it's only natural to exaggerate.
when I was rereading the Harry Potter books in college, I noticed something odd that had never caught my attention before, and seemingly not the attention of others either. Many of the wands seemed really small: described as nine to eleven inches. This is kind of innocuous until you actually measure it out.
Maybe I just really like a long
wand in my hand, or maybe
wands are bigger on screen (on average) than they are in real life.
Harry Potter: holly, 11", supple, single phoenix tail feather
Draco Malfoy: hawthorn, 10", reasonably springy, unicorn tail hair
So let's find some stills of the on-screen
wands that these men whip around to perform various acts with, and let's measure the
wands with pixels. Hmm.
Well Harry's face is not really only five inches tall, but thanks to foreshortening it's hard to say how much to adjust the scale. No matterDraco's
wand seems to be right in line with his face. This is the money shot.
Hold on a minute! If Draco's
wand is only ten inches, then that means his head is seven inches long as a young adult. Now my face is about nine inches from top to bottom, and it's a lot rounder/more feminine than Mr. Tom Felton. So what could be going on here?
I propose that wizards have shrunken heads. Need proof? We already see one on the Night Bus and on the entry door to The Hog's Head bar.
What am I getting at?
Let's think about it this way. My older brother is getting married on Saturday, but he's also the floor manager at my job because nepotism hooray. Tangential to that, he's taken off the whole week and we'll also be closed Thursday and Friday. Stay with me. I promise this is going somewhere. Now just because we're closed those days and the floor manager is out doesn't mean we're trying to get less work done. So I've been asked to come in a couple hours early each day and stay a couple hours late as well.
Then add in the little sleep I got this past weekend for throwing an awesome bachelorette party.
Okay, so, there's like this myth on the Internet about how if you don't have sex by the time you're thirty years old then you become a wizard. And it seems clear to me that if you have to brag to internet strangers about the massive peen you possess then maybe that's because you're not actually using it.
The bottom line is this: forty-two.