A Pottermore-Inflicted Existential Crisis

I finally received my Pottermore early access last night. Digital events ensued, and now I have some proverbial things to get off my chest. So let it be written, so let it be done.

I'll stop mincing words. Let them stay roughly chopped instead. There were not a number of digital events that I found disturbing, bewildering, strange and demeaning--there was really only one. I got Sorted into Hufflepuff.

Badgers are easily run over by cars.

I am a pretty tolerant and accepting person. I have friends who claim to dislike J.K. Rowling's masterworks. I even have friends, if it can be believed, who have never cracked open one of her sacred texts yet who have seen every single one of Warner Bros.' cinematic heresies.

But when I found out that I am, in fact, a Hufflepuff, and that I have been deluding myself for twelve years about having qualities of wisdom, daring or even cunning, I let out one giant obscenity. Hufflepuff, after all, is the house of "the rest," taking every magical (and, yes, fictional) 11-year-old from the British Isles who does not exhibit any remarkable demonstration of a personality. It has the common room in closest proximity to the kitchens, presumably so that its gluttonous students can snack between meals. I'm also pretty sure that each of the other house mascots eats badgers.

There is no conclusion to this sad story. My intellectual capacity is probably not strong enough to develop one.

A Jimmy Lolcat II

Two out of two professors agree: my humor is "for the most part well-placed." I will confirm this sound endorsement with a second Jimmy lolcat.

Jimmy Carter show'z meshured thinkin!!!!11

Cupcakes

This morning, in the baked goods section of my college dining hall--not the dungeon-like one with the more complete salad bar, but the one with a slightly more pleasant ambiance and rather less good food--I saw a perplexing sight. It was an array of cupcakes. Now, seeing such an unapologetically non-breakfasty dessert on my first morning of classes--in my choice of chocolate or vanilla, no less!--was enough to catch my attention; but what was on these cupcakes, far too appetizing for 8 am, was even more bewildering. Formed in icing atop a chocolate or vanilla base were the words "I [heart] NYC."

My initial, early-morning reaction was to pick one up. After all, I do love New York. I am from New York! Plus, it was a cupcake. I could save it for after my first classes.

Then I showed the cupcake to my friend. "Wait," I said, my neurons quickening as the drowse of the morning began to slowly wear off. "Do you think this is a 9/11 cupcake?"

My friend the dormant blogger agreed. There were no other possibilities. Football is a favorite theme of our dining hall cupcake decorators, but New York City (thankfully) lacks its own team, and ____ College/University is sufficiently far from the city to justify a show of New York pride.

I ate the cupcake, but I am still not sure what to think of the sentiment of 9/12 cupcakes. Sure, the design was certainly less offensive than what they could have possibly conceived of, but maybe it would have been for the best to keep recognition of the 9/11 anniversary off cupcakes entirely. Or, I guess, we could just as easily have gone without cupcakes for breakfast.

What do you think?

Standards of Excellence

Hi friend,

My semi-regular blog posts are back in full force. They are, in fact, so forceful that I've heard they were caused by some tropical cyclogenetic activity in the Caribbean. Lock up your windows and your local evening news reporters!

Beginning yesterday, the blog known as From a Concerned Friend shall be even more concerned and even more tangential. I will no longer hesitate to write something just because I have no ideas. Whatever I find in the corners of my mind is what I will relate to you in beautiful Times New Roman. Unadulterated concern, like the murky detritus at the bottom of a sieve, is what you will get.

Still, I promise you that no matter how lowly my blog may fall, and no matter how minimally I may censor my every thought from flowing into interweb space for all eternity, I will never, ever resort to bullet points.

Yours forever, at least in digital form,
A Concerned Friend

Jimmy: a Lolcat

Why, hello. Why hello? Hello because it's been four months since I last mustered the willpower and finger dexterity to tap out a message to my "many" eager reader"s".

And here we are again! The West Indian Day Parade has signaled the beginning of a new school year with its pounding beats that drown out the rhythm of my own heartbeat, its helicopters buzzing overhead, its sporadic gunshots, and its cries of deeply entrenched racism--so I guess I'd better get back into the swing of reading and writing before reading and writing take a swing at me.

Here is a summer news-inspired lolcat to tide you over while I continue to regain sensation in my brain matter.

 

We can has peace in teh holy land!!!!111

Breaking News

Osama Bin Laden was killed last night in a top-secret, CIA-run operation. His body was buried at sea.







So that would have been impressive to report had I announced it, oh, 17 hours ago. It is amazing how a partial rotation of the earth can render an entire amateur blog post immaterial.

 Africa is threateningly large! Can we get a Mercator projection going on up in here?

Eastertime Excitement

I guess I should start off by addressing my four-week hiatus.

Dear Four-Week Hiatus,
The other day, inundated with medieval Christian imagery, I realized something. I realized something worth blogging about!

It's likely you know this story better than me, but I'll do my best to recount the basics. One day, a little baby named Jesus was born. This was a pretty unusual birth because his mother was a virgin (Give me a break! I'm sure she got around.*). Jesus also turned out to be a pretty unusual guy. He did a lot of good things, like clean people's feet and revive the dead and give good speeches. For some reason, however, the Romans and/or other Jews were not too pleased with Jesus, so they sentenced him to death by crucifixion.

Pretty harsh! The main point of this story, though--apart from all those bits about doing good on earth and whatnot--is that crucifixes are pretty deadly. Go into any church, except those silly Lutheran ones,** and you'll see a bleeding or otherwise visibly distressed Christ bound to the cross, on the verge of death or whatever else befell him before his body disappeared from his tomb.

Flash forward to the twenty-first century, the era of iPads, eyeglasses and independent Ireland. Today, the main usage of the cross is not in the capacity of a murder-or-incapacitation-of-the-Messiah device, but rather in the following way:

The Red Cross: if this ain't reappropriation of religious imagery, I don't know what be.

By the 1860's, when Wikipedia says that the International Red Cross was begotten by (most likely) a number of non-virgins, the cross, unlike the Jews, must have lost its connotation of "Jesus Killer."*** Otherwise, it would have taken a great deal of insensitivity--much like that which I display in this blog entry--to venture out onto the battlefield under the banner of the crucifix and heal the wounds of good Christian soldiers.

Happy Easter!

A Concerned Friend

*God, please don't kill me. I was just joking.
**Just kidding, I swear! I even have Garrison Keillor's autograph.
***Killer Jesus, on the other hand, might make a good side-scroller game.