And This is Where You Can Stick Your Quaffle


1207938353Look at this photo from today’s BU Daily Free Press. Now let me ask you something: When did college kids become so lame? I ask because, you know, last year I was one and if memory serves, I was lame—some might even say sophomoric and all to willing to fall back on a good fart joke—but I wasn’t this lame. Come on BU students. You have got to be kidding me. Don’t you have some form of alcohol or drug you could be intaking somewhere?

And do your parents know they’re spending $35K a year so you can run around with a broom between your legs?

Nevertheless, Muggle quidditch has apparently become something of a phenomenon on college campuses, at least so say the Boston Globe and USA Today. Now I love sports and I love Harry Potter (have read all the books, seen all the movies) , but muggle quidditch is not a sport nor really even an acceptable past-time. It is taking a make believe sport—the principle premise of which, by the way, is being able to fly—and trying to reproduce it within the laws of, ahem, muggle physics. What this leads to is a bunch of people running around a field with the aforesaid brooms between their aforesaid legs for no apparent reason. Some of them wear capes.

Why does this bother me? It’s a fair question, and aside from admitting that I’m a jerk who likes making fun of things, I don’t have that great an answer. The best guess is that this particular outgrowth of fanciful stupidity has to be a result of parents over-protection and over-indulgence of their children. Back when I was a wee little sprout, I once played a game of newcomb (sort of like a cross between volleyball and dodgeball) where there were no losers. When you were “eliminated,” you just switched teams and the game went on indefinitely. To me it seemed to be the most lame-ass game ever, but some of the other kids playing seemed to genuinely enjoy the idea that nobody actually lost. I suspect these are the people who play muggle quidditch.