Baby Jolie-Pitt's okay, but I'll take Rowling for creating family magic

SHILOH JOLIE-PITT?? Sounds like a sponsored archeological dig site . . .

The NYT reporter who herself was given a middle numeral in place of a middle name -- Jennifer 8. Lee -- wrote a story a few weeks back about the exploding popularity of the newly created girl's name Nevaeh (some MTV rocker spelled "heaven" backward to create some unique magic, and made his daughter's name quite ordinary in the process.)

When it comes to the private lives and to mother power especially, I might snort or satirize a bit but I let the private choices and divergent experiences of other folks wash over me like smooth waves of electromagnetic force. I ponder possible connections and contrasts in my own experience, but I seldom consider how to disrupt and redirect their course to one I'd find more suitable or seemly for them.

So here's the flow of my thoughts today --

Moms creating, delivering and naming new babies is ordinary magic, the kind I've practiced privately myself. Celebrity moms like Angelina Jolie or Gwen Stefani deliver their unusually named babies to a riveted world though the same kind of ordinary creation magic that humble and anonymous moms and dads experience, the same everyday "real magic" through which every muggle who ever lived in this real world arrived.

Something we could legitimately name creation science . . .!

If we're gonna honor celebrity moms with the power to alter the flow of cultural forces, let's choose one who creates, delivers and names both the ordinary and extraordinary kinds of real magic, to help change the real world with her imagination.

JK Rowling blends history, science, culture and informed imagination in a complex created environment more crucible than kitchen. She must be a hoot and a half as ordinary magic mom, and there's plenty to celebrate her for, just in that -- but look what she's creating in the public world:

HARRY POTTER GETS HIS OWN DINOSAUR

The dragon-like, 66-million-year-old creature with a knobbly, spiky head has been christened Dracorex hogwartsia.
Draco and rex are the Latin words for dragon and king, while hogwartsia was inspired by the Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. . .
The dinosaur`s nearly complete skull was discovered in South Dakota by three fossil-hunting friends in 2003, and is now on show at the Children`s Museum of Indianapolis. . .

"I am absolutely thrilled to think that Hogwarts has made a small (claw?) mark upon the fascinating world of dinosaurs.
"I happen to know more on the subject of palaeontology than many might credit, because my eldest daughter was Utahraptor-obsessed and I am now living with a passionate Tyrannosaurus rex-lover, aged three.

"My credibility has soared within my science-loving family."

The author added that she visualised the creature as a "slightly less pyromaniac Hungarian Horntail".

Renowned palaeontologist Robert Bakker, who helped devise the name and has written a paper on the pachycephalosaurid dinosaur, said: "The creature is a very special dinosaur that seems at home in a Harry Potter adventure.

"It was a plant-eater, only about as heavy as the war horse of a medieval knight. And it carried an armour-plated head of almost magical configuration, covered with knobs and spikes, horns and crests" that would have lived in Asia and North America during the late Cretaceous Period, 96 to 65 million years ago.

I've marveled for years at how real Rowling's created Harry Potter magic can be, but it's real news again this week.

What will you do as an imperfect human commanding magical power, when Rowling's fictional magic can make you invisible to the real world at the drop of a cloak? Better start planning now, because researchers in this week's issue of Science give us a mere 18 months to prepare for the real-world epidemic of "invisibility on demand."

We'll have to respond as a culture too, of course. Do you imagine that invisibility on demand will be celebrated, regulated, outlawed, taxed, perhaps condemmed as Dark Art by church mystics and banned in South Dakota? -- if fundamentalists already hate and fear Rowling's fictional creations as extraordinary make-believe magic, how much more so will they hate and fear them as omnipotent real-world science in our everyday human hands?

[quote=Associated Press]
How to make an invisible cloak:
Researchers have a blueprint for one like Harry Potter's

"It's theoretically possible to do all these Harry
Potter things, but what's standing in the way is our engineering capabilities," said John Pendry, a physicist at the Imperial College London. Details of the study, which Pendry co-wrote, appeared in Thursday's online edition of the journal Science.

Pendry and his co-authors also propose using metamaterials because they can be tuned to bend electromagnetic radiation — radio waves and visible light, for example — in any direction. A cloak made of those materials, with a structure designed down to the submicroscopic scale, would neither reflect light nor cast a shadow.

Instead, like a river streaming around a smooth boulder, light and all other forms of electromagnetic radiation would strike the cloak and simply flow around it, continuing on as if it never bumped up against an obstacle. That would give an onlooker the apparent ability to peer right through the cloak, with everything tucked inside concealed from
view.

Such a cloak does not exist, but early versions that could mask microwaves and other forms of electromagnetic radiation could be as close as 18 months away, Pendry said.[/quote]

Through the real magic of radio and public support, "This American Life" featured invisibility as superhero stuff in one of its most popular episodes ever, probably because in it we hear the honest voices of ordinary humans admitting they'd use its magic mainly for venal sins such as shoplifting and spying on their lovers.

Some speculated that spurning invisibility for personal flight was more noble, supposedly because flight was more likely to be used creating selfless and public magic rather than creating private profits or in selfish power grabs. But the story suggests that in the end, in reality, even better-than-ordinary humans wouldn't do much world-saving with the power of flight.

It seems merely being there without superhuman strength to alter the course of events isn't as magical as it appears.

On the other hand, Rowling created a magical hero who commands the power of both flight and invisibility, an extraordinary super-son who does sacrifice repeatedly to save an ungrateful and sometimes unknowing world, but for all that, how ordinary and painfully inept his private teenaged magic keeps revealing itself to be!

My own experience of Harry Potter as power of story is to teach me the true nature or ordinary mom-magic, reminding me that extraordinary motherlove from supernatural realms can't trump the ordinary magic of really having your mom with you every day, to help my child imagine and create a natural world worth living in without superpowers, and real magical places for her within it, to cover my child and hold him tight under the cloak as powerful forces flow over and around rather than detect, disrupt and destroy.

Brangelina, Gwen and the gang will do whatever they do.
I'm going forward, not backward.
And I'm calling mine magic.

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