Less than an hour ago, I finally finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. When the bar exam was over, I made a goal to re-read the entire series, so that I could understand Book Six better, and at least have something a little less serious to read than the evil bar exam materials I spent July immersed in. Now I'm kind of yearning for something nonfiction.

Rather than discuss Book Six with spoilers and all, instead I thought I'd share some tangential thoughts about the whole Potter world. You can read this without fear, so long as you've at least read through Book Five.

Quidditch Might Not Be So Stupid After All
I hope everyone agrees that quidditch is a dumb, dumb sport. You score ten points for a goal, but if you grab the Golden Snitch, you get 150 points and the game automatically ends. What's the point of doing anything other than look for the Snitch, then? I think Rowling responded to this gripe with the Quidditch World Cup game in Book Four (the Bulgarians got the Snitch, but the Irish won the match), but I think that was a cop-out. The explanation was that Bulgaria wanted to end the match on their terms. But I would shudder to find a professional athlete who, in the championship game, would choose to end the game rather than fight back from a deficit. We're told that quidditch games often last for days, even weeks. The World Cup game was an hour or two. Just silly.

BUT... when you take a good look at the way the Hogwarts Quidditch Tournament is played, the rules of quidditch might not be so stupid after all. The winner of the Quidditch Cup is determined not by win-loss record, but by total points scored over the course of the year. Various times the outcome of the Quidditch Cup depends on margin of victory (in Book Six (this isn't a spoiler), Gryffindor could theoretically have finished first, second, third, or fourth, depending on the final score of their last game). Therefore, the Chasers and Beaters and Keepers DO mean something. A Seeker has to keep track of the score and only grab the Snitch when the time is right. Granted, that's not as cool as a game like basketball or football, but it does at least make the other players relevant.

No, Quidditch is Stupid After All
Despite that, quidditch is stupid. I don't know how the professional leagues do it, but at Hogwarts, they have weekly or even semiweekly practices, but they only have a game every two or three months: One in November, one in February, and one in April. Boooo-ring. How can you maintain excitement about how the team is doing when the last game they played was three months ago? Why do you practice so hard when the game is three months away? It's silly.

Also, there is no team sport in the world other than quidditch that doesn't have bench players. Quidditch players are supposed to be impervious to injury and exhaustion, yet part of the game is making an active attempt to seriously hurt players. Just silly.

What Kind of School Is Hogwarts Anyway?
In Book Two and Book Six (not a spoiler), various concrete references are made to the Hogwarts Board of Governors. Like most schools (and corporations), there is a board that makes ultimate decisions about the school. It's the Board of Governors (under the influence of Lucius Malfoy) who removed Dumbledore for a time in Book Two.

Yet in Book Five, the Ministry of Magic appears to have unfettered control over the school, what with their Educational Decrees and giving Umbridge more power over school function than Dumbledore. I would have thought that maybe something changed to bring the school under government control, but it's back under the influence of the Board of Governors in Book Six.

Is Hogwarts a government school or a private school? This I want to know.

What is Voldemort's Goal?
All the rumors about Book Six were that we were going to find out more about Voldy-poo. And we do. But I'm still left with one burning question: If Voldemort got his way, and everything he wants to happen were to happen, what would happen? OK, Harry Potter would be dead. And Dumbledore, and probably most or all of the members of the Order of the Phoenix. But that's just because they're out to stop him from getting what he wants.

But what does he want?

He can't want the world entirely rid of anyone who is not a pureblood wizard, because that would mean there would be only a few hundred people populating the planet, and where's the fun in that?

He can't want political power. If he had wanted to be Minister of Magic, he could have had that, long ago. He's a very, very powerful and intelligent wizard, and the voting public (or whoever chooses the Minister of Magic) would recognize that and give him the job (so long as he refrained from killing the voting public).

He can't want to be The Most Powerful Wizard Ever. He already is. Some say Dumbledore might be more powerful (at least Voldy fears only Dumby), but Voldy has Dark Magic at his disposal that Dumby either can't or won't use.

He might want immortality. There are a lot of clues about that desire, especially in Book Six. But first of all, he seems to have somewhat already achieved that, what with his survival of Harry's rebounding of his curse, and second of all, running around killing people doesn't seem like it will lead to that objective. He'd do better to concentrate on learning how to make another Sorcerer's Stone.

The only thing I'm left with is that he just likes being mean, and he likes people being afraid of him. Not a very concrete or worthy goal, even for an evil person. But that's all I can garner from what I've observed of him in the last couple of weeks. He merely wants to hurt people. Those who oppose him want him to stop hurting people, and those who follow him want to ingratiate themselves to him simply so he won't hurt them.

All of which makes Lord Voldemort the most stupidly motivated villain we've seen since Cruella de Vil (who just wanted to look good).