Pottermore : New material about Prisoner of Azkaban
Marjorie Eileen Dursley is the older sister of Vernon Dursley. Although no blood relation of Harry Potter, he has been taught to call her ‘Aunt Marge’.
Marge is a large and unpleasant woman whose main interest in life is breeding bulldogs. She believes in corporal punishment and plain speaking, which is what she calls being offensive. Marge is secretly in love with a neighbour called Colonel Fubster, who looks after her dogs when she is away. He will never marry her, due to her truly horrible personality. This unrequited passion fuels a lot of her nasty behaviour to other people.
Marge dotes on Dudley, her only nephew. She does not know that Harry Potter, who lives with her relatives, is a wizard. She believes him to be the offspring of two unemployed layabouts who dumped their son on their hardworking relatives, Vernon and Petunia. The latter, who are terrified of the prejudiced and outspoken Marge finding out the truth, have fostered this impression over many years.
When Harry becomes angry with Aunt Marge, who has been insulting his parents, and loses control over his magical abilities, she is blown up like a barrage balloon. Two members of the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad must be dispatched from the Ministry of Magic to deal with this incident and modify Aunt Marge’s memory. From that time forward, the Dursleys do not invite Marge to stay while Harry is in residence and he never sees her again.
Oh, yes. Because unpleasant people could never find "true love" or happiness. And the unrequited love always turn people into "nasty and offensive" individuals. *rolleyes*
J.K. Rowling's thoughts
HARRY POTTER and the Prisoner of Azkaban
I regret making Aunt Marge a breeder of bulldogs, as I now know them to be a non-aggressive breed. My sister owns one and he’s the most loveable, affectionate dog you could hope to meet. On the other hand, they do look grumpy, and on appearance alone seemed to suit Aunt Marge.
See kids? It's o.k. to judge a book by its cover. And "appearance alone" is more important then character.
Btw, I wonder, now that she knows they are not aggressive, which dog breed wold she pick instead?
For witches and wizards who are Floo-sick, whose Apparition is unreliable, who hate heights or who feel frightened or queasy taking Portkeys, there is always the Knight Bus, which appears whenever a witch or wizard in urgent need of transportation sticks out their wand arm at the kerb.
A purple, triple-decker bus, it has seats during the day and beds at night. It is not particularly comfortable, and I would advise against ordering hot drinks even if offered, because the bus’s habit of leaping from one destination to another at a moment’s notice can result in a lot of spillage.
The Knight Bus is a relatively modern invention in wizarding society, which sometimes (though it will rarely admit it) takes ideas from the Muggle world. The need for some form of transportation that could be used safely and discreetly by the underage or the infirm had been felt for a while and many suggestions had been made (sidecars on taxi-style broomsticks, carrying baskets slung under Thestrals) all of them vetoed by the Ministry. Finally, Minister for Magic Dugald McPhail hit upon the idea of imitating the Muggles’ relatively new ‘bus service’ and in 1865, the Knight Bus hit the streets.
While some wizards (mainly pureblood fanatics) announced their intention of boycotting what was dubbed ‘this Muggle-esque outrage’ in the letters page of the Daily Prophet, the Knight Bus proved hugely popular with most of the community and remains busy to this day. "
"The Knight Bus is a relatively modern invention in wizarding society, which sometimes (though it will rarely admit it) takes ideas from the Muggle world.
Sometimes?
How about; all the time.
And why is the bus a "this Muggle-esque outrage" but the train is o.k.?
J.K. Rowling's thoughts
The Knight Bus was so-named because, firstly, knight is a homonym of night, and there are night buses running all over Britain after normal transport stops. Secondly, ‘knight’ has the connotation of coming to the rescue, of protection, and this seemed appropriate for a vehicle that is often the conveyance of last resort.
The driver and conductor of the Knight Bus in ‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’ are named after my two grandfathers, Ernest and Stanley.
I don't think she have liked those grandfathers much considering the way Ernest and Stanley are portrayed.
Birthday:
Unknown
Wand:
(according to legend) Blackthorn and troll whisker, nine inches, combustible
Hogwarts house:
Gryffindor
Special abilities:
Insane bravery
Parentage:
Wizard father, witch mother
Family:
Three wives are believed to have left him, rumoured to have had seventeen known children
Before the wizarding community was forced into hiding, it was not unusual for a wizard to live in the Muggle community and hold down what we would now think of as a Muggle job.
It is widely believed in wizarding circles that Sir Cadogan was one of the famous Knights of the Round Table, albeit a little-known one, and that he achieved this position through his friendship with Merlin. He has certainly been excised from all Muggle volumes of King Arthur’s story, but wizarding versions of the tales include Sir Cadogan alongside Sir Lancelot, Sir Bedivere and Sir Percivale. These tales reveal him to be hot-headed and peppery, and brave to the point of foolhardiness, but a good man in a corner.
Sir Cadogan’s most famous encounter was with the Wyvern of Wye, a dragonish creature that was terrorizing the West Country. At their first encounter, the beast ate Sir Cadogan’s handsome steed, bit his wand in half and melted his sword and visor. Unable to see through the steam rising from his melting helmet, Sir Cadogan barely escaped with his life. However, rather than running away, he staggered into a nearby meadow, grabbed a small, fat pony grazing there, leapt upon it and galloped back towards the wyvern with nothing but his broken wand in his hand, prepared to meet a valiant death. The creature lowered its fearsome head to swallow Sir Cadogan and the pony whole, but the splintered and misfiring wand pierced its tongue, igniting the gassy fumes rising from its stomach and causing the wyvern to explode.
Elderly witches and wizards still use the saying ‘I’ll take Cadogan’s pony’ to mean, ‘I’ll salvage the best I can from a tricky situation’.
Sir Cadogan’s portrait, which hangs on the seventh floor of Hogwarts Castle, shows him with the pony he rode forever more (which, understandably perhaps, never much liked him) and accurately depicts his hot temper, his love of a foolhardy challenge and his determination to beat the enemy, come what may.
I'm not touching this with a 10 foot pole.
It's just too much.
Birthday:
22nd November
Wand:
Chestnut and phoenix feather, eleven and a half inches, whippy
Hogwarts house:
Hufflepuff
Special abilities:
Encyclopedic knowledge of magical creatures, fearlessness
Parentage:
Magical father, magical mother
Family:
No wife, no children
Hobbies:
Dangerous creatures are both his work and his hobby
Silvanus Kettleburn was the Care of Magical Creatures teacher at Hogwarts until Harry’s third year, when he was replaced by Rubeus Hagrid.
Kettleburn was an enthusiastic and occasionally reckless man whose great love of the often dangerous creatures he studied and looked after led to serious injuries to himself and, occasionally, others. This fact led to no fewer than sixty-two periods of probation during his time of employment at the school (a record that still stands). Like Hagrid after him, he was prone to underestimating the risks involved in caring for creatures such as Occamys, Grindylows and Fire Crabs, and once famously caused the Great Hall to catch fire after enchanting an Ashwinder to play the Worm in a play of ‘The Fountain of Fair Fortune’.
Kettleburn was a loveable if eccentric man and his continuing employment at the school was evidence of the great affection in which staff and students held him. He finished his career with only one arm and half a leg. Albus Dumbledore presented him with a full set of enchanted wooden limbs on his retirement, a gift that had to be replaced regularly since, because Kettleburn’s habit of visiting dragon sanctuaries in his spare time meant that his prosthetics were frequently set on fire.
Ah, so grievous bodily harm is a traditional and normal thing for kids in Care of Magical Creatures.
Why they don't find some pyromaniacs to teach the kids too? I'm sure that would be just as safe.
. . . oh, wait.
And if he only got "a full set of enchanted wooden limbs on his retirement" how did he function before that?
A Boggart is a shape-shifting creature that will assume the form of whatever most frightens the person who encounters it. Nobody knows what a Boggart looks like if nobody is there to see it, although it continues to exist, usually giving evidence of its presence by rattling, shaking or scratching the object in which it is hiding. Boggarts particularly like confined spaces, but may also be found lurking in woods and around shadowy corners.
The more generally fearful a person is, the more susceptible they will be to Boggarts. Muggles, too, feel their presence and may even glimpse them, although they seem less capable of seeing them plainly and are usually easily convinced that the Boggart was a figment of their imagination.
Like a poltergeist, a Boggart is not and never has been truly alive. It is one of the strange non-beings that populate the magical world, for which there is no equivalent in the Muggle realm. Boggarts can be made to disappear, but more Boggarts will inevitably arise to take their place. Like poltergeists and the more sinister Dementors, they seem to be generated and sustained by human emotions.
The spell that defeats a Boggart can be tricky, because it involves making the creature into a figure of fun, so that fear can be dispelled in amusement. If the caster is able to laugh aloud at the Boggart, it will disappear at once. The incantation is ‘Riddikulus’, and the intention is to force the Boggart to assume a less-threatening and hopefully comical form.
Famous Boggarts include the Old Boggle of Canterbury (believed by local Muggles to be a mad, cannibalistic hermit that lived in a cave; in reality a particularly small Boggart that had learnt how to make the most of echos); the Bludgeoning Boggart of Old London Town (a Boggart that had taken on the form of a murderous thug that prowled the back streets of nineteenth-century London, but which could be reduced to a hamster with one simple incantation); and the Screaming Bogey of Strathtully (a Scottish Boggart that had fed on the fears of local Muggles to the point that it had become an elephantine black shadow with glowing white eyes, but which Lyall Lupin of the Ministry of Magic eventually trapped in a matchbox).
Behind everything those silly Muggles can't understand is something WW related.
Apologies if my grammar, spelling and punctuation are off.
But I just got back from a New Year party and I'm not at my best.
p.s. Happy New Year! ;D