Anne, that sounds cool.

Debet, I hear you. We'll see.

Perkins, you are an angel, but I couldn't put you to such trouble.

...otoh, I may end up using my Dad's Paypal account to buy a Ravenclaw patch, or an Atlantis Patch. Or, and this one REALLY tempts me, a Wormhole Extreme patch.

Debet the pensive will be able to convince anyone of whatever the Snape agreement was. And we don't know that some other member of the order isn't in on the secret -- we just haven't seen that one is.

Trudy, that's about the only solution I can come up with that satisfies me at all, but it had better happen within the first half, and, preferably, the first 1/3 of the book. And only the first option is...uncontrovertable enough for the situation, IMO. Either that or a painting.

Google defaults to and.

It's not there for the AND ability, but to insist that both words MUST be in the result. Just as you use the minus sign to remove similar but wrong results.

Though, of course, you know much more about this than I do, but that's what I recalled from advanced query stuff.

to insist that both words MUST be in the result.

That's precisely what AND means.

From their help page:

By default, Google only returns pages that include all of your search terms. There is no need to include "and" between terms. Keep in mind that the order in which the terms are typed will affect the search results. To restrict a search further, just include more terms. For example, to plan a vacation to Hawaii, simply type vacation hawaii.

Unless you're using a stop word (you weren't -- they are common words like I, and, or that are normally filtered out of searches¹, and it'll tell you at the top of the search results), there's no need to force them in. They're in by default.

¹: Though it doesn't seem to be stopping me on anything, these days.

I wonder if this is something I learned using Yahoo.

Patchy goodness! My DH is an adamant member of Ravenclaw, so I'll see what I can find for him. I just pulled my Banzai Institute and Tyrell Corporation patches off my fencing jacket and put them on my gi a couple years ago, but I may change to a Hogwarts patch. I just don't know what house I'm in.

I agree with Jeff on the favorite part of the book, and also the lack of surprise about the plot development.

Friend in LA tells me that the all girl L.A. street gang the "Half-blood Princesses" is suing over the name.

that's about the only solution I can come up with that satisfies me at all, but it had better happen within the first half, and, preferably, the first 1/3 of the book.

I thought that the reason why Dumbledore trusts Snape were revealed in this book? Wasn’t it that Snape confessed to DD all about being a death eater and telling Voldemort about the prophecy (thus being responsible for James and Lily’s deaths) and everything? That could be me making a narrative leap, though.

Need two recs in children's and adolescent literature.

1) A 12 year old boy - loves to read, into a bunch of sports baseball, basketball, football, soccer - also a Nascar fan. Mostly not into SF or Fantasy, but is into Harry Potter. Anything that would make a good Birthday present.?

2) A second birthday - a 15 year old girl, who is mainly into boys, and top 20 MTV music. She used to love to read, but apparently not so much these days. Want to get her a book that will remind her that just cause other things are fun too, books have not stopped being pleasurable.