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MAGolding (1240)
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Dr. Who Dreams
Biff! Pow!
An inconsistencey
Strange Colors
The Fictional Location
Who is Lily?
Captain of a pirate crew?
the filming locations.
Ice Cream
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I had chemotherapy for six months after a cancer operation. I had port put in my chest with a tube going to my heart. Every two weeks I would go and get a poison pump with a load of poison hooked up to the port. The pump would pump the poison through the port into my heart which would pump it all over my body to kill any remaining cancer cells. I would wear the poison pump for two days every two weeks.
So that made me a part time cyborg for the duration of the chemotherapy. After the chemotherapy was ended and I no longer got the pump attached, and after I had the port removed, I am no longer a cyborg since I no longer have any mechanical parts.
My nephew Tom watched a lot of Dr. Who episodes as a child in the 1970s. And I think he contemptuously referred to Daleks as "Derlicts" or "Derelicts".
Here is some of my family history:
Henry Hurst was born in 1771 in Gwynedd township, Pa., and Jacob Demuth was born in 1779 in Lancaster Pennsylvania. In 1800 Henry Hurst married Eva (Lowman) Jauch who had been widowed in the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia. Henry Hurst and wife Eva had a daughter Ann Frances Veronica Hurst in 1801 and eventually moved to Lancaster, PA.
By 1822 Henry Hurst and Jacob Demuth were both widowers. At the Moravian Church in Lancaster Henry Hurst married a niece of Jocob Demuth, who should have been about the age of her new stepdaughter and thus twenty to thirty years younger than her husband.. And a few days later the new stepdaughter Anne Frances Veronica Hurst got a new name when she married Jacob Demuth who was 22 years older. Both Henry Hurst and Jacob Demuth had children by those later marriages.
That made Anne Frances Veronica Hurst Demuth the half sibling of Henry Hurst's later children, as well as their grandaunt by marriage. It made the children of Henry Hurst's second marriage the grandnephews and grandnieces of Jacob Demuth and also his half brothers-in-law and half sisters-in-law.
Imaging trying to draw a family tree showing the relationships resulting from those marriages and other marriages of Jacob Demuth and his relatives I imagined it would get very complicated with relationship lines crisscrossing like crazy. So I made up a little genealogical rhyme:
"Oh what a tangled web we weave,
when first we practice to conceive"
Anyway, Henry Hurst had a daughter born when he was 60 or 61, and a son, Elam D. Hurst, who might have descendants to the present. Jacob Demuth and Anne Frances Veronica Hurst Demuth had nine children, including Henry Cornelius Demuth I, (1830-1906) one of my great great grandfathers.
Here is a link to a list of castles and vaguely castle-like buildings in the USA.
<url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_castles_in_the_United_States</url>
Here is a link to an article about a castle in Haledon, New Jersey.
<url>https://www.northjersey.com/picture-gallery/news/passaic/haledon/2023/05/24/photo-gallery-haledon-nj-castle-cedar-cliff-avenue/11950579002/</url>
And the pictures of that castle don't look much like the castle in the movie to me. Is there another castle in Haledon, NJ?
I saw part of the movie Sat. 11-23-2024 and saw a couple of images of the castle.
And it looked to me like the artist was inspired by the Belem Tower in Lisbon, Portugal.
<url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bel%C3%A9m_Tower</url>
This long article about matte paintings of spooky movie castles and mansions
<url>https://nzpetesmatteshot.blogspot.com/2011/11/creepy-castles-menacing-mansions.html</url>
Shows a matte painting of the castles by Russ Lawson, quite close to the top of the article. I am pleased to note that the tops of at least some of the turrets seem to be bulbous cupolas instead of cones.
Today Nov. 12 2024 I was reading that captured German pilots in the Battle of Britain were detained at Trent Park, Greater London. And the Wikipedia article on Trent Park says:
<blockquote>Trent Park was used as the location for scenes set in and around a boys' boarding school in the 1983 Doctor Who story, "Mawdryn Undead", featuring Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor.[39]</blockquote>
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So should the joke scenes at the end of the episodes be considered to be part of the canon of the series, events which really happen in the series, or are they considered to be mere jokes about the series and not really happening in the series?
Some people might want the joke scenes to be real, and so make it canon that the kids sometimes reanimated the figurine. But there is another joke scene at the end of "Wizards vs Angels". In that episodes Max, previously turned into a girl named Maxine, brings some little girls from school home for a slumber party. During the course of the slumber party, the little girls are turned into old men, and then into talking fruit. In the joke scene at the end of "Wizards vs Angels", after the moral compass was turned back to good, and everyone has reverted to their normal behavior, the talking fruit, who had been old men, and little girls just hours before the scene, are telling dumb jokes. And one of the wizards threatens to put them in the blender if they tell another terrible joke. One of the talking fruits then tells another unfunny joke, and as the scene fades to black, the sound of a blender is heard.
So there seem to be a number of deaths of people and of magical beings who seem to probably be people, in <i>Wizards of Waverly Place</i> (2007-2012), And almost all of them are directly or indirectly caused by the teenage and preteen protagonists.
And those young protagonists have many magical abilities which mean that they can never be forced by circumstances to kill. But they kill anyway, in situations where killing is purely optional for them, presumably because they have no ethical objections to killing.
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In the fourth season, in "Journey to the Center of Mason" December 17, 2010, Mason turns into wolf form and swallows Dean, Alex's former boyfriend, whole, but the wizards enter his stomach and rescue Dean. And it is implied that if Alex loses her wizard powers she will be unable to be Mason's girlfriend, presumably because Mason would be too dangerous. Note that Mason, the person-eating werewolf, seems to be an accepted member of wizard society, but monster hunters shoot at Juliet and her vampire family with ray guns.
In "Three Maxes and a Little Lady" January 21m 2011, Max is accidentally turned into a little girl, Maxine.
In "Everything's Rosie for Justin" Feb. 4, 2011 Justin's new girlfriend turns out to be an angel. In "Dancing with Angels", Feb. 11, and "Wizards vs Angels", Feb. 18, Rosie turns out to be a dark angel working for Gorog, who is a satanic character. The moral compass is stolen, and set for evil, turning everyone evil. Gorog is defeated, and the moral compass turned back to good, and everyone becomes good again.
In "Pop Me and We Both Go Down" on January 6, 2008, a figurine on Mr. Russo's trophy was accidentally animated and ran away, as mentioned before. Mr. Russo ordered the kids to return it to the trophy and deanimate it. So Mr. Russo's selfish desire to retain his trophy intact made him order his kids to kill a living being, and one which seemed to be a person. In the end the figurine is deanimated, and the trophy restored.
But in the last scene, a joke scene, the figurine from the trophy was seen alive again, so according to that scene the Russo's occasionally reanimated him, which make killing him seem somewhat less evil than it otherwise would be
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If you had the power to animate inanimate objects like Alex has, you could also use it to animate dead lifeforms. And if you killed someone in order to achieve some goal, and had the power to bring the dead back to life, you would immediately bring that person back to life, once you achieved your goal. Any decent person would do the same. But none of the wizards in training present made any move to reanimate Stevie. Then Max, the kid who released many deadly monsters into New York City, accidentally knocked Stevie over and Stevie shattered into many pieces.
And of course they could have used the spell to reassemble broken objects to put Stevie back together, and then another spell to reanimate Stevie, but nobody indicated any desire to do so.
And that ended the plot of "The Good, the Bad, and the Alex". The episode ended with a final scene, a joke about unrelated matters.
And of course the writers could have made the final scene one in which Alex is told that Stevie is calling from wizard prison, and Alex is asked if she wanted to take the call. And they could have shown Stevie in Wizard prison with faint lines crisscrossing her face. And a passing prisoner could compliment Stevie on her outstanding facial tattoos, and Stevie could snarl that they weren't tattoos but where she was put back together right before being brought back to life.
But they didn't, so as far as the viewers knew Stevie stayed dead forever. So kids who thought that the protagonists were good kids would learn the lesson that it is alright to treacherously kill someone. And also that people with the power to bring dead people back to life have no ethical obligation to do so, even when they themselves have killed them.
And so the episode ended with the young protagonists having a good time while on the floor all around them were scattered the many pieces of the horribly mutilated corpse of the girl they had just killed.
In "Wizards Unleased" October 1, 2010, they free Mason, in wolf form, from a group of "wizbillies", hillbilly wizards. Alex makes a deal with the wizbillies, but instead of keeping her word tricks them through a portal leading to "some void". And I have to wonder how survivable "some void" entered through a magical portal would be.
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I note that in a 4th season episode Harper asked if Jeremy had been found, which implies that he had still not returned home or been contacted. So at the best Jeremy had been separated from and out of contact with family, friends, and home for months, and at worst he had been killed almost instantly.
In <i>Wizards of Waverly Place</i> the Wizard World has a rule that only one child in a family of wizards can win the family's wizard competition. The losing kids in a wizard competition lose all their powers after having been dependent on them for all their previous years of life. And the reason for that rule is unknown and many wizard laws and rules seem rather senseless.
In the next episode "The Good, the Bad, and the Alex" May 7, 2010, they learn that Stevie is the leader of a revolution against the wizarding competition, with thousands of wizard kids behind her. And Justin immediately says that means Stevie is evil. Justin didn't think Stevie was evil from sending a kid to an unknown and probably instantly lethal location, but thought that Stevie was evil for leading a rebellion against a rule which seems senseless and tyrannical to many viewers.
Alex pretends to join Stevie's rebellion, and tricks Stevie into touching the machine which is supposed to transfer Stevie's wizard powers to her brother Warren. And then she magically immobilizes Stevie while transferring Stevie's powers to Warren. She immobilizes Stevie by turning Stevie into non living matter, which is a euphemistic way of saying she kills Stevie.
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In the episode 'Third Wheel", April 30 2010, Alex and Harper ask Stevie, a new girl at school, if she is a wizard. Stevie says yes and demonstrates by making a portal appear in the floor under a boy who falls through it. Harper says the boy was Jeremy from science who was going to ask her to dance. Alex asks Stevie where she sent Jeremy and Stevie says she doesn't know, and Alex says that is the type of irresponsible wizarding she likes.
Anyone who knows anything about science know that even if human habitable planets were was common in real life as in Star Trek, Teh vast, bast majority of locatins in the universe would still be almost instantly lethal to humans. Even if Stevie's spell transported Jeremy to an unknown location somewhere on the surface of Earth instead of to an unknown location anywhere in the universe, he would have only a 25 percent chance of still being alive at the end of the scene.
I also note that Harper seems a little upset by what happened to Jeremy, but is not seen asking either Alex or Stevie to try to bring back Jeremy alive. My theory about Harper not asking is that in offscreen events Harper has seen Alex and Justin make a lot of other students disappear and so is used to it.
Maybe there is some sort of magic limitation put on the magic abilities of wizards in training which makes their spells unable to permanently harm anyone. So if Alex, Stevie, and Harper know that in "Third Wheel" then their lack of excitement about Stevie sending Jeremy to an unknown location could be due to knowing all spells of wizards in training are essentially harmless. So in that case Stevie would not have murdered Jeremy and Alex would not be an accomplice his murder, but would still be guilty of other murders.
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