I’ve written about Joe Posnanski before. Not only is he America’s greatest sportswriter, he is also a real Harry Potter fan. In the most recent post I’ve written about him, I explained Posnanski’s success in losing weight on the Harry Potter Diet Plan and included links to the other HogwartsProfessor posts I’ve written about his love for Rowling’s first and her best selling novels (aside here: I’m a Serious Striker and I love Christmas Pig, but let’s be real; nothing Rowling has written has sold anything close to the number of published and sold copies of any of the Potter pieces).

If you only have time for one article, read either Posnanski’s Katie the Prefect or Katie the Prefect Revisited for perhaps the greatest stories ever written about a dad, a daughter, and their love of the Wizarding World.

Though I no longer follow professional sports teams or leagues, I have a paid subscription to Posnanski’s Substack Page, which is called ‘Joe Blogs,’ a sort of sideways tribute to Princeton Review because of their ‘typical tester’ and to the Joe Bloggs who is the ‘man in the street‘ of the UK. Today in a wonderfully rambling Thanksgiving post, he once again showed his love for the Potter series.

It starts with his new-found obsession with fountain pens. He lists the ‘Best of Price Point’ Categories for these pens with his nominations.

• Under $50: LAMY Safari. All the LAMYs are great—there are those who will tell you that the LAMY 2000 is the best fountain pen ever made—but I totally dig the Safari as just a fun pen. I just bought the Harry Potter collection of Safaris—one pen for each Hogwarts House.* They’re awesome.

*OK, so somebody taught me a trick for figuring out somebody’s Hogwarts House that has worked INCREDIBLY well. I mean, like, eerily well. I’ll give you the key down below, but now ask yourself or your friend this question: “You come upon a locked door. You want to get in. What do you do?”

Gauntlet tossed down… A little while later on, after discussing the arcana of that fountain pen choice, at a sideways prompting retreats into the Sorting Hat Question:

And that leads us to my gift to you. I have now tried this [trick] FOUR times, and it has worked every time. Above, I told you to answer the question: You come upon a door. It is locked. You want to get in. What do you do?

If you answered, “Knock on the door,” you’re a Hufflepuff. Katie answered that way. Katie has long known she’s a Hufflepuff.

If you answered, “Go look for a key,” you’re a Ravenclaw. Margo answered that way. Margo has long known she’s a Ravenclaw.

If you answered, “Pick the lock,” you’re a Slytherin. Elizabeth answered that way. Lis has long known she’s a Slytherin.

And if you answered, “Knock the door down,” you’re a Gryffindor. I answered that way. I have no idea why I answered that way—I couldn’t knock any door down, even on a gingerbread house—but it was the first answer that came into my head, and, yes, I have long known that I’m a Gryffindor. In fact, I once had an exchange with Lin Manuel Miranda about him being a Slytherin and me being a Gryffindor. I wonder how Lin would answer the question.

Anyway, it’s 100% foolproof and… you’re welcome.

It worked for me!

This Tuesday Variety published a piece by Adam Vary titled HBO Says ‘Harry Potter’ Series Will ‘Benefit’ From J.K. Rowling’s Involvement: She ‘Has the Right to Express Her Personal Views.’ The title simultaneously shares the news it reports, two points of relatively low shock value, and the focus of the opinion-editorial embedded within the news article which op-ed argues that both HBO assertions are scandalous and shameful.

I think we have arrived at a point in the Trans Wars, the TQ+ assault on J. K. Rowling’s right to speak biological common sense to their shared delusion that men can be women and vice versa, where we are obliged to take score. The science vis a vis “transgenderism” is now on the side of Rowling, the courts agree that her stance is correct and women’s spaces must be protected, athletic bodies are beginning to retreat from their “inclusive” definitions of ‘woman’ that allows men to compete in women’s sports, and, in the US at least, the sizeable majority of Americans voted for the Presidential candidate who took Rowling’s position point by point starting early in 2023 and made it a focus of his campaign advertising in the ‘Swing States’ in the fall of 2024. Rowling has moved from a defensive position during the first two years of an all-out effort to “cancel” her to an aggressive position of truth-telling and of refusing to accept apologies from the conformists who threw her under the bus when she needed their help.

The Gender Theory Extremists, in other words, have lost the high ground. The government, the majority of voting citizens, the courts, the sports authorities, and the scientists are now supporting Rowling’s supposedly “murderous” opinions, “transphobia,” and “bigotry.” Who are the hold-outs who insist against all evidence that “TWAW“? The Twitterati, certainly, and the main-stream media talking heads, but there are at least three other significant pockets of 21st Century zanryū nipponhei who refuse not only to acknowledge their profound error in judgment but also to apologize for their years-long defamation of those who were correct. This article unwittingly exposes them all by exclusively citing their spokesmen (persons!) as authorities on the Trans War status quo. [Read more…]

Rowling called for the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury yesterday and today he obliged her by stepping down.

The only thing of note here for Rowling Readers is that the Anglican priest-child abuser whose crimes the Archbishop neglected to insure were investigated and prosecuted committed his assaults on children under his direction in a “shed.” Rowling told her Poet Laureate interviewer, whose podcasts are based out of his garage or “shed” in UK-speak, that the shed at her home as a child was a frightening place to her. In her renovations of Church Cottage years later, the only building to be removed was that shed.

That’s not enough for a proper post, though, so I’ll leave it at that, a marker placed for a future Golden Thread post-series.

Today I want to talk about Rowling’s “first television interview,” a fan-servicing piece she did in 2001 for all those impatiently waiting for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

What Is It? It is a Q&A with a ten year old boy (now 33 years old; how was the course of  Victor Greenstreet‘s life changed by this bizarre contact with The Presence?) in which he asks the author softball questions about Quidditch Through the Ages and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. BBC One aired it as part of television special about Comic Relief, the charity which received most of the money generated by sales of those Hogwarts schoolbooks.

Was it Rowling’s “First Television Interview”? That is the claim made by the person who posted the short video on YouTube, but it is easily refuted. She spoke with 60 Minutes in 1999 and with the CBC in July 2000 as part of the Goblet of Fire promotional tour on the Hogwarts Express; I suspect there were others.

Why Should We Care about This Forgotten Bit of Marketing? What I found fascinating was that this quite forgettable clip remained unposted until 2023. There is nothing significant in it, but why did it take more than two decades to be added to the Rowling interview catalog on YouTube? It’s a guaranteed click magnet; even I felt obliged to check it out, right?

The only reason to care about it in the end, I think, is because of the credible snapshot it provides of Rowling in 2001, the year of her engagement and betrothal to Neil Murray, M.D. It was in a very real sense the turning point of her personal life and it was the year she was beginning the big push to the summit of her professional life and popularity. The “three year summer” between Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix was the inter librum solstice in which she revisited and re-planned the last three books of the Hogwarts Saga while the world began to queue outside bookstores globally in anticipation of their next Harry, Ron, and Hermione fix.

What was she like then? I think three things reflect her state of mind at the time she sat down with 10 year old Victor (love that sharp haircut!). After the jump! [Read more…]