‘Wizards of the Caribbean’ AI Film

“Pirate Wizard”! Three top-of-my-head thoughts about this “Official Music Video:”

(1) More of a question than a thought, but — What are the boundaries for using actors’ and actresses’ images in Artificial Intelligence generated pictures for money-generating enterprises? Are they compensated for these depictions by the computer graphic wizards?

(2) The existence of this “Official Music Video” suggests that Harry Potter will eventually invade all fictional categories, from Pirate Movies and Westerns to Food Network programs and Game Shows. This almost certainly here is best attributed to the success of the Warner Brothers’ adaptation of the books for cinema audiences (whence the universal recognition of the characters played by Watson, Grint, and Radcliffe) but it definitely has a ‘Shared Text’ vibe to it. There isn’t going to be a ‘Pirate Wizard’ video in which the main players of the Caribbean series are transfigured into Harry Potter regular roles; as popular as it was, it’s not going to sell.

(3) So, beyond Harry Potter and the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchises, the music background suggests this video is also a side-eyed, winking parody of Golden Age Hollywood musicals, film trailers past and present, and MTV music video classics out of the vault. That’s a lot going on, but I think the graphics programmers may have pulled it off. Look for ‘Cowboy Wizard’ here soon…

Rowling’s ‘Harry Potter: Wizards of Baking’ Coming This Holiday Season

Friend of this Weblog Wayne Stauffer sent me the link to a news story from GoodHousekeeping.com (I kid you not).

I’m not sure if the news qualifies as evidence that Harry Potter has finally ‘Jumped the Shark‘ or if it is just another demonstration of the ‘Shared Text’ theory that the Hogwarts Saga and attendant Potter Mania is the common denominator of 21st Century life, one that cuts across all boundaries of age, country, creed, or sex (insert gender joke here). Or — is just a sign of desperation on the part of the actors and actresses in the original Warner Brothers film adaptations to cash in before the HBO+ teevee shows new stars displace them in the three ring Celebrity Circus?

The news, in brief, is that the Food Network will be airing a new cooking program this holiday season called ‘Harry Potter: Wizards of Baking.’ From GoodHousekeeping.com’s ‘The Food Network is Dipping into the World of Harry Potter with a New Food Series:’

The hit culinary channel is embracing the world of wizardry, spells and magical creatures in a new way, thanks to a new show coming this fall. In an announcement made on Instagram on September 1, Food Network announced they would be stepping into the world of the Harry Potter franchise with a baking competition inspired by the beloved books and movies.

Titled Harry Potter: Wizards of Baking, the show will follow a group of contestants as they bake and design desserts inspired by the fandom. And if that’s not enough, actors James and Oliver Phelps (who portrayed Fred and George Weasley in the Harry Potter films) will host the series with chefs Carla Hall and Jozef Youssef judging the creations on the sets where the iconic movies were filmed in London, England….

While details like when Harry Potter: Wizards of Baking will premiere are under wraps, the series will be available to watch on both Food Network and Max. What’s more, James and Oliver won’t be the only Harry Potter cast members involved in the competition.

Alongside Oliver and James, Warwick Davis (who played Griphook the goblin and Professor Flitwick), Bonnie Wright (who played Ginny Weasley) and Evanna Lynch (who played Luna Lovegood) will all be featured guests on various episodes of Harry Potter: Wizards of Baking. As for what they will be asking for? The bakers may need their wands and spell books at the ready in order to win the competition.

Where does this rank in the hierarchy of silliest Harry Potter knock-off fan servicing products and projects? I’m thinking ‘Wizards of Baking’ may have displaced Potter underwear and Hogwarts toothpaste. If it gets anything like the ratings that David Martin’s championship run for Hufflepuff on Harry Potter: Tournament of Houses, I expect that we’ll see a Price is Right version with galleons, sickles, and knuts.

Rowling “Baptizing the Postmodern Imagination:” ‘Truth and Beauty’ (2017)

The talk above is one I gave in 2017 at the Highlands Latin School in Louisville, Kentucky.

I’m not sure it has a lot of ‘Fourth Generation Rowling Studies’ material, but it has some challenging ideas that ‘hold up’ even after the passage of seven years.

If I say so myself! Let me know in the comment boxes what you think of what I said about Rowling before her ‘Lake and Shed’ revelations and the Trans-TERF War.

Rowling Endorses Lindsay’s ‘Hounded’

The book is titled Hounded: Women, Harms and the Gender Wars. It is not yet in print in the US but both the hardcover and paperback editions will be available here next January. What is it about?

The last decade has seen countless cases of women being fired, disciplined, protested or no-platformed for their views on sex and gender. Whether high-profile celebrities or previously unknown feminists, such women’s vocal non-belief in ‘gender identity’ as a universal human condition bears a high social cost. These ‘houndings’ are often presented starkly, clinically, in headlines or fleeting social media moments, stripped of the true cost of holding such beliefs.

But what is the reality behind the headlines and noise? What are the true consequences of holding – and living with – such seemingly now-heretical thoughts?

Hounded charts the often hidden and unspoken harms women face for prioritising and defending sex-based language and rights. Outlining the often-bewildering array of tactics used by opponents against such women, as well as the resilience required to refuse to be silenced, Lindsay presents a compelling argument for recognition of the individual and social harms that are being enacted under the auspices of ‘gender identity activism.’ 

This debut non-fiction book by award-winning poet and essayist Jenny Lindsay, whose own ‘hounding’ offers a unique perspective, is a solid, sane, witty but also compassionate account about the very human cost of this extraordinary cultural and political schism.

The Amazon.com page for the book features several blurb reviews, the most interesting of which, I thought, was this one:

“Jenny Lindsay’s Hounded: Women, Harms and the Gender Wars is a reminder of why compassion is so vital for social justice work in a liberal democracy. Lindsay lays bare the dark side of the gender identity debates, exposing the damage caused by online smear campaigns, harassment, and violence targeting gender critical feminists. While I vehemently disagree with Lindsay and other gender critical feminists on sex, gender, and trans inclusion, we do not have to be on the same side to know that terrorizing those with differing beliefs is illiberal and dehumanizing. Hounded serves as a crucial wake-up call to the silencing impulses on the left that stifle meaningful debates, and the human cost of this silencing.”
Caroline Heldman, Occidental College

Lindsay lives and writes in Scotland and it is a good bet that Rowling is featured in the new book. The fox badge reflects that the person wearing it, a Gender Critical feminist presumably, has been set upon figuratively by hounds, whence “hounded,” in the aristocratic sport of fox hunting. The hounds referred to here are the Gender Theory extremists, the TWAW enforcers, who, oblivious to irony, act out authoritarian pantomimes online and in person while claiming to be hunting “fascist TERFs.”

It is a beautiful photo of Rowling, one of the best in several years. I have to believe, though, that we are meant to laugh about the exchange Rowling had with an admirer, given the absence of any wrinkles in the picture, in which both discuss the non-existent signs of aging as if they haven’t been air-brushed, filled, or botoxed away, as if Rowling is a weathered prune.

Still, whatever ‘work’ Rowling has done to maintain her youthful visage in addition to the hair coloring, it is good to see her looking as well as she does now that the tide has turned as totally as it has in the “transgender” TERF wars. For someone who has been hounded as Rowling has for as many years as she has and at such a cost, a true solve in the alchemical formula, that she appears no worse for the wear and ready for the next battle is no doubt reassuring to those who look to her as a lightning-rod leader in resistance to contemporary madness.

Rowling Pregnancy Traps: Casual Vacancy’s Krystal Weedon, Kay Bawden

This is the second in a series of posts that detail the various Pregnancy Trap plot points that run through the work of J. K. Rowling from Harry Potter to Cormoran Strike. For the ‘Fourth Generation Rowling Studies’ context of this series, see the introduction to the first post in it, ‘Rowling Pregnancy Traps: Merope Gaunt.

In brief, each post in this series will explain the importance of the specific Pregnancy Trap being explored to the specific title in which it appears or to the series in question, will detail its textual appearance and what if anything Rowling has said about in her interviews, and will compare and contrast the Trap with others Rowling has used, i.e., what makes it a typical one and what makes it unique. At the conclusion of the series, I will be sending my summary and conclusions from it to HogwartsProfessor Substack subscribers.

Merope Gaunt’s nightmare relationship with her abusive father and brother and her decision to trap Muggle charmster Thomas Riddle were the foundation crime and point of origin respectively for the Harry Potter novels. Rowling’s first post Potter piece was the stand-alone novel Casual Vacancy in which two women characters try to win a man by sexual favors, one of whom deploys a Pregnancy Trap intentionally and with tragic results. A third woman traps her husband with a child he does not want albeit through adoption not pregnancy and the trap is post nuptials not prior. Join me after the jump for all that! [Read more…]