More “Potter”ing
Via Pensacola Beach Blogger I found Jon Swift’s take on the phenomenon, Harry Potter Is a Brat, explaining how the series is destroying life as it should be [if you are a supporter of the Shrubbery].
Of course, like all of the DFH bloggers, Swift eschewed breaking the embargo or revealing spoilers. Those sorts of things require professional journalists for newspapers like The New York Times and Baltimore Sun to prove they are more privileged than the children for whom the books were written. I have no idea why they thought it was important to “scoop” the Harry Potter fan sites, but these are important decisions made by professional journalists with editors. These are the people who get all of the important news, like the existence of all those WMDs in Iraq.
[If in doubt, see number 7.]
4 comments
…I haven’t read any of the Harry Potter books since the third one (mostly out loud to my children), although I have seen all the movies and listened to the disparities between each movie and it’s corresponding book on the 45-minute drive home from what passes for the “big city” here in Central Orygun. Who lives or dies doesn’t really matter much to me, but it matters greatly to both the senior fan-girl and number one child. They weren’t so much outraged at the NYT rush review as they were at the local paper for being so fast at picking up and carrying the syndicated copy of that review as opposed to it’s normally “day late and dollar short” pickup of national-level features…
…there are serious professional members of the media who had better not find themselves in the same room with either a 50-year-old woman or an 18-year-old woman/girl that I can think of if sharp implements are laying around loose…
There are things you want to learn on your own.
This would be like some cretin using post-it notes to tell people what’s in every package under the Christmas tree. Some people enjoy the anticipation and the surprise.
Spoilers are nasty. Writers of spoilers deserve to have their other, non-spoiler columns pirated and published a day early on competitive sources’ sites. So far I’ve managed to avoid HP-DH spoilers, mainly because I haven’t read a single damned thing on the web about HP in the past two days. In a few days, I’ll get the book, and no, of course I won’t publish any spoilers once I read it.
Do these people also reach out and knock kids’ ice cream cones out of their hands onto the hot pavement?
I still haven’t updated my site for the last book because I don’t want to spoil it for someone else. I can’t believe they couldn’t have waited a few days.
The reviews I’ve seen on the BBC, CNN, and AP give you a flavor for the book, but they don’t reveal anything you wouldn’t have anticipated and they provide a heads up to parents that this is a more violent book than the earlier ones.
Jack’s news caught me off guard, because I didn’t know the Times syndicated their book reviews. This isn’t hidden in the Times’ style section, it will be in dozens of local newspapers.
It is polite to have a “spoilers” warning, but I guess that’s a DFH thing.