Questions of Travel:

At the beginning of October I will be leaving Chicago to study in England. Anybody with advice on inexpensive but safe flights from Chicago to London that leave in October and return in December (or better yet, open-ended), will earn my undying gratitute.

Quidditch:

So I'll confess it. I've started reading the Harry Potter books. I still haven't read the latest release, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, but in the last two weeks I've read all of the first four. And frankly, the books are pretty good. I'm still undecided on whether they're better or worse than the Lemony Snicket books, a childrens series with a number of similarities. (A recurring nigh-unkillable villain responsible for the death of the parents of the hero(es); a sequence of puzzles and obstacles to be thought around; a group of undependable caretakers; a terrible sequence of foster homes...) the major difference is that the Baudelaire children of Mr. Snicket's work have nobody who really understands what's going on; their super-guardian Mr. Poe is easily duped and rarely helpful. Harry Potter, on the other hand, can fall back not only on the Weasleys and his godfather, but also on Professor Dumbledore, the only Wizard ever to make Voldemort quake in terror.

But at any case, that is not the issue. What is at issue is the game of Quidditch, which I confess I don't quite understand. Rowling seems to have conocted the sport by mixing the impenetrable rules and quirks of cricket, the intramural rivalries of rowing, and the structure and national fascination of soccer (aka football). The end result is . . . strange. Which I realize is what one should expect from a series of children's books about powerful teenage wizards.

So the Quidditch rules, as I understand them-- there are seven players to a team; three seekers (forwards), two beaters (defenders), a seeker, and a keeper (goalie). The seekers try to throw the quaffle (the ball) through their opponent's goal. Meanwhile two giant heat-seeking balls (bludgers) try to hit all the riders; the beaters are given bats and are charged with hitting these into people strategically. Then there's this tiny golden ball called a snitch, fast and nearly impossible to see. The seeker's job is to catch it. You get 10 points for every Quaffle-goal, and 150 points for catching the Snitch, and the game ends only when the snitch is caught. Oh, and the whole thing takes place on broomsticks.

So what's weird is that the quaffle seems almost entirely irrevelant to me. To win, the snitch has to be caught, and it is worth an overwhelming number of points. Furthermore, your opponent will only catch the snitch when catching it would give them a victory, so really, to win a team has to catch the snitch. That being the case, why do teams even bother with telling their seekers to try to score points. Why not put two of them on permanent scout duty, helping their seeker find and obtain the snitch, and put a third one with the beaters and the keeper to defend the goal?

so far I've only found mention of a single Quidditch game where the team to catch the snitch wasn't the team to win the game, and even in that game the team that lost and caught the snitch might well have avoided disaster if their seekers had been devoted to defense and snitch-spotting rather than wasting their time.

So hopefully some Harry-Potter devotee can help me out, but why bother with the quaffle?

New York Times Roundup:

Naomi Klein suggests that just as the Vietnam War was a U.S.-brain drain bringing tons of talented folks to Canada, that our new conservativism will do the same, because "The U.S. has become a harder place for so many people." This seems unlikely to me, since the folks traditionally hurt the most by this sort of conservative are not the professionals and successful artists who Klein thinks constitute the "brain". This helps to mark the difference between turning right on social policy (like the draft) versus turning right on economic policy, and I'm not sure Klein gets (or wants to get) that. Surely Chris has more thought-out thoughts.

In an ABC Interview, Sandra Day O'Connor verifies that she's not going anywhere for the next year, while Stephen Breyer discussed the court's growing disagreement over whether to place any weight on international practice.

There's also a piece on data addiction describing OCD: online compulsive disorder. One alleged finding is that those who multitask-- checking email and writing a report at the same time, for example-- spend 50% longer on the whole thing than they would if they did the two things sequentially. I don't know about the details of the study, but if they used the email-checking example, this is highly misleading. As all high-volume emailers know, checking your email intermittently over a period of time can net you a lot more responses than simply checking it once. You trade messages throughout the day with a friend, you get in an email argument with your sister, and another with your law teacher, and so on. So while it may be true that it's *faster* to check your email once and then write the report, it doesn't accomplish the same thing at all. It's almost like saying one can make a conversation take up less time by simply saying your piece once and having done. In other words, don't think of email as a giant time-suck that makes writing a report take so much longer. Think of writing the report as a way to take up the downtime between emails. At least, that's what my paper-writing habits in school were like.

Here's a weird piece on corporate blogs, and no Sunday NYT issue would be complete without a long asexual piece on nudity. Eschewing naked summer camps, the Times now covers nakedness on Broadway.

Chris Jones:

As will be apparent, Chris Jones of Canada has joined us for a time. As will also be apparent, it's nearly the end of the 4th of July Weekend and Mr. Jones has bearley gotten started. That being the case, he'll be here with us for the ensuing week. Stay tuned, and I'm back from my blogging holiday.