appease her and guide their ships safely through her vast depths.

give me wide-eyed ensigns eagerly drinking in tales of great creatures of the void, space whales and other more malevolent leviathans, dismissed as tall tales by more cynical cadets who only trust the sense of their own eyes.

give me whispered accounts of ghost vessels, lost long ago in great battles across the universe, populated by a literal skeleton crew.

give me a space bermuda triangle.

Antarctica is about to have its first ever Pride

Antarctica is set to have its first ever Pride event thanks to a group of LGBTQ+ people based in an Antarctic research center. 

So she asked him if he knew what that meant, and he was like, “Oh, yeah! One of my favorite characters on TV is ace! (Todd, from BoJack Horseman) I get that,” and it just made her entire coming out to him so much easier and more accepting and she’s so much happier now.

Time to cry

All the weay over

to picking up my babe

NO IT’S FINE

If  I cry too much

But then I think about more important things, like what would have happened if Granny Weatherwax ever met Albus Dumbledore, and I can’t help but feel a whole lot of shit could have been avoided if he’d had a good clip round the ear and a strong talking to about the whole “my hands are tied” bullshit that enabled years of abuse and suffering at the hands of adults in a position of authority over young, vulnerable people.

Like oh, this spell requires the bond of blood to keep him safe, all right. So that just means we’re not going to hold these adults accountable for their torment and abuse? I think the entire fuck not, Albus.

Snape is a double agent who is actually working for the greater good. All right, but that doesn’t stop him from being an absolute fucking shit weasel who shouldn’t be around children until he learns to control himself and works out his issues in a safe and sane manner, what the fuck, Albus.

You have an entire school system that ascribes to ideas of inherent morality when in fact this is a thing that needs to be taught? Well no wonder there’s one house in particular that keeps going off the rails, you keep telling them they’re evil. Tell people something for long enough they’ll start to believe you. There’s nothing wrong with being selfish and cunning, sometimes that’s what it takes to survive. Teach them how to use those traits for good. As strength. My land, my home, my people (not my daughter, you bitch) how dare you try to hurt them. Teach them, Albus, you have to bloody teach them and realize that evil isn’t born. It’s made. In a thousand small deplorable ways. And it starts with treating people like things and I cannot be having with this.

Of course there’s also the other flipside to this thought process, which is imagining Gytha “Nanny” Ogg shouting “watcher Molly” as she thumps Bellatrix Lestrange on the back of the head with a cauldron, and drops her like a fucking stone. Later they’ll sit together and grieve, later there will be time to pick up the pieces and mourn. But for now there are things to fight for, people to keep alive. And people to keep from doing what they shouldn’t ever have to do, so you find a way to do it for them, by hook, crook or blunt force trauma.

And because my head wont let go of this thought:

“You always was a right little miss,” she said, taking a puff from her pipe and resettling her weight with a hefty bounce as the younger witch struggled to get out from under Nanny’s considerable girth. “Giving yourself airs and graces and such. Pretending you was too good to scrub a pot. Well, let me tell you something, Mistress Lestrange, you ain’t fit for nothing no more except maybe a noose. And if I had my way that might be the end of it. But we don’t do things like that no more, we don’t rule by blood.”

“Then you’re weak,” Lestrange shot back, still struggling to claw her way free. “A weak, old woman with nothing left but tricks up your fat sleeve.”

Nanny puffed in silence for a few more moments, then reached up her sleeve. “And your wand, dearie. Walnut is it? With a dragon heartstring core? Very nice, painting it black was a bit much, but you always were fond of your dramatics.”

She pulled out her own wand, holding it out under Bellatrix’s nose, whose face went cross eyed and then wide with panic.

“Haul yoo, aye yoo, the great big ugly gangly scunner wi-oot a nose. Can ye sew? Well stitch this.”

Harry watched in consternation as Voldemort staggered back, dropped to the ground like a ton of bricks and lay still.

“That’s it?” he demanded, lowering his wand. “That’s all you had to do?”

Rob Anybody, perched on his shoulder, looked up at the young wizard out the corner of the eye, which was to say he looked him in the nostrils.

“Weell,” he said, gesturing towards the chaos that had been unleashed as the full force of the Nac Mac Feegle was unleashed upon the band of Death Eaters, primarily by running up the inside of their trousers. “That’s the thing about the lads. Once they’ve decided tae dae something, they dae it good and hard.”

“But you just headbutted him!”

Because Ridcully, for all his faults, probably understands that the actual learning of magic relies on a certain degree of both freedom and madness and sometimes explosions. 

And Umbridge would crawl right up his skin with her concept of a “Defense Against The Dark Arts” Course, and in the middle of a lecture on recent runes, would go on a “tangent” on the history of various dark wizards and the means by which they were defeated and here Why Don’t We Have A Practical Outside, The Weather Is Nice (The weather is not nice. It’s Scotland. In Late November.)  But everyone is really curious to see the old man actually take his wand out for once, only to discover that that’s not a wand at all, that’s a Burleigh & Stronginthearm and they’re all going to pass it around and whoever shoots the weathervane off the top of Ravenclaw tower gets 50 points. Hannah Abbot puts a bolt through Umbridge’s window, taking out a kitten plate and gets 100 points.

Fred and George turn the third floor corridor into a Swamp and Umbridge is pleased to hear Ridcully bellowing at the Weasley boys about “BLOODY INSONSIDERATE, NEVER HAVE I EVER MET SUCH WRETCHEDLY-” but the second she’s around the corner it changes to “-brilliant young men, how much is this setup you have here? That potions-master could do with some aggravated moisturizing. Speaking of moisturizing, what would it take to get you two gentlemen to work on the faculty baths? Disgustingly substandard, nowhere to put your nail trimmings-”

Ridcully would like the students there too, I think.  Especially the Slytherins, because he’s perfectly aware how important being a cunning bastard and willing to get your hands dirty or bloody if needed is, especially in the world of Magical Academia.  They’re socially intelligent and disenchanted with the system, not Evil, Albus. The Malfoy boy would be a lot less trouble if he had something to do besides practicing subject’s he’s bored with.  Fratricide, perhaps. I’m kidding Albus! (he’s only sort of kidding.  Maybe not murder. Just turn him into a toad and keep him as a familair in a bowl on the mantlepiece.)