Category Archives: Books

Harold Bloom, literary lion, loses his shit on Potter fans…again

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Harold Bloom

Some of those New York intellectual types can be rather tightly wound. Here, the OriginalUnoriginal reports as eminence grise Harold Bloom, the king of litcrit heavyweights, Sterling Professor for the Humanities at Yale University, and Berg Professor of English and American Literature at New York University, goes apeshit on some hapless Pottermaniacs.

“It’s crap! It’s fucking crap! It’s double fucking crap!” He ranted at the assembly of overtly nerdy adults and blank-faced children – many wearing faux dark-rimmed glasses and wizard hats – who seemed more perplexed by Bloom’s sub-references than intimidated by his harangue.

“What’s a Northrop Frye?” one school-aged boy with an “I Heart Hogwarts” t-shirt asked his mother.

“I don’t know,” she responded. “Maybe some kind of breakfast special?”

He was taken away in an ambulance, attended closely by officers of the NYPD, but was expected to make a full recovery after a course of treatment at St. Mungo’s Hospital.

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Operation Global Media Domination: the Potter Situation

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TIA, babyWell, Technorati loves me, but Google has forgotten I exist. Ah well, they’re probably just getting back at me for misusing their name as a generic verb; these Internet people are such drama queens! It’s true, though: my posts don’t seem to show up on Google at all anymore, although when someone posts them to Digg the Digg post turns up okay. I also appear to be AOL’s favorite referral, which is weird. I mean, people still use AOL?

Technorati situation:

Authority: 270

Rank: 15,898

Which is pretty cool, particularly when you realize that two weeks ago I was at 17,800. That’s the kind of breakthrough I’ve been looking for for awhile. Now to get it back to 14,400, which it was for all of twelve hours before Technorati did a reorg and kicked me back to 18000..

In related news, search terms indicate unsurprisingly that you’re all about the Potter boy lately. Seriously, you can’t wait one more day? The entire top half of the Vancouver Sun yesterday was dedicated to this guy who’d found the book online…like I did about three months ago. Really, I DO need to do a better PR job for myself. Why should some other pathetic internet obsessed nerd get the cover of the paper and not me? He doesn’t even have a blog to pimp out!

But top posts is looking like this lately:

Britney Spears(?) sex tape trailer 235
Harry Potter spoiler di tutti spoiler 131
Harry Potter final paragraph 129
Daniel Radcliffe in Equus 94
Harry Potter and the treasure trail of s 48
mummified fairy remains found!!! 46
beaver shots 40
Linkie o’ the Day: Beautiful Agony 30
the Harry Potter Countdown ticker: get i 17
LolGoth #16: ai iz kleered 4 takeoff! 17

I’m sensing a trend. Also sensing that hits are headed towards a cliff, off which they will throw themselves in about 25 hours. Ah well, Britney will always put out for me…or just about anyone, so it seems.

In related news, nobody on Reddit is interested in Boris Johnson, as mine is the only story on him on the site and nobody’s voted it up. Did okay on Digg, but not Pottermania levels. Diggers, it seems, have more of a sense of humour; whodathunkit?

The benefits of encouraging newbies have manifested themselves, as blogpimping apprentice With Malice was interviewed and managed to plug the ol’ raincoaster blog repeatedly with links throughout the interview. That’s my boy! He also linked to my All Star Hooker Bust post, and why would he do such a thing? Because shrinking violet here asked him to, that’s why. He also liked my Air Sex story and video. Hey, if golf is a sport, so is air sex.

I’m trying to put together a “Virtual Birthday Present Roundup” but it’s frankly too big a project. Archie, ferinstance, posted virtually nothing but tentacles the entire week of my birthday, and every blogger in the Western Hemisphere plus a couple in the Eastern one sent me the story of the giant squid washing up in Tasmania. More on this later…because I know you’ll keep coming back for the sweet, sweet Fake Britney Porn.

Lolgoths finally came through for me, achieving continued readership and a link from this article; the neat thing here is that the Bloggersblog has something like eight different URLs, all with different authority levels, all the way up to 700. And technorati counts each one. I love the scent of SEO in the morning!

Also: snuck past the WordPress.com censors and made it into Top Blogs and Top Posts again today. They’re all partying at Wordcamp and will doubtless delete me as soon as they return.

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Harry Potter final paragraph

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wave, Harry, wave. You're doomed anyway

Here it is, folks: the penultimate paragraph in the most hotly-anticipated book of all time. I stole it from Gawker, and have secreted it over the jump so as to preserve the innocence of any innocents who happen to stumble across the demented galaxy which is the ol’ raincoaster blog.

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Continue reading →

welcome back, Potter

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The sad tale of Harry Potter‘s pathetic adulthood of relentless, asexual underachievement. From the television series spun off from the movie based on the top-secret Eighth Harry Potter Book!!!! Oh, my life’s not worth a plugged nickel after releasing this to the public: that agent is going to kill me! Still, something about it is vaguely familiar.

stolen from Defamer
Sorry about the laugh track; it was the Seventies!

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zombie hamsters, the whores of Lisle street, the Lord of the Flies, and global warming

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Zombie HamsterIt’s a long story.

First of all, the zombie hamsters were created by rigging up surplus military material to nuke them back to life after they were frozen solid by the Mad Scientists of Mill Hill.

No, I am not making this up.

Second of all, the scientist in charge of hamster zombification was James Lovelock, who later originated the Gaia Hypothesis, for which he is alternately vilified and deified by the Global Warming is an Apocalypse/Global Warming is a Hoax crowd, depending on how literal-minded the reader happens to be at that particular moment.

Third, the Gaia Hypothesis itself was named by the man who wrote Lord of the Flies. Which gives one pause, especially if one is a happy hippie kumbaya life-in-harmony type. Maybe the “Red in Tooth and Claw Hypothesis” was taken?

Fourth, to obtain the components for the hamster zombification machine, Lovelock had to delve deeply into the Red Light district of London, an area whose denizens, it is claimed, held no charms for him. That’s our boy! I’m sure those spinster novelists who were responsible for the creation of the archetype of respectable “confirmed bachelor” would be proud of him.

Actually (fifth!), microwaving the hamsters was an improvement over what they were doing before, which was putting heated spoons on their chests until their hearts restarted. Was one of those Mill Hillers a freebaser, perchance?

In any case (sixth!), it’s a long, strange journey from reanimating cryorodents to inventing the Grand Unified Theory of Planet Earth. But once you realize that the central question is: what is life, the flight plan makes more sense.

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