Geekfoolery

(I am assisted today by the two geeklings in the Mr. Alex home, who are greater Harry Potter fans than I)

The seventh and final Harry Potter book comes out midnight on Friday, an event long awaited by the two geeklings in the house. We’re going to be there at the stroke of midnight as the book goes on sale at the local Borders, and rest of the weekend will be devoted to frantic page-turning, no doubt.

Still, after seven books and five movies, I still can’t help but wonder about the magical world created by J. K. Rowling. I’ll accept the idea of witches and wizards and magic overlaid on the backdrop of a nostalgic remembrance of a British boarding school.

But on the edges of Harry’s world is our world. Muggles, in the jargon of the book. Harry even lived among them–er, us–until he was 10, unaware of his magical abilities. Harry and Ron wear sneakers, presumably normal ones, and Hermione wears blue jeans. So there is cross-over between the magical world and normal one.

My question is why doesn’t Harry’s world borrow a few of the more obvious non-magical, but very convenient and useful innovations from the “Muggle” world? Here are but a few the geeklings and I came up with:

Wikipedia/Google: How many times have we seen Hermione and the rest of them sitting in a library, poring over stacks of handwritten, leatherbound texts full of spells and magical incantations? I get the impression these books don’t even have indexes or tables of contents, nor does the libary seem to have even a card-catalog. Can’t all these spells and potions be loaded into a database and indexed against keywords and topic?

Speaking of books, there’s always the scenes where they’re all loaded down with half their own weight in schoolbooks, again, all heavy, leather-bound tomes. How about paperbacks? Or even eBooks or PDFs? There’s also a lot of writing with feather quills. Harry should impress his Hogwart’s classmates with the miracle of the “ball point pen.” I am fond of the Fisher Space Pen myself–”Look, Ron, it writes upside down!”

What about Email, Instant messaging, Cell phones? Much was made of Hagrid’s unfamiliarity with the telephone at one point, and Rowling tells us that all the messaging in the magical world is via owl. So that means I have to get a piece of paper and my feather pen to send a message? And to receive it, I need to have a predatory bird with a six foot wingspan swooping by.

Lasik: Harry wears glasses. So does Dumbledore. Seems like at least as many people in the magic world have short eyeballs or astigmatism as we Muggles do. So you can shoot flaming lightning bolts out of your magic wand, and transform matter, but zapping a smidge off the cornea? No can do, I guess.
Orthodontists. Let me understand this: You can make a necklace charm that can alter the flow of space-time, but wrapping a few pieces of wire around Neville Longbottom’s wayward teeth is beyond you?

Security cameras. Not everyone has an invisibility cloak, and while Hogwarts is chock full of nasty security measures like the Whomping Willow and giant 3 headed dogs, it seems to me that a lot of the problems that have cropped up at that school could have been addressed by having a decent security camera system installed.

ATMs. Or even paper money, or checks. Nope. Not in the magic world. You have to go to Gringots and get your hands on the actual bullion. I won’t even talk about the question of going off the gold standard.

Just a few. Got any more?

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