Anyone who knows me well knows that I love Tron. It was one of the first big CG movies and it inspired an entire generation. More than one of my students has studied the intricacies of Encom Corporation or Flynn’s Arcade in my valuation class. I even refer to those close to me with the names of the characters in the movie. I leave it to anyone who knows my friends to identify the players. It’s actually pretty easy if you know them. This said, my entry is not about Tron, but instead, I’m making reference to another universe—specifically one from Universal. No, not the Hyborian, although I’m sure we’d like to talk about my proposed script for the follow-up to Conan the Destroyer, Conan the Accountant. Instead, I’m talking about the thing that dominates Universal’s theme parks—the boy who lived.
BYU and Harry Potter
I will be meeting with the new dean of the BYU Business School tomorrow, and in doing my research, I watched a recent talk by her. It is one of the best religious talks for a large group of people I have ever heard, ranking up with some of the iconic ones I heard at St. Ignatius, Temple Emanu-El, or Riverside Church (I used to attend these groups regularly, paying homage to my diverse family background).
So why do I mention this in this blog? We all need guiding myths, both personal and collective. Ideas that can inspire us individually, and as groups, to do better. Close friends of mine tell me the dean at Oxford is a fanboy of the Inklings, and the PayPal mob was and continues to be inspired by LOTR (was it Pippin or Merry’s idea to call a company Palantir?). This all makes sense as technology becomes simultaneously more embedded in our society while becoming more indistinguishable from magic for most (my thanks to Arthur C. Clarke for this idea). Considering this, I don’t find it strange that the dean of BYU is a devotee of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. The main point is that in both LOTR and WWOHP, magic is alive. That is something beautiful and inspiring.
City-types and their Secret Shame
Before moving to London to build out the systems for a top hedge fund, I was always more of an Inklings fanboy myself, something logical in that I was a DM when I was a kid. However, I started to notice something powerfully strange in 2005 as I rode the train. After spending 18-hour days coding, I would unwind on the train home reading SciFi, specifically Brin, Clarke, Herbert, and Stephenson. That was until one day I noticed that all these City types (the UK equivalent of Wall Street bankers) all had their noses buried in hardback books strangely the same size, but with different covers that were very serious like “A Brief History of Time.” They were all quiet and fully engrossed. Considering that those types didn’t often read, and especially not deep books, I started to wonder if I was playing the part of Rowdy Roddy in They Live. Like any protagonist in a B-horror film, I set out for further investigation.
With minimal effort, I soon discovered that the City types were all reading copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which had recently been published. Upon further investigation, I found that Waterstones and other bookstores were selling false covers for the books so that the City types could hide their obsession, much like a corner bottega gives customers a brown paper bag to disguise a 40. Intrigued, I went to Waterstones that very day and bought my own copy sans the false cover to discover the secret cipher hidden in the children’s book.
That night, I started to read, and within a few pages, I was hooked. I then blew through the series going back and starting from the beginning. By 2007, I was waiting for the finale like everyone else. The WWOHP is a good myth and one I highly recommend, richer than Tron and more accessible for most than LOTR. It also has magic, which we will be supplying to the world via the ULISSES Project. What I’m saying is that you will probably see me reference WWOHP again in this blog. That said, this whole account begs the question of who the City types were rooting for in the Half-Blood Prince?