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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Sunday, November 27, 2005

So there.

UD was weirded out by the latest Harry Potter movie. She made the mistake of trying to tell the crew she attended with (UD's kid, kid's friends, various adults) why.

"It just seemed sadistic to me," she said. "It seemed to be about a group of old people putting young people in extremely painful and sometimes lethal positions for fun and games."

For her efforts, UD was derided, shouted down, abused, and spat upon by the others...

But then she went home, went online, and found this, from Anthony Lane's New Yorker review of same:

Still, [the director] cannot do much about the slightly tired sadism that is creeping into the cracks of the Potter franchise. The tournament, for instance, is hailed with rah-rah enthusiasm, like any other sporting event, yet it basically entails putting a bunch of young people through dragonish perils, and mortifying fear, all for the edification of the youthful masses and their freaky overlords. Caligula would have loved it.