The Harry Potter Lexicon

The Wizard of the Month calendar on Jo’s site is again this year displaying happy birthday wishes to Fred and George Weasley for April 1st. What a fitting birthdate is April Fools Day for these pranksters!
Be sure to visit The Floo Network Homepage for a tribute to their wacky wares from Weasley’s Wizarding Weezes this month!

On the text only version of Jo’s site we have April’s WotM as:
Magenta Comstock
1895 - 1991
Experimental artist whose portraits’ eyes not only follow the viewer around the room, but also follow them home.
(Magenta is a new canon character, not one of the Famous Wizards Cards. Yay! New canon!)

EDIT: And now the twins’ birthday message on the calendar has been replaced with the moving picture on the Flash version of the site. Eep! Those eyes are creepy! 0_0

Thrilling, confounding, gorgeous cover art! Be sure you’re sitting down when you look. High-resolution artwork has been released today by Scholastic and Bloomsbury [Link outside: Leaky Galleries].

:Gulp: Treasure! Patronus! Locket! Silver Hogwarts? Strange triangle/circle emblem! Veils? Hallows? Let the theories begin.

The artist for the American editions is again Mary GrandPré, and the artist for the UK children’s edition is Jason Cockcroft.

Update: I have two pages uploaded with the images and close-ups, as well as written descriptions of the details and action.
UK children’s cover | US cover
Note: the Mary GrandPré artwork for the American deluxe edition is still to come, as is the special painting the edition comes with as a bonus.

I know it’s been awhile, but I have finally posted another new essay. This one is from astronomer and past Lexicon contributor Mike Weinstein: Astronomy in the Harry Potter Series. Enjoy!

When I was in London in September, I got a first hand look at Electronic Arts’ new game for Order of the Phoenix. I have to admit that I’ve never been much into arcade-style games, preferring to play Excite Truck and Elebits on my Wii, Time Splitters on my GameCube, or Animal Crossing on the DS. So I watched the demo they showed us without expecting to care a whole lot. Boy, was I in for a surprise.

This new game, from what I can tell from everything I’ve been seeing and from the conversations I’ve had with EA, is going to be almost an RPG. Not entirely, mind you, but enough so that it will feel like you’re a student at Hogwarts, doing wizardy things like attending classes, playing wizard chess in the common room, solving mysteries, and making potions (stirring with the Wii remote or the DS stylus! How cool is that?). This is going to be a lot more than an arcade game. And the graphics are gorgeous. Take a look at these two exclusive screen shots to see what I mean.
Image1
Image2

More to come. We’re going to be creating a section here on the Lexicon with player support information and other resources to make your virtual time at Hogwarts even more rich and exciting. In the meantime, I’ll post any new graphics I can get and pass along any other new information as it comes in.

The WotM calendar on Jo’s official site is showing Happy Birthday wishes to Remus Lupin for March 10th, again this year.
So far, all birthdays have repeated since appearing for the first time, with no new ones nor any being skipped.

Remember my idea to provide lists of the character names from the translated versions of the books? So far I have created a page for the Dutch names (Dank u, Sandra!) and a page for the Norwegian names (Takk, Siri!). Eventually I will create an index page to all the lists and link to it from the character pages.
If you want to send us a list, please send it in “plain text” if possible. Word processing software like Microsoft Word adds too much formatting. And if you found it on another website please let us know so we can credit them.
Do you have a list? You can send it to me at lisa@hp-lexicon.org.

P.S. The Norwegian translation of “Quidditch” is “Rumpeldunk.” Sweet.