Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Uncanny Harry Potter Anagrams

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows =
Worthy hero's plan - Halt deadly threat



The Harry Potter Anagrams page has become the most popular item at stevengalen.com. Due to the upsurge in interest, I have decided to revisit the topic to mine the character names for new anagrams and I have found many interesting ones, including some from names that I previously thought were unworkable.

Before we get to the new ones, let us review some of the anagrams of major characters that are currently on the site.

Lavender Brown = Brand new lover
Albus Dumbledore = Duel durable mobs
Hermione Granger = Gem on her earring = Merging near hero
Gilderoy Lockhart = Liked to clog Harry
Minerva Mcgonagall = Call governing ma’am
Harry Potter = Try hero part
Severus Snape = Save up sneers
Dolores Umbridge = Go, Sir Dumbledore
Arthur Weasley = We salute Harry
Ronald Weasley = Lose wand early


Dolores Umbridge's anagram is perhaps the freakiest anagram of the lot considering Dolores took over Dumbledore's job. Ronald's anagram goes well with the picture below.

Lose wand early

These anagrams were taken from...
Harry Potter Anagrams - Page 1

Now, for the serious Potter fans, let's look at recently found anagrams that feature secondary characters (although not totally obscure ones). Some anagrams include descriptions to clarify their meaning.

Bathilda Bagshot = Bah! Bad hag lost it

Regulus Black = 'Slug Club' rake

The Slug Club was the informal name of Horace Slughorn's group of selected favorite students and Regulus Black was indeed a member of the Slug Club. In the context, the word rake would refer to a licentious or profligate man. It's unclear whether this particular negative connotation would ever suit Regulus Black but the anagram is interesting nonetheless.

Millicent Bullstrode = Contributed ill smell = Little lions crumbled
The second of the two anagrams has some merit. The symbol of Gryffindor is a lion and Millicent was definitely the type of bullying girl that one could imagine frightening young Gryffindor students.

Cedric Diggory = Rid odic egg cry
This anagram might at first sound meaningless but it is surprisingly good for such a difficult name. Remember that Cedric, as one of the chosen school champions in The Goblet of Fire, successfully retrieved the egg from the dragon in the first task. When it was opened, it would let out a piercing sound but Cedric discovered that when opened under water, it would reveal a poem that described the next task. The word odic means relating to a lyric poem, so as in the anagram, we have an 'odic egg'. Since Cedric figured out how to 'rid' the 'odic egg' of its 'cry', the anagram amazingly makes perfect sense albeit in stilted language.

Aberforth Dumbledore = Brother duel bad for me
Aberforth was in a three-way duel with his brother Albus and Gellert in which Ariana died.

Ariana Dumbledore = Dame in rural abode
Ariana was the sister of Albus and Aberforth. I'm not sure if the Dumbledore's Godric's Hollow residence would be classified as a 'rural abode'.

Gellert Grindelwald = Grand greed will tell

Charity Burbage = The barbaric guy = Caught by a brier
Charity is killed by Voldemort in the Deathly Hallows.

Elphias Doge = Polished age

Mundungus Fletcher = Unsung cur fled them
A cur is either a mongrel dog or a mean, cowardly person. Sure enough, Mundungus fled his fellow Order members out of fear during the transport of Harry to safety at the Weasleys.

Peter Pettigrew = "I regret!", wept pet
Of course Peter masqueraded as Ron's pet rat Scabbers.

Kingsley Shacklebolt = Black only seeks light

Salazar Slytherin = Real sly Nazi trash
Salazar's vision of pureblood supremacy was very Nazi-like.

Pius Thicknesse = He's in sick setup
This anagram could be suggestive of Pius becoming the Minister of Magic while under Voldemort's Imperius Curse.

Well, that's it for the preview of the new anagrams. They should be added to the Harry Potter Anagrams pages during May 2011 along with some others that are not included here. When visiting Harry Potter Anagrams at stevengalen.com, don't forget to see page 2 which includes anagrams of the full book titles. How about these two?

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone =
Propped hat sorts a hero: "Not Slytherin, eh?"


Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire =
Fitter hero got near fabled trophy


Here is the link if you'd like to see all of the full book title anagrams now.
Harry Potter Anagrams - Page 2

Also, stay tuned to this blog and stevengalen.com for news about a Harry Potter Anagrams video which will hopefully be ready for Youtube very soon.



Saturday, April 30, 2011

Ultimate Fighting Anagrams

The biggest event in mixed martial arts is being held tonight in Toronto, with about 55,000 fans expected at the Rogers Center to watch UFC 129. Here are some anagrams of Ultimate fighters taken from stevengalen.com

José Aldo = Dojo seal
Jose is defending his featherweight title against Mark Hominick

Jonathan Brookins = Took on brash ninja
Jonathan won The Ultimate Fighter, season 12.

Mark Coleman = Mean armlock

Junior Dos Santos = Dojo sons train us
A dojo is a place where martial arts are taught

Forrest Griffin = First ring offer

Roger Huerta = A huge terror

Matt Hughes = Mash the gut

Jake Shields = Sleek jihads

Wanderlei Silva = Leads in live war

Georges St. Pierre = Repress tiger ego
Georges is defending his welterweight title against Jake Shields

Dana White = I hate dawn = A death win
Dana is president of The UFC

This MMA anagram video is set to March of the Pyrodroids, a short piece from my electronic album Searching in a Vacuum



If you would like to see the page that these anagrams were taken from, click below
Mixed Martial Arts Anagrams @ stevengalen.com

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Star Wars Anagrams

stevengalen.com has been going through some heavy changes lately and this wave of development should continue until early summer 2011. At that point, I plan on returning to music and to start a writing project that has been on my mind for quite a few years.

The Twilight Anagram page is finally complete and it is the first web page at stevengalen.com that can be viewed in two visual motifs. There is a "day" version and a "night" version. On each of the pages, there is a clickable button in the upper right menu that allows visitors to go from one to the other. Here are the links, if you are interested.


Twilight Anagrams - Day motif


Twilight Anagrams - Night motif

Several new anagram pages are in the works right now. The one that is most likely to be ready for the website next is Star Wars Anagrams. Unlike other theme related anagram pages such as Twilight, Avatar, etc., the Star Wars anagram page might not include actor names and focus only on characters, places and words from Star Wars. Here is a sneak peak at some of the anagrams I have found. I should point out that many of the main characters have brutally difficult names for anagrams

Darth Maul = Harm adult

Han Solo = No halos

Lando Calrissian = Ran social island

Obi-Wan Kenobi = OK, I win no babe

Owen Lars = Roselawn

Yoda = Do ya?

Death Star = Headstart

Princess Leia = Special siren

Luke Skywalker may roll off the tongue and sound natural and memorable but those letters are tough to work with. The best I could find so far is "Key skull waker" which doesn't mean much.

More Anagrams

Here are some random anagrams that I have found lately that have not been added to the site yet.

101 Dalmatians = 110 mad latinas

Charlotte Bronté = Let no brother act

Emily Bronté = Loiter by men = Timely boner


Sacha Baron Cohen = An NBA hero's coach

Michael Fassbender = He's a film scene bard

The Rolling Stones = The one troll sings = Sell hot ringtones

He's a film scene bard
Michael Fassbender as Edward Rochester
in Jane Eyre 2011

Mia Wasikowska, who plays Jane Eyre, has a very difficult name to anagram but I did find a reasonable one.

Mia Wasikowska = OK, Sam was a Kiwi

Friday, March 18, 2011

The Perfect Perfect Pangram?

Many of you have probably heard of a pangram, a sentence (or any letter-group) that contains every letter of the alphabet at least once. Quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog is perhaps the most well known. Well, a perfect pangram is a pangram without repeating letters, or in other words, an anagram of the alphabet.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ = ?

Trying to come up with an anagram with those letters is fiendishly hard, even for word nuts and to come up with one that makes any real sense is often considered impossible. I started taking a crack at this a few years back and I often found that sports related themes yielded good results, due to some nice consonant-only abbreviations such as NHL, NFL, QB, BMX, etc. One of my early efforts remains one of my best

Folks quiz NBC TV, "Why ax Dr. J?" Mpeg
If you saw this written in an article or on some web page, you might think it made sense. It could translate as 'People are asking NBC why they fired Julius Erving (Dr. J)'. Mpeg would signify that there is a video covering this. Three others I came up with later were...

Vex NFL QB. Drug zip was jock myth.
NHL MVP wiz just rocked by GQ fax.
Lucky GQ sex whiz T.J. Ford, NBA MVP

NFL = National Football League, QB = Quarterback, NHL = National Hockey League, MVP = Most Valuable Player, QC = Gentleman's Quarterly and NBA = National Basketball Association
The last one is fairly interesting, since T.J. Ford is an NBA basketball player (although not an MVP), and even more interesting for reasons we shall soon discover.

The freaky perfect pangram

When I did a page of basketball anagrams for stevengalen.com, I decided to try an impossible looking name, T.J.Ford. I spotted Dr. J and so I came up with the anagram

T.J. Ford = Oft Dr. J
Since both T.J. and Dr. J played in the NBA, I considered that an excellent find for such a brutally tough anagram subject. When I revisited my perfect pangrams, it dawned on me that I could substitute Oft Dr. J for T.J. Ford in the last one.

So I came up with..

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ = Lucky GQ sex whiz Dr. J, oft NBA MVP

Not bad at all. Dr. J had been the NBA MVP, 2 time all-star game MVP  and also 3-time ABA MVP. The sex whiz phrase wasn't great but I already had a sensible perfect pangram which is a rare thing indeed. But then I thought, maybe I could change sex to ex and place the s somewhere else. With a little finagling, I re-engineered the anagram to read

GQ's oft lucky whiz Dr. J, ex-NBA MVP

So now the question remained, had Julius Erving ever been on the cover of GQ?



How about as recently as February 2011. Amazing!


Thursday, March 17, 2011

Go Edward!






Here's a look at some of the anagrams found on the Twilight Anagrams page.
 
Carlisle Cullen = An ill cell curse 
Edward Cullen = Led cruel dawn 
Rosalie Hale = A holier seal
Mike Newton = Meek win not
Bella Swan = Lawn sable

Charlie Swan = Law's in reach


An ill cell curse is good for patriarch Carlisle and Charlie's the police chief. 
An anagram of Stephenie Meyer is The enemies prey.

I have also done anagrams for the actors. The two stars, Kristen and Robert are already in the Actor Anagram pages on the site.

Kristen Stewart = Starkest winter 
Robert Pattinson = Brit star not open (also "Poster titan born")