Elephant Talk

Inventor of Floo Powder

Posted Tue 4th Oct 2005 at 9:14 am by sooty

Where there’s floo there’s fire

This blog and its domain are dedicated to Ignatia Wildsmith, a character from the wizarding world of J.K. Rowling’s remarkable series of Harry Potter books. According to the HP-Lexicon, she invented floo powder in the 1200s:

This silvery powder…when thrown in the fire, allows magical travel and magical communication between fireplaces connected to the Floo Network. The powder is thrown into the flames, which burst up emerald green. To travel, a witch or wizard steps into the flames and states her or his destination (another fireplace on the network). To communicate, the witch or wizard throws the powder into the flames and inserts only her or his head, again stating ther fireplace to which a connection is desired.

It is managed by the Dept. of Magical Transportation in the Ministry of Magic.

Floo networking is a rather hair-raising method of travel and communication, not to mention the possibilities it holds for getting singed, but it is a proven system that has been adopted here for purposes of travel on the Internetsâ„¢.

Although there is little known about the inventor and she only figures as one of the wizard cards that comes with each chocolate frog, her singular contribution to modes of travel has been enormous. We raise our glasses of Madam Rosmerta’s butterbeer in her honor: To Ignatia Wildsmith, who gave us an alternative way to travel great distances in the shortest amount of time without risk of falling from a great height or being splinched. Cheers!

Incidentally, the likeness of Ignatia was lifted from Jo Rowling’s own website and modified without permission.

The Memory Hole

The Memory Hole Moves

Posted at 8:12 am by sooty

Right, about a year ago, The Memory Hole moved from blancmange.net to a subdomain of floonet.net. We set up an .htaccess file to redirect all links to the former domain to the new one. Which meant keeping the blancmange.net domain for a while, at least. May use it for something more interesting, down the road a short piece.

Most everything was transferred to the new domain, but there remain odd bits of little importance to the site yet to be uploaded or revised.

There are numerous new articles and books in the queue eventually to be added to the site. But things move more slowly these days than in the past. We would list them here, but that would then force us to do something about them. So, we’ll just leave it at that.

Consideration was given to redesign of the site, but that impulse quickly passed. It shall remain in its current state for the foreseeable future.