Harvard Students Live-Stalk Harry Potter's Hermione
Actress Emma Watson, who plays the teenage heroine in the 'Harry Potter' film series, is a freshman at Brown University. When visiting Cambridge, Massachusetts for a recent football game, she was "quite shaken" by the hoards of Harvard hecklers -- so shaken, in fact, that she had to be escorted by an entire security team, the New York Post reports. The entire spectacle, though, was the direct result of a stalking campaign initiated by the Harvard Voice, a student magazine.
Both before and during the game, the mag's blog and live Twitter feeds featured the kind of insightful pearls that one would expect to hear from the future leaders of the Free World: "We will be Live-Tweetin' the game and possibly stalking Emma Watson, so keep your eyes peeled for that, too!"; "Let's go Hermione! Lolz"; "In enemy territory. Lookin for a certain witch," "WATSON FOUND. i repeat WATSON FOUND." The magazine later published Watson's picture on its Web site, declaring the mission a roaring "success."
Several readers were angered by the campaign, including one admonishment which read, "Anybody can do anything unfeelingly to anybody in this day and age, especially if they feel imbued with entitlement from membership in Harvard College." (What? A sense of entitlement? At Harvard?? No way...). After the Post story appeared, The Voice came out with an editor's note in response to the (non) story, saying the event was "a parody of one that might originate from an overeager fan with no intentions of watching the football game at hand." She then went on to explain that "the blog was meant as an intentionally sensationalist parody for which no real action was taken," and the Post blew the story out of proportion. Perhaps a Classic Lit major might call this "much ado about nothing."
Watson certainly doesn't deserve to be gawked at, especially by creepy Ivy League physics majors. But honestly, isn't this the kind of behavior you would expect to see from the world's Bastion of Nerd-dom? Surround a starlet of wizardry with 30,000 18-year-olds who over-intellectualize even a football game, and suddenly Hermione wishes the invisibility cloak was hers, not Harry's. [From: The New York Post and VeryNoice.com]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
nknj said 5:26PM on 10-02-2009
Amar Toor: Who are you, and what do you know about Harvard? Why don't you spend even an hour there talking with students in the Yard or at dinner, and then judge them? I think you'll find that there are many who don't "play croquet, stroke their egos" or have any sort of trust funds to squander (by the way, the students can't hemmorhage the endowment... you might want to look into that and see if you can learn something). There are also many who are not nerdy. Though I'm happy to admit the legacy students and the nerds are there to find, if you go looking for them. But even they are not as pathetic as you seem to be with this reporting.
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Rosencrantz said 7:22PM on 10-02-2009
nknj, you seem to have taken the author's comments quite personally. Harvard is an elite school, and as such will encourage students to think of themselves as "better" than students from other schools. Not at all surprising. Will all of them do this? Of course not. Will a higher percentage think of themselves as better than students at the local community college? Well, of course the percentage will be higher. And yes, there will be a higher percentage of what we might call "nerds", as you would expect. This is all easy to joke about because there is a certain amount of truth - even though generalizations are never true when looking at the whole population.
So, while I am happy to hear that you do not play croquet or stroke your ego, I am disappointed to see you so easily offended by the author's light hearted remarks. Perhaps you need a little more ego stroking to build your self confidence such that you don't have to get defensive every time someone makes a joke. Okay?
Part of appreciating the diversity of people, as you seem to, is also appreciating the humor our own idiosyncrasies bring to others. We are all different, and all amusing in our own ways. Learn to make fun of yourself! It is very healthy.
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