Rowling Heads to the Paris Paralympics

Rowling tweeted this in response to a fan who joked about her supposedly heading to Greenland to escape criticism of her stand against the gold medal winning boxers in this summer’s Paris Olympic Games.

To no one’s surprise, she seems to be doing her best to sail again to the far north for her birthday next year. Yesterday she tweeted about Fabrizio ‘Valentina’ Petrillo, a 47 year old Italian “transgender woman” who satisfied the Paralympic guidelines for men-competing-as-women with respect to current testosterone levels. These guidelines are ridiculous because, once having passed through puberty, the male human body is significantly stronger and faster than the average female body, an advantage that is not off-set by lowering testosterone and elevating estrogen. Rowling sarcastically called Petrillo “inspirational” and a “role model,” if only to “the cheat community” of men-competing-as-women.

The first comments to this thread were behind Rowling and against Petrillo, not an unheard of thing now that Rowling’s 14 million twitter followers include significant numbers of Gender Critical feminists, two of whom noted that “transgender” Petrillo’s specific practices from youth forward with respect to his mother’s and wife’s clothing was understood by psychologists as “transvestic fetishism.” [Read more…]

Rowling Still Writing Hallmarked Man

Rowling confirmed for her more than fourteen million Twixter followers what we have been reporting here for several weeks, namely, that her annual ‘Birthday Party’ cruise this year took the Murray clan to Greenland. In a four part thread, she thanked the people whom she had met, shared pictures of the natural beauty there (to include feminists near the Artic Circle), endorsed a guide to the folklore of Greenland, and assured her readers that it was a working vacation, i.e., she had not been “idle” in finishing The Hallmarked Man.

One by one, then:

The Rowling Library helped those of us who have neglected to keep up with our Danish (Greenland dialect) by providing this helpful translation:

The natural beauty!

It looks like Rowling &Company had a costume ball for her birthday revel and that she dressed up as ‘The Mother of the Sea.’ Forgive me for wondering if she traveled with the necessary dress, tiara, cosmetics, and hair dyes to pull this off or they sell these things at most shops in Greenland’s port cities. 

The Maria Kreutzmann book she recommended, Bestiarium Greenlandica, can be purchased at Amazon. What’s it about?

Meet the motley crew of dangerous, cheeky, and fantastical beings of Greenland! 

The world of Greenlandic mythology is inhabited by creatures that have played a vital role in Inuit beliefs and stories throughout the ages. The Bestiarium is a collection of what is generally known about these diverse beings, spirits, and animals. Their stories are gritty, cruel, and reflect from the harsh landscape and lifestyle of ancient Greenland. Descriptions are paired with illustrations by contemporary Greenlandic illustrators that transport these mythological beings into the 21st Century. A brief history of Greenland and the shaman tradition launches the reader into the ancient world of Greenland and how myth and legend told generation after generation can mould and depict a place that was dark and grim as mischievous and lively and full of natural wonders. 

If the Fantastic Beasts franchise is ever revived (ho!), perhaps this bestiary from the great north will be part of Newt’s kit.

And then there was this bit of news, perhaps as much for Rowling’s editors as for her readers:

Taking a closer look at the written page, we find a quotation from Oxenham’s A Maid of the Silver Sea as the epigraph for Hallmarked Man’s Part Nine:

That passage has a note of finality to it and Running Grave only had nine chapter sets, Rowling’s ‘Parts,’ so we can hope that she is nearing the finish line. I have to doubt very much, though, that it will be available for your Serious Striker’s stocking stuffer this December. Alas!

For a in depth conversation about the Maid of the Silver Sea and Oxenham, Nick Jeffery tells all in ‘Sark, Snark and Censorship.’

One jokester on the thread noted the hysteria that had been going on in her absence about her Olympic boxing “cyber-bullying” and how her silence for several weeks had meant to her critics that she was retreating from her war against gender theory extremists (discussed here). Her response was characteristically buoyant, appropriate for a woman sailing back across the North Atlantic in her yacht.

Tomorrow, some thoughts on the influence of P. D. James on Robert Galbraith. Stay tuned!

 

Rowling to be Sued for Cyberbullying?

Last week I postedRowling Rages Against Olympic Women’s Boxing Debacle,‘ in which piece I reported on the author’s sixteen tweets between 30 July and 3 August on the subject of men being permitted to compete against women in the 2024 Olympic Games. See that article for the facts about these karyotype XY boxers, the pushback against Rowling’s  assertion that this is being allowed by a “misogynistic sporting establishment” rather than by an IOC cowed by feminists and their genderist offspring, and my thoughts about the relative importance of this story compared to the UK riots and incipient war between Iran and Israel.

Since I wrote that post, the Algerian and Taiwanese boxers won all their matches against biological women and were awarded gold medals. Rowling has tweeted and retweeted fifteen more times on this subject since 7 August; her only other three tweets in that time frame were one to condemn the UK riots targeting Muslim groups (nothing about those targeting “non Asian” populations or the causes of anti-Labour riots as well as the attacks on immigrants in the UK), one about the Islamist state’s abuse of women in Iraq, and another about those in Iran.

[Aside: again, nothing about the history of Islamist crimes against women in the United Kingdom or the context of the UK riots contra open immigration, making the irony and hypocrisy of her rioting post’s exclusivity that much more obvious. See ‘England Burning’ for the necessary historical perspective and typology of current populist protests in the US and UK that you won’t find in Rowling’s tweets.]

Regardless, Rowling has tweeted on the subject of men being able to beat up women in the 2024 Olympics more than thirty times since the end of July; thirty one out of thirty seven tweets and retweets have been on the Olympic boxing scandal or 84%. She hasn’t tweeted on the subject or any topic since 7 August.

Today this story took a predictable turn. One of the XY boxers, Imane Khelif, the Algerian who won a gold medal against XX competition, has initiated a law suit in France claiming that he has been the subject of “cyber bullying.” Rowling is said to be named among those accused of causing Khelif this harm. From the BBC report: [Read more…]

Rowling Impersonator, Doppelganger — and the Mysterious Michael at Exeter?

This is a grab-bag post with only the weakest of a connecting thread, namely, all three pieces have something to do with J. K. Rowling.

The first is the evidence Andy Ngo uncovered in April 2023 that radical leftist Talia Lavin had decided to impersonate J. K. Rowling on the Twitter social media platform in order to put “trans-phobic” words in the author’s mouth. If you check out the Lavin wikipedia page, you’ll see this wasn’t her first offense with respect to irresponsible behavior online.

The second is a Ukrainian woman living in the Donbass region who appears to be Rowling’s body-double or doppelganger. As you can see from the picture, she’s a dead ringer for The Presence, say, in 2005, and, at 5’2,” not far off in height, even allowing that it is a much younger Rowling that she resembles. Life in Ukraine, especially in the Donbass, is unimaginably difficult today because of the proxy war being fought between the United States and the Russian Federation there; perhaps Rowling, Inc., could find a job for ‘Oksana, Age 43‘ as a Rowling stand-in for engagements she is obliged to show her face and do little else? I think she belongs on these lists of ‘Nine Regular People Who Look Like Celebrities‘ or ‘Twenty-Two Celebrity Doppelgangers.’

And, third and last, I searched and searched online for digital versions of the photographs of Rowling as a college student at the University of Exeter that are in Sean Smith’s J. K. Rowling: A Biography. I had no luck with that and, sadly, the book has no photo credits or exact dates so the pictures cannot be searched in that fashion. This is a real shame, because two of the pictures are of Rowling out on the town with three friends, two young women and one man. These are the only pictures we have of Rowling at UExeter outside of graduation — and they feature a guy, perhaps even the mysterious boyfriend?

I’m fairly confident that this man is either the “Michael” boyfriend of seven years, the break-up with whom after she lived with him in Manchester 1990-1991, inspired her decision to leave the UK for Portugal, or, much more likely, that he knows the real “Michael’s” surname. He looks like an accountant, rugby player, and, alas, not especially bright, which is to say, he could be the inspiration for Matt Cunliffe.  To be fair, of course, who looks their best in candid pictures taken in a bar, frat, or club?

Regardless, if you’ve seen this man or recognize him, please write to me at john at HogwartsProfessor dot com. I have tried for matches with him at TinEye.com (zero matches) and SocialCatfish.com (twenty-seven matches for $6.87 I don’t have); why not unleash the power of our readership to find the man? Happy Surfing!

‘It’s the Mold!’ Rowling Twixter Cameo Shots Launch Bizarro Theories

I have posted here through the years an irregular feature called ‘Shared Text.’ Those posts were inevitably inspired by someone, somewhere — anywhere, everywhere — using a reference to Harry Potter to make a point. It could be to Snape or Hermione, too often it is to Voldemort (everybody thinks the other guy is the Dark Lord’s minion), more often than not, it’s just a ‘Hogwarts’ call-out. My favorite, the ‘own-goal’ of the Covid unvaccinated, to which group I belong, deciding to promote that status by pushing #PureBloods on Twitter. If you want to scroll through all those Shared Text posts for a taste of the variety, click here.

I am fairly frequently reminded not only of the Harry Potter books being the ‘Shared Text’ of our times but just the enormity of Rowling’s celebrity in the place where I work to pay my bills and student loans. It’s a grocery store and just small enough that almost everyone there knows me and about my ‘Dean of Harry Potter scholars’ Walter Mitty existence. At least once a month, sometimes once a week, an acquaintance there will walk up to me with their ‘smart’ phone saying, “John, have you seen this latest bit about Rowling?” And hold up their phone so I can read the story.

Last Sunday it was my beloved tattooed man in the Produce department. “I suppose you’ve heard that Rowling has black mold in her house? And they’re saying that it’s taken over her mind?” I thought he was kidding, but he showed me the story. You can read here the whole sequence of events about the first tweets on the subject, how it grew into a meme, and the pictures from 2022 that showed the same “mold” growing on her walls.

The take-away? People who hate Rowling because of her resistance to what Elon Musk has called “Woke Mind Virus,” especially with respect to Gender Theory Extremists and ‘transgender’ over-reach into women’s safe spaces, are really on the look-out for avenues to insult and demean her. The first tweet on the subject from @mushycrouton reads:  “Sorry but is that black mould growing up the walls of her house? Is that why she’s the way she is?”

“The way she is” means, of course, “not onboard like all my followers are with everything LGNTQ+” and the mold reference becomes his explanation for her being so outlandishly wrong. The black mold, you see, has taken over mind… The internet ball rolled from there. You can read more about this at Rowling-despising sites here, here, and here. The time you spend reviewing that, though, cannot be reclaimed, alas.

The bizarre thing to me about the whole attack-meme charade was that it isn’t hard to see what this mold is.  Join me after the jump if you’re at all interested in that. [Read more…]