Never tell me the odds

[matgb]

William Hill has a set of odds for entertainment related stuff for next year. Some of them are suitably daft. This link may work (if not go to their homepage, on the left click specials/tv then entertainment) (via-sort of):

Lord Voldermort Revealed To Be The Killer Of Harry Potter : 5/1
Prince William To Have A State Wedding : 6/1
Beatles To Have A No. 1 Single : 10/1
Dumbledore To Be Brought Back To Life In Final Harry Potter Book : 10/1
Harry Potter - Ron & Hermoine To Marry : 10/1
Daniel Craig To Win Best Actor Oscar : 25/1
Lembit Opik And Cheeky Girls To Have A Number 1 : 66/1
Proof That The 1969 Lunar Landings Never Happened : 250/1
Queen To Abdicate : 10/1

Note that on the full list, the Queen to abdicate thing is at the bottom, way after the Loch Ness monster and Kate Moss silliness, but has significantly shorter odds. Also note that Harry Potter gets as many entries as Posh and Becks.

Can one of the Harry Potter experts out there confirm: I thought the whole point of the ghosts thing is that death is just another state of being? Ergo he's not going to come back to life, but is going to be a character in the book? Bet someone'll be conned into putting money down anyway, and then whinge about their own stupidity afterwards...

Also? The Sun says Tennant to leave Dr Who. The BBC denies it. Given Tennant is the biggest fanboy ever, I'll go with the Beeb version for now (via). Right, 2am. Time to go to bed. I have Torchwood DVDs to (re)watch.

Comments

[burkesworks.livejournal.com]

Lord Voldermort Revealed To Be The Killer Of Harry Potter : 5/1
Dumbledore To Be Brought Back To Life In Final Harry Potter Book : 10/1
Harry Potter - Ron & Hermoine To Marry : 10/1

Who's to say that JK Rowling hasn't got a little team of runners going round every single William Hill's in Edinburgh regarding betting on every single dénouement of what may or may not happen in Harry Potter And The Deadly Marshmallows?

On a similar note, rumour has it that Harold Wilson won thousands of pounds off Hill's in 1970 with multiple bets on which date he was going to call a General Election.

[matgb]

Isn't there some "thou shalt not bet on stuff you can influence" anti fraud thing in standard T&Cs?

I mean, I'd do that as well, but the bookies should be able to notice. I like with the death thing that the bet is on who kills him, not on if he dies. Which is nice.

[eldar.livejournal.com]

Maybe she has. The odds have come in from 5/1 to 5/2 since the post. Or is it just astute LJers getting in on the action?

[caramel-betty.livejournal.com]

Can one of the Harry Potter experts out there confirm: I thought the whole point of the ghosts thing is that death is just another state of being? Ergo he's not going to come back to life, but is going to be a character in the book?

Ghosts in Harry Potter are a bit odd. First, they can only come from wizards. Or maybe other non-Muggles, though Nearly Headless Nick wasn't too helpful on this. Second, not all wizards leave their ghost behind. Most go on to the afterlife, whereas some are too afraid to go on (such as Nearly Headless Nick), whereas others seek to torment the people they knew in life (such as Moaning Myrtle). In any event, they seem to need to choose to stay.

Based on Moaning Myrtle's recollection of her death, it seemed to me that becoming a ghost was fairly instant. You die, ghost, done. In a later book, when a character dies and Harry wonders if they'll come back as a ghost when the idea occurs to him, he half-expects that character to walk through the door some hours or days later, though we're led to believe that that's a sort of futile hope in his grief.

Also also, Dumbledore - as a former headmaster of Hogwarts - is already found on the wall of the head's office as a portrait. JK Rowling says on her website: "Wizards have ways of making sure their voices are heard after their death: think of ... the portraits of dead headmasters and headmistresses in Dumbledore's office".

We are also told that no magic can bring back the dead. A number of rumours/theories tend to pick up about a given character having faked their own death to get around that e.g. James Potter is still alive and someone with Polyjuice Potion was in Godric's Hollow the night he died. From Goblet of Fire:

"Which means," said Dumbledore slowly, his eyes upon Harry's face, "that some of Cedric must have reappeared."

Harry nodded again.

"Diggory came back to life?" said Sirius sharply.

"No spell can re-awaken the dead," said Dumbledore heavily. "All that would have happened is a kind of reverse echo. A shadow of the living Cedric would have emerged from the wand. Am I correct, Harry?"

However, JK Rowling is quite good at setting up rules and then having them, well, not exactly disregarded, but subverted in other ways. And one thing we do know about Dumbledore, direct from Rowling herself (not inferred from the books), is that Dumbledore's Patronus is a phoenix. "And, as many of you have deduced, Dumbledore's Patronus is indeed a phoenix." And in Chamber of Secrets, she does make quite a thing of phoenixes being reborn - we see Fawkes die and emerge from the ashes. So it would be entirely possible for her to have Dumbledore reborn, somehow, perhaps.

[faeriecween.livejournal.com]

This makes the comment I was going to write utterly pointless :o)

The Polyjuice potion theory was whacked on the head from the self same scene that Dumbledore is discussing above- if it hadn't been James he couldn't have popped out the wand.

[caramel-betty.livejournal.com]

Hard to say... we don't know if the "echo" that comes out due to Priori Incantatem would look like it did when it died.

However, JK Rowling has knocked the Polyjuice Potion theory on the head directly:

FAQ - About the Books
Did James and Lupin switch bodies before James was killed?

An ingenious theory, but no: James would never have saved himself and left his wife and son to die.