remus john lupin.

Guests of Sirius Black's Halloween party (at our house), you may have left some things over here. So far, I have found three different shoes (two women's shoes, one men's shoe, but no pairs, which is interesting), a pair of what I think may be charmed butterfly wings that won't stop fluttering around the house, a rake (I'm not even going to speculate on this one), and some women's undergarments. You may or may not want these back, as I found them outside, and there's no guarantee that a neighboring dog has not gotten to them before we found them. Also, to whomever may have accidentally gone off with several of our towels and a tea kettle, please return them. Thank you.

[ Order of the Phoenix ]

I've finally come across some of those new posters that everyone has been talking about. They're rather nice if you only look at their formal elements. However, I do worry that someone will read them and form the tragic misapprehension that the minister has any interest in helping people beyond what is required for the furtherance of his own political aspirations.

Spanish naming custom makes it exceptionally difficult to alphabetize books by the author's surname.

You see, in Spain, people have a single (or composite) given name and two surnames. A person's first surname is the father's first surname, and the second one is the mother's first surname. Each surname can also be composite, the parts usually linked by the preposition de (of) or by a hyphen. For example, a person's name might be Juan Pablo Fernández de Calderón García-Iglesias, consisting of a composite forename (Juan Pablo), a paternal surname (Fernández de Calderón) and a maternal surname (García-Iglesias).

So I, the lucky individual who gets to stock the shelves, now have to determine which of these up to five surnames is the appropriate one for alphabetization purposes. I had to read a book about Spanish naming customs, and I still don't feel much closer to an answer. I think you're supposed to alphabetize by the first letter of the first part of the person's paternal surname, but that seems awfully patriarchal.

Bugger. We may have to just get rid of the Spanish and Latin-American literature section and save ourselves the trouble.