mystery

[lapin-agile.livejournal.com]

I love a good mystery!

So Draco is itchy and having trouble breathing.

Have we got a situation where alt_amycus is poisoning pigeons students? Or is it just really cold in the castle? (Others, including McG, have noted how cold this early winter is in Scotland.) Is Draco having an allergic reaction to something? (Pansy suggests that you can develop allergies as you get older; Draco says no one in his family has allergies. This Muggle wonders if in-breeding has unfortunate effects...)

Or has someone hexed Draco? (And have the house elves suddenly this term happened to forget how to make savory food?) Or is it a dry run for a student game of AK? Or is there something going on we don't yet have enough information to understand?

Does this take us back to Halloween and the mystery of the troll? (Who set it loose in the castle?) Does it connect with Harry's broom's malfunction during the first Quidditch match? Does it connect with the reported sightings of Quirrell?

...

Or is it really the obvious (a situation where alt_amycus is poisoning pigeons students)?

Oh, how wonderful is a well-crafted mystery!!

:)

Comments

Re: Rambling about the economy...

[lapin-agile.livejournal.com]

I suppose that canonically, a "raiding" or parasitical financial economy could have gone even deeper -- pilfering, pawning, trading in second-hand goods, rather than actually exchanging any wizarding products to build up a stock of muggle money. In which case they're really clueless now. Interesting to think about.

Along those lines... what we do know is that they've used brokers to manage their money, treasure-trove, and (I would guess) most currency issues: that's what the Goblins are for. This seems counter-intuitive as an answer to how they deal/dealt with exchange for Muggle currency, but it could be one of those things where JKR would have (had she had a reason to explain it) suggested that our really arcane Muggle institutions -- the Bank of England, perhaps -- are weirder than we thought. Maybe it's Goblins in the sub-basements on Bartholomew Lane, too.

Re: Rambling about the economy...

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

Interesting that even in the game's world, the goblins remain formidable, a group that the LP and Bella need to negotiate with carefully. Perhaps wizards collecitvely are "bad at maths" and have formed a more naturally symbiotic relationship with goblins, who handle the hard stuff about managing the economy. I wonder where the goblins really stand on the whole LP business and whether they couldn't be helping more, if they really wanted to.

I suspect that credit default swaps were a goblin invention.

Re: Rambling about the economy...

[lapin-agile.livejournal.com]

And "hedge fund" is Goblin for "If you believe that I've got some lovely swamp land in Siberia on special this week."