5

The Wizard Rock Festival

In what can only be an attempt by rogue mathematicians to create an actual physical empty set, someone organized the overlap of "Rock Festival Attendees" and "Hardcore Harry Potter Fans" in Brooklyn last September. If you've already guessed that the bands all had names like "The Cedric Diggorys" and "The Remus Lupins," well done on recovering from that attack on your faith in humanity faster than we did.

Tickets actually sold out, with 20 Muggle dollars earning you Wrock festival attendance (if you were wondering, yes, "Wrock" is "rock" about wizardly subjects). Though now that we look at it, it says about 300 fans and 17 bands turned up, a ratio that they could have managed if each band just got their friends and family to fork over the cash.

Behold the face of Wrocking Out:

Wait a second, that's... a lot of girls there. Maybe the young dudes in the audience know something the rest of us don't, like that guy we all laughed at when he made it onto the cheerleading squad.

4

The Intercollegiate Quidditch Association

As we mentioned yesterday, Quidditch is an incredible sport based entirely around magic and making the actions of everyone except a single primary character utterly irrelevant. This makes it the best movie game ever, but the most impossibly bad candidate for a real sport since synchronized shitting.

And if we told you a bunch of schools had organized a Quidditch league, you'd say, "Aww, that's so cute." Which is why we put "Intercollegiate" in the title; this isn't elementary schools, or perhaps kindergartens for the specially-differently-abled. Real actual universities like Princeton, McGill and Boston University have full-fledged Quidditch teams. Possibly as a "if we have to cut budgets we know where to start" measure.

Oh, there's video:

There's an easy way to tell if you're playing a real sport or just failing to realize you're four-years-old: Are you carrying a piece of equipment that doesn't do anything? In a real sport you carry a stick if you intend to hit an object (baseball), other people (kendo) or both (ice hockey). In Quidditch, you waddle along like an arts-degree penguin clutching the kind of broomstick that makes witches say, "Don't worry, it happens to every wizard."

3

The Politician Who Must Not Be Named

A Russian man legally changed his name to "Harry Potter" in an attempt to win an election for governor and, while frighteningly insane, is by far not the worst thing a 32-year-old could be doing by pretending to be Harry Potter.

We're not experts on Russian government procedure (and if the last 50 years are anything to go by, neither are they) but we're fairly sure that 12-year-olds don't get to vote. And magical interference in elections is punished by the ghosts of the KGB. Oh, and you're not allowed to use a changed name in a Russian election anyway. Kind of an afterthought at this point, since if the voters were going to elect the guy, really they kind of deserved what they got.

What's even more outrageous is that we're thinking this guy wasn't a Harry Potter fan at all. If so, he would have known those Soviet Durmstrang wizards from Goblet of Fire would kick the s**t out of the snotty Hogwarts rejects any day of the magical week. If you're going to go with a fake wizard name on a Russian ballot, you need to put "Viktor Krum" on that s**t.

2

Fight for Your Right to Wizard-cest-aedophilia

1

Harry Potter Symposium

Twelve hundred people paid full price for a three day symposium, "Lumos 2006," which started at 9 AM in a Las Vegas conference center with a Powerpoint presentation on "Muggles and Mental Health: Rites of Transformation and A Psychoanalytical Perspective on the Inner World of Harry Potter." We are honestly a bit less sane just from reading that sentence.