Happy Birthday!

Harry Potter fans, today is the day. The thirty-fourth birthday of the Chosen One...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HARRY JAMES POTTER!

Dear Harry,
You've had so many adventures. The quest for the Philosopher's Stone, which was almost like a live version of a video game. The search for Slytherin's monster, and the fight in the Chamber of Secrets. The search for Sirius Black, who turned out to be your godfather. The Triwizard Tournament, as the youngest participant ever and the only non-Death Eater to see Voldemort's return. You ran Dumbledore's Army under Umbridge's nose and fought Voldemort and the Death Eaters in the Department of Mysteries. You lost Sirius and heard the prophecy in one day. You searched for the Half-blood Prince, who you found was your hated teacher, Severus Snape. You learnt about Horcruxes, and you saw your headmaster killed. You searched for Voldemort's Horcruxes as the Second Wizarding War hung overhead, a storm about to break. You saw many you loved die and found that you were Voldemort's last Horcrux. You sacrificed yourself to defeat Voldemort once and for all. You survived and killed Voldemort. You became the master of all three Deathly Hallows.

You had millions of people, fictional and real, rooting for you, cheering you on. You took us out of our own lives for a while. We laughed and cried with you. You took the world by storm.

Thanks for being with us. You're on my bookshelf, and in the houses and hearts and minds of millions around the world. We're still cheering for you.
Happy birthday!
-Purple Dragonfly

Holes

Oh my goodness, look at that, I haven't posted for almost two months!
How horrifyingly embarassing.

Holes happens to be a book that I personally think is awesome. It won the Newbery medal, which is, as far as I know, an award given in the USA to what the judges think is the best children's book of the year.

Don't quit reading this in disgust after the term "children's book", because a lot of those books are targeted towards teenagers as well, and even adults enjoy them.
Okay, so if you're not convinced...well, here's the review I posted on Goodreads last year.


When I read this book, I decided that it totally deserved that Newbery Medal.
Holes is the story of Stanley Yelnats IV, a singularly unlucky guy from a singularly unlucky family. His family was supposedly cursed when Stanley's no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather broke a promise to a fortune teller.
His dad is an inventor trying to invent a way for shoes not to smell. When a pair of shoes falls out of the sky and hits him on the head, he thinks it's fate. Maybe his luck is changing...
Apparently not. Those shoes once belonged to legendary baseball player, Clyde Livingstone, called Sweetfeet.
Stanley is given a choice- jail or Camp Green Lake. He chooses Camp Green Lake.
There's no lake at Camp Green Lake, a 'correctional facility' in the middle of the dry Texas desert.

Once, the desert used to be a lake, and there was a town. The schoolteacher there, Katherine Barlow, fell in love with an African American onion-seller named Sam. When the townspeople found out, they shot dead Sam.
The sheriff refused to help, and asked Katherine for a kiss instead.
Three days after Sam was killed, Miss Barlow shot the sheriff and left a lipstick mark on his forehead.
She became the feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and the lake dried up. Twenty years later, when confronted by two people she once knew, she refused to tell anyone where the money she's stolen was.
They could dig holes in the desert for a hundred years, and they wouldn't find the treasure anywhere. Soon after saying this, Kate died from the bite of a poisonous yellow-spotted lizard, laughing.

If you take a bad boy and make him dig a hole every day in the hot sun, he becomes a good boy. And that's what happens at Camp Green Lake. The strange Mr. Sir and the mysterious, intimidating Warden make the boys dig a hole every single day. There aren't any fences or walls- because the camp is the only place that has water for miles around. It's a prison.
The boys at Camp Green Lake all have nicknames, and soon Stanley's new name is Caveman. The boy he becomes the closest to is Zero, a quiet boy who everyone dismisses as stupid. When Zero runs away, Stanley wants to find out what happened, and follows him.
Although he doesn't know it, running after Zero will lead to the breaking of two curses- the Yelnats family curse and the curse on Green Lake.

This was a really well-written, captivating book. I stay with my statement- it totally deserved the Newbery Medal it got.


Yes, I'm serious, Stanley and his family refer to his great-great-grandfather as his *deep breath* 'no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather'.
It's engrossing and funny and a really good book, so I recommend you read it at the first chance you get!

Quote of the Week

 Another quote from Agatha Christie! Meet Miss Jane Marple, elderly spinster and intelligent detective...

"You imagined what you would do if you were a cruel and cold-blooded murderer?" said Craddock looking thoughtfully at Miss Marple's pink and white elderly fragility. "Really, your mind-"
"Like a sink, my nephew Raymond used to say," Miss Marple agreed, nodding her head briskly. "But as I always told him, sinks are necessary domestic equipment and actually very hygienic."
                                                      -Agatha Christie, 4.50 from Paddington

Quote of the Week

This quote is by Agatha Christie, an author who I am so wary of that I can never tell whether a paragraph of seemingly innocent description is, in fact, description, or a clue to the whole mystery. I have not actually read the book this quote is from, but I strongly suspect that the key to the mystery is in an unexpected place...



“Poirot," I said. "I have been thinking."
"An admirable exercise my friend. Continue it.”

-Agatha Christie, Peril at End House

The picture is a photo of Agatha Christie, from pinterest.com

Pi Day

3.14159265358979

What's that number?

Pi. The 16th letter of the Greek alphabet. Used to refer to the ratio between the circumference and diameter of any circle. Also the nickname of the protagonist of the novel and movie Life of Pi.
Pi is an irrational number, so the decimals don't repeat, which is why the number I've shown above is pi to 14 decimal places.

Oh, here it is...for those of you who are trying to forget it in the aftermath of the exams, here is a reminder of what the symbol of pi looks like.

Today, March 14, is Pi Day. (3/14, you get it?)
There are two things you can do to commemorate Pi Day:
1) Draw the pi symbol on the back of your hand or the inside of your wrist
2) Do about twenty sums calculating the area and circumference of circles of varying lengths of radii


 It's your choice.

Quote of the Week

My New Year's resolution is utterly failing, isn't it?

“What's that?" he snarled, staring at the envelope Harry was still clutching in his hand. "If it's another form for me to sign, you've got another -"
"It's not," said Harry cheerfully. "It's a letter from my godfather."
"Godfather?" sputtered Uncle Vernon. "You haven't got a godfather!"
"Yes, I have," said Harry brightly. "He was my mum and dad's best friend. He's a convicted murderer, but he's broken out of wizard prison and he's on the run. He likes to keep in touch with me, though...keep up with my news...check if I'm happy....”

-J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

EXAM TIME!!!

Exams are just around the corner.
Obviously, you're either trying not to study or you're taking a break, because otherwise you wouldn't be reading this.Or else you're being deeply philosophical, musing over who invented exams.
To help my fellow thinkers and exam-writers, I am posting this.

I, like so many of my classmates, have by now become a veteran exam-taker. So I can now give you five tips for surviving exam time.

Yes, exactly. Exam alert. The exams are coming, so quickly read this and get back to studying before someone finds you...well, not studying.

RULE NUMBER 1:
Don't stay up late. Never stay up late before an exam. Ever. You might be studying, but that is not going to help, because in order to write the exam, you have to be awake. It's not really going to help if you start snoring in the middle of a description of an experiment demonstrating the necessity of carbon dioxide in starch production.

RULE NUMBER 2:
Eat. Yes, I'm serious. Eat before the exam or you will collapse in the middle. Once, in the middle of a math exam, I started having visions of butter-covered potatoes I'd seen on a cooking show. And I'd eaten breakfast! Thankfully, I had finished the paper, but...don't starve yourself.

RULE NUMBER 3:
Try not to freak out. How can you not freak out before an exam? If you can't stop your stomach from turning in anticipation, pretend. Pretend you're perfectly fine. Pretend that you're not on the verge of having a panic attack. Pretend you're calm. You might just fool yourself into calmness and that will become real. Which, of course, means that you focus more on the paper.

RULE NUMBER 4:
Don't daydream. That will take your mind off the test and will cause you to cringe when you see the marks on the corrected paper. The minute you catch yourself daydreaming, bring back your focus to the test. Daydream later, instead of biting your nails and wondering about how you wrote.

RULE NUMBER 5:
Don't think about the exam after you've written it. Because this will ruin your peace of mind for the next exams. If you're thinking, "I wrote that it was active voice but my classmate wrote that it was passive voice, will I lose a mark?" while trying to revise how to find the inverse of a function, it's definitely not going to help you.

Believe me, these tips actually work- for me, but cross your fingers and hope that they work for you, too. Good luck for the exams!
Oh, and as for these tips...you're welcome.