Roads to Safe Places

• Minerva/Severus
• Minerva/Pomona
• Minerva/Rolanda
• Pomona/Rosmerta
• Book
• Minerva/Poppy

• White Collar: two WASPs, one FBI agent and a con-artist he arrested, strike an unlikely deal and fight crime. I don't really understand why this entertains me so much, especially given the paucity and relative two-dimensionality of the few female characters, but it is still entertaining to watch the main characters, in a The Pretender kind of way. The formula gets repetitive, though, but I am charmed by the fact that the main pairing of the show's fandom seems to be an OT3: con-artist/cop's wife/cop. 

• Pretty Little Liars - Desperate Housewives meets I Know What You Did Last Summer, sort of - four sixteen-year-old High School girls receive (text-) messages from someone impersonating their murdered friend Alison. The impersonator tries to expose the various secrets the four are entangled in and takes revenge on them.  I am trying really, really hard to get into this, but fail because if this is what today's fifteen-year-olds think of themselves, it's hilarious.
  So grown UP! And though I suspect that they do have a tongue-in-cheek My So-Called Life-take sometimes, this is not always that obvious. Especially the romantic storyline between one of their number and her teachers creeps me the hell out. I can see it work as a teenager fantasy, but I don't believe anyone would show this as a good thing on a show aimed at this demography. And those kids are so serious and GROWN-UP! Definitely old enough to have statutory rape-y relationships with their High School English teachers! Because they're TOTALLY WISE beyond their years! And if said High School teacher starts catching on and notices this might be dangerous for his job and leaves town, they are sad for days. DAYS, man! Also, the main characters are responsible for a fire that blinded another character, but we don't have to feel sorry for her, apparently, because she's creepy. Yeah. Also, they all look the same, and though one of them isn't white, no-one seems to be aware of that fact, which I found sad. I'm also shocked that Holly Mary Combs (37) has reached mother-character age already, especially seeing as her "daughter" Lucy Hale is 22. 

"Wer niemals ganze Nachmittage lang mit glühenden Ohren und verstrubbeltem Haar über einem Buch saß und las und las und die Welt um sich her vergaß, nicht mehr merkte, daß er hungrig wurde oder fror -

Wer niemals heimlich beim Schein einer Taschenlampe unter der Bettdecke gelesen hat, weil Vater oder Mutter oder sonst irgendeine besorgte Person einem das Licht ausknipste mit der gutgemeinten Begründung, man müsse jetzt schlafen, da man doch morgen so früh aus den Federn sollte -

Wer niemals offen oder im geheimen bitterliche Tränen vergossen hat, weil eine wunderbare Geschichte zu Ende ging und man Abschied nehmen mußte von den Gestalten, mit denen man gemeinsam so viele Abenteuer erlebt hatte, die man liebte und bewunderte, um die man gebangt und für die man gehofft hatte, und ohne deren Gesellschaft einem das Leben leer und sinnlos schien -

Wer nichts von alledem aus eigener Erfahrung kennt, nun, der wird wahrscheinlich nicht begreifen können, was Bastian jetzt tat."

"If you have never spent whole afternoons with burning ears and rumpled hair, forgetting the world around you over a book, forgetting cold and hunger--

If you have never read secretly under the bedclothes with a flashlight, because your father or mother or some other well-meaning person has switched off the lamp on the plausible ground that it was time to sleep because you had to get up so early--

If you have never wept bitter tears because a wonderful story has come to an end and you must take your leave of the characters with whom you have shared so many adventures, whom you have loved and admired, for whom you have hoped and feared, and without whose company life seems empty and meaningless--

If such things have not been part of your own experience, you probably won't understand what Bastian did next."

• "The lack of economic and integrational success of the Damascan people are due to cultural features which are due to the Muslim faith."
• "Most of them [Arabs and Turkish people] don't feel discriminated against."
• "If you're discriminated against if you wear a headscarf that's your own choice. [...] You could as well live in the United States or in Turkey." 
• "The Turkish woman which lives in Germany told me some weeks ago, 'Please don't take these mental aggravations seriously, oriental people tend to play with their emotions and love to raise guilt in others.'" 
• "I have alienated nobody. I have just stated facts, and that's alienating nobody."
• "I think if the United States would be better off if they were careful with having two different languages in one country."