The Vanishing Glass

I almost missed another day, getting far too caught up in Wil Wheaton's Memories of the Future - Volume 1 to remember little Harry. (On a related note, I was inspired to create a new tag for my LibraryThing catalog: "geek porn" for which I have some very particular and yet nebulous criteria, so far only Wheaton's book and Russell T. Davies' The Writer's Tale qualify.) I've also got a couple Sam Smith Oatmeal Stouts in me now, which might make this post more interesting...or it might just make me sleepy after a long week.

So it's ten-years-later and Harry is living in the cupboard under the stairs, where he apparently rooms with a bunch of spiders. (I can't help but find it odd that uptight Petunia would allow any spiders in her house, even to torture Harry.) Oh, and it's Dudley's birthday. This is actually one of the (very few) scenes I prefer in the movie. "But last year - last year I had 37!", so much better than "That's two less than last year." particularly as the latter requires Dudley to do some rather quick math we he proves is all but impossible a paragraph later.

Harry's baby-sitter breaks her leg (does she really though? Is this addressed in Order of the Phoenix?) and Harry gets to go to the zoo with the family. Vernon tells Harry there better not be any funny business, which is a bit ridiculous, even for the Dursleys, but it turns out to be a pretty good way to tell us all the weird stuff that seems to happen around Harry, so we'll forgive it, and Harry proceeds to have a pretty good day (I have no idea what a Knickerbocker Glory is, (and I'm too lazy to look it up) but I'm pretty sure I want one). It's a good day until they go to the reptile house anyway, where Harry has a quick conversation with a snake before the glass on it's cage disappears and the snake escapes, thanking Harry on the way. Surely that snake thing won't come up again, right?

Harry is, of course, punished for the Great Snake Escape, even though there's no proof he had anything to do with it other than a traumatized boy mentioning that Harry was talking to the snake (no 10-year-old boy has ever done that before) but this gives Harry the opportunity to be retrospective and tell us about what he remembers of his parents' death (a lot of green light, sounds like a car crash to me alright) and that a bunch of weirdos do things like bow and wave and shake his hand (can't say I really blame Petunia for trying to avoid that, it's a bit creepy).

Changed the format a bit, thoughts?