Shared Text: SNL Impeachment Trial Skit

February 2, 2020 by Leave a Comment

Last night, Saturday Night Live troupe in its ‘cold open’ skit a wish-fulfillment fantasy for everyone who wanted witnesses called in the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump: The Trial You Wish Had Happened. The actress playing John Bolton refuses to answer questions but tells the judge “There’ll be no more free spoilers!” from the book about to be released, which tome s/he holds up to promote sales on Amazon.

The book’s title? Harry Potter and the Room Where It Happened.

It got a good laugh which meant I think the audience understood that Bolton was being accused simultaneously of being childish, of profiteering in the midst of an impeachment trial, and of writing opportunistic fiction.  I suspect they may have missed the slash at those in Generation Hex, now all grown up, who were waiting for Bolton and his book to appear ex machina to defeat the Dark Lord.

Once again, though, the chief take-away is that Harry Potter almost ten years after the last film release is still the global shared text. No one said, “Who is Harry Potter? Why is this funny?” As a cipher for best-seller, fiction, and good defeating evil, nothing beats the Hogwarts Saga.

Filed Under: Shared Text

The All-New, Even Better MuggleNet?

February 1, 2020 by 3 Comments

We’ll learn a lot more I hope on 5 February, this coming Wednesday.

She equates the “passionate partners” that helped MuggleNet staff escape Dose Media and founder Emerson Spartz with the Weasley twins. Forgive me for dreading the possibility that this means Dan Fogler and Ezra Miller are now decision makers at MNet!

My best guess is that the new partners are Macmillan publishers, with whom MNet is coming out with a Character Compendium — a Harry Potter Lexicon by a different name? — in the coming months. Media Lab Books is the Macmillan imprint and they seem a good match for the projects Kat Miller mentions.

The good news? MuggleNet will soon be back online with all its Reading, Writing, Rowling podcasts from Katy Mcdaniel and the Bertholda’s Notebook posts by Beatrice Groves. They’re free at last from the profiteering Spartz and his click-bait empire.

The scary part? We don’t know yet who the new partners are or their relationship with the MNet leadership and staff.

See you Wednesday for an update!

Filed Under: MuggleNet Academia, Reading Writing Rowling Podcast

If Hogwarts Were an Inner City School

January 27, 2020 by Leave a Comment

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Who Killed Leda Strike? Uncle Ted Did It

January 26, 2020 by 13 Comments

I promised yesterday in an aside that I would explain today why I think Cormoran Strike’s Uncle Ted killed Leda Strike. I doubt we’ll get anything in Strike5 that lays out this ending of the seven book story cycle but the fifth book will have to set up that finale if true. Rowling’s new twitter page header, the natal astrological chart of Aleister Crowley, suggests that Jeff Whittaker will be returning in Strike5 because Strike’s step-father is a great fan of Crowley and Anton LaVey, so much of an admirer that he named his son, Switch LaVey Bloom Whittaker, after the California Satanist. LaVey, a wannabe musician who tortured animals and abused women and children, may be the real world model for fictional Whittaker.

My recent re-reading of the four Strike mysteries and the new twitter header make me think that Whittaker was not Leda Strike’s murderer as her son Cormoran believes, but the evil person that Leda’s real killer attempted to frame for the seemingly faked suicide. Leda’s real killer? Her brother, Cormoran and Lucy’s beloved Uncle Ted.

I have three reasons for thinking Uncle Ted killed his sister, Leda Strike. Join me after the jump for exploration of Uncle Ted’s means, motive and opportunity as well as the structural and misdirection reasons for this shocking possibility! Talk about Chairos Moments –imagine Cormoran when he figures this out. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike

Rowling Finishes Strike5 — Big Hint? Aleister Crowley’s Horoscope Header!

January 25, 2020 by 4 Comments

The Official Announcement this afternoon on twitter:

It has been a busy day at the neglected Rowling twitter feed. Careful observers will note that she re-tweeted a posting from American comedian (and hard core leftist and atheist) Patton Oswalt a few hours before this book announcement and that she changed the header and cameo on her page as well.

Nota bene: her global social media following post TERFing controversy has grown on the twitter platform by 200,000. So much for the disappearance of Rowling fandom…

Three quick notes that we will discuss here at greater length in the next week:

(1) Nick Jeffery has ID’d the horoscope in the header as the natal chart of Aleister Crowley.

I’d love to think she is trolling us here at HogwartsProfessor because of the Baphomet posts I put up earlier in the month (in which I explained that she isn’t a Satanist or Crowley disciple), but have to think that it really is a pointer to the return of Jeff Whittaker in Strike5, in parallel with Career of Evil, and that a la the death of Harry’s godfather in Order of the Phoenix, we will be seeing the death of Cormoran’s step-father in his fifth adventure. Whittaker is the ardent satanist and Crowley devotee in the series. Good news for Shanker fans!

(2) Rowling is back on twitter, it seems, with the first real postings of note — with the exception of 19 December, of course — since January 2019. The sabbatical seems to have been a New Year’s resolution along the lines of, “I won’t post again until I have submitted the Strike5 manuscript.”

‘Da Tweet’ on transgender overreach? That may have been a family passion, it turns out. See Dr Neil Murray’s private twitter account, @Slowfinger45, for his several re-tweeted postings on transgender matters here, here, here, and here (there are more; hat tip to Nick Jeffery again for discovering both Murray’s ‘Fat Cops’ rock band — husband plays the keyboards, hence ‘Dr Slowfinger’– and his hidden twitter account).

I wonder, though, if the new cameo picture of her with hand over mouth isn’t a joke of sorts, a signal to her Universal Studio handlers, that she isn’t going to be speaking her mind here about social justice and political issues; Patton Oswalt is covering the impeachment hearings for her…

(3) I have been re-reading the Strike novels this past week, and, half-way through Lethal White for the umpteenth time, I realized who killed Leda Strike. It was Uncle Ted. More on that tomorrow and in days to come! Let the full bore conversation about Strike and speculation about the new novel begin!

 

 

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike, Hog Pro Notes, Twitter