SPOILERS...!!! Harry Potter # 5

Don't read another wor-

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Don't read another word if you have any plans ( ever ) of reading:
Harry Potter
& The Half-Witted Prince
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Alright; my Review, Critic, Recapitulation,
Summarization, Synopsis or Frothing Rant,
Is about to begin...

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Harry Potter
& The Half-Blood Prince
By JK Rowling

The Answers to your
Top Ten Questions:

1. Professor Dumbledore
2. Severus Snape
3. Harry Potter
4. Harry Potter
5. Ginny Weasley
6. Harry Potter
7. Hermione Granger
8. Bill Weasley & Phlegm
9. Aragog
10. Kreacher

What i would like to see in
The last ( ? ) book that we haven't seen yet...

( By the way; this was supposed to be the second to last book,
as next year, Harry would be a 7th Year student of Hogwarts,
which is the terminus year for it's students, and yet--
It may now be the case that Harry will 'Drop Out'
and pursue a different career path...???
Might this mean that there will be many more books,
perhaps an 'unspecified' number of books in the future...??? )

What i would like to have explained is;

The Theory of Magic!
Where does the power for magic come from, how is it focused into actions & fabrications...?
Are the animals that Witches & Wizards produce out of thin air, or transformed from Inanimate objects; 'Really Alive'...?
How would a Wizard go about 'Inventing' a new incantation, spell or magical object?
We've seen that Harry's father & 'Chums' made the Marauder's Map,
and Fred & George have invented many curious practical jokes & such,
But neither Harry, Ron or even Hermione has ever created anything even remotely creative...!!!

How do Witches & Wizards Differ from Muggles?
There are apparently 4 distinct types of Humanimals...
Witches & Wizards : Full Blooded Magical Beings
Mudbloods : Half Blooded Magical Beings
Squibs : Full Blooded Magical, But Inept Beings
Muggles : No Magical Abilities
The Mudbloods ( Apparently there is no proper technical term for these...? ) & Squibs are the most interesting... They seem to mean that the talent for Magicalness is like a Musical or Spelling gift... Anyone can obtain this ability, if their genes ( ? ) allow it...?
( If not our genes, is there 'some-other' 'attributical source' that passes this ability down through a family...? )
Also: What are 'Elves'...??? They seem to be fully sentient beings, and yet they are enslaved by the Magical Community...??? We see this again & again, The Good Guys are retaining a moral standard that doesn't quite seem to connect with the high ethical standards that many of the characters are attempting to embody while differentiating themselves from The DeathEaters and Voldemort...???

Does Magical Science have any awareness of DNA, Electricity, Mechanical Principles or The Material Sciences?
We discover in this book that Arthur Weasley, Ron's dad does not understand how Airplanes fly, and we see that Hogwarts is lit exclusively by Oil Lamps and Torches...! It is as if somewhere along our ancestral's technological evolution, a magically talented group separated themselves from The Muggles, and never looked back...! The historical nuances of this seem very interesting to me...! How could they have so completely insulated themselves from Muggle advances...? The Magical Society must have so thoroughly loathed humans, that they made somekind of racial decision that Anything The Muggles do, We will refute it completely!
They are like Magical Amish People...???!
But -Why-...??? Is it Religious...?
If The Magical Community does have somekind of Religion, it's not entirely clear what that might be... They celebrate Christmas, but only in a trans-secular manner...
Their Christmas is missing both The Christ Child AND Santa Claus...???
Another element that i find very curious;
Is that The Magical Community doesn't seem to have an equivalency for The Telephone...!
Never mind Cell Phones, they don't even have a Wall Mounted Variety...?
The don't seem to have Television Either ( In some magical form )
But in this book, The Weasley's do have a phonograph, but it seems to work in exactly the same way The Muggle version does...???

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Has anyone listed all The Clever Ideas that the previous books have been chocked full of...?
i only mention this because this book seems to have fewer of them than the former ones...
It's as if; The Vocabulary & Scenery were set down, and now we're merely shown how it all fits together...???
There are a few new things, The least clever is U-No-Poo... A joke product produced by Fred & George...
The most clever idea is a container that holds half your soul... Which has NOTHING to do with the Title...
But even this may easily be derived from Previous Story Lines such as Steve Martin's 'All of Me' in which a soul is kept, transitionally, in a large bowl. The effect is quite different, but the elemental idea is there...

( One of many ideas is take a well loved movie or book, such as Star Wars or Harry Potter, and pick it apart, one bit at a time, and show where all the ideas were stolen from...! ( Some of the scenes in Star Wars are quite blatantly ripped off from other films...!!! ) )

In this book; JK Rowling has begun comparing the affinities of Voldemort & The Ministry of Magic
to Al'quida & The Bush Administration...!
When the books first came out, Voldemort was a very undimensionally challenged villain --
But now; with the War on Terror, Star Wars I through III and A Series of Unfortunate Events--
to draw from--
Voldemort is becoming a classic;
Good Boy that took a wrong turn while trying to find the secret of immortality...!
Tom Riddle ( Voldemort ) started out as an orphan, no more genuinely mischievous than Harry Potter, given their slightly different upbringings...
With new revelations, we see that Harry and Tom have much in common, and while one is portrayed as All Evil & one as All Good... It is apparent that given Harry's pathological tendency to Lie first and squeeze the truth later, -vs- Tom's scrupulous approach to academic studies...
One may wonder who is The Good Guy and Who is the Bad Guy...???
( We also are made to wonder more about which side Professor Snape & Draco Malfoy are on...? )
We've seen this in Star Wars; when Anakin only wants to make the political organization of the galaxy run a little smoother than what the confederation of Senators is able to accomplish...
And in the X-Files, The Smoking Man is portrayed as Evil, yet his actions are always to save The Earth from an Alien Invasion...
( The final episode never really made it clear if He -or Mulder and Scully succeeded at this...! )
Is it just Moral Relativism, or is there a trend creeping into our Movies and Books to portray The Arch Villains as Good Guys that are merely Confused about how to go about building their Utopian Paradise's...?
Adolph Hitler wanted to create a Utopia for Germany, and if he'd only chosen not to keep invading other countries, he might easily have succeeded, and exterminated all the Jews in Europe to boot...!!!
One might wonder if The Time Travelers are somehow responsible for WWII, when they might just as easily have killed off Hitler, But that's not what they wanted to see happen...
These things are Very Complicated...
And seeing Voldemort struggle with his choices should make you wonder if the books are really about him, and in the end, Voldemort will Triumph, as we hope he will...?

Other Annoyances...
These books really should have a Glossary... It's quite as bad as A Clockwork Orange, but unless you take the time to reread all the previous books, whenever a new comes out, you are severely handcapped when trying to fully grasp the simple nuances of everyday life amoung the magically inclined.
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Don't you just hate it when you're watching a news interview, and the politician or CEO or Bigwig will say some bone-headed thing, and the reporter will completely fail to follow up on it...! Well the same think happens repeatedly in this book, Nobody ever seems willing to ask pointed or necessary questions to make a particularly ambiguous & confusing situation clearer...!!!
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The Revelation of who The Half-Blood Prince is, is very clumpsily done... it's just thrown out, and the half-blood part seems to directly contradict previous factoids -- of which this series is becoming somewhat notorious for...!!! ( Why for example; Is it the Fake Mad-Eye Moody that teaches Harry to repell a particular kind of spell that Voldemort is most famous for, which at the end of the book, allows Harry to escape...! -- i really think that Rowling just starts writing and writing and writing, and then her publisher starts whining that it's time to set it into type, and she quickly wraps it all up, whereever she happens to be...!!! )

Additional Links:
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The Last Page of : The Half Blood Prince...
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Harry Potter : Toady of Satan?