The Telegraph reported today that Emma Watson was named the World’s Sexiest  Film Actress. It was their excuse for compiling all their best pictures of the young actress. For the story and the Top Ten list itself, check out the BBC.

I’m putting this news under ‘Shared Text’ for three reasons which I’ll offer as questions or observations:

(1) Without looking it up, name more than one movie in which Emma Watson appears whose title does not begin with the three words ‘Harry Potter and.‘ Draw your own conclusion.

(2) Scarlett Johansson came in second — the woman Esquire has twice named ‘The Sexiest Woman Alive’ — and Jennifer Lawrence was third. Just sayin.’

(3) Scroll through the Watson fashion pictures at the Telegraph compilation. Try not to think of the words ‘cute’ or ‘pixie’ or ‘trying too hard.’  Then read today’s Shoe comic strip:

I have to assume that, no matter how I put this, I will be assumed to be insulting the undeniably talented, intelligent, and attractive Emma Watson. So be it. Let me be brief then with my Shared Text assertion that I think stands without argument.

Except for the Harry Potter film franchise and for her having played the part of Hermione Granger, which character every reader adored on several levels of admiration and identification, no fashion designer or movie director would ever have picked this young woman for a Vogue shoot or a feature film. Hermione Granger won the Sexiest Film Actress award today because voters chose to express their warm feelings for this character.

Go ahead. Tell me how wrong I am.

‘Bombing Suspects Followed Harry Potter-Hating Australian Sheikh’

That’s the headline of a FoxNews.com article by Jamie Dettmer that was posted 19 April this year. Here are the lede paragraphs:

Four months ago, the Boston bombing suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed yesterday in a shootout with police, uploaded to his YouTube Channel an eight-minute lecture by the radical Australian Muslim preacher Sheikh Feiz Mohammed denouncing the Harry Potter movies for glorifying and promoting paganism.

“How can you allow your children to watch this?” the sheikh demands in the table-thumping lecture. “This film glorifies, magnifies, promotes paganism…What does Harry Potter do and his devilish schoolmates, what do they do? They cast spells, learn magic, brew potions, learn how to tell the future…And this is called harmless.”

He condemns the Harry Potter movies for being built on shirk — the sin of worshipping someone or something other than Allah.