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In This Issue

• Lie-Hum: A Columbia-to-English Dictionary
• Dear Class Of 2011: Get Down And Get With It.
• Letter from the Editor
• Seven Days in New York
• Magna Carta Libertatum
• Portrait of a Columbia Hipster
• No Man Is An Island
• The Good Life, The Hard Life, The Drunk Life: A Guide To Columbia
• Facebook: The Great Relationship Historical Archive
• SEXILED! -- The Board Game
• Harry Potter And The Spoiled Finale
• What Goes on in my Head While I Get Paid to Pick Pine Needles out of the Gravel at my Local Country Club
• The Hierarchy of Columbia
• Tales of the Inexpressible
• I Love Global Warming
• THEY Watch

Michael Bredin

Sure, I could’ve gotten a job this summer, maybe some nine-to-five gig whoring out my soul in a cubicle, but I wanted to make a real difference in people’s lives; I wanted to do something meaningful, something that I could look back on and be proud of. So while you were off licking envelopes at that internship or building houses in Central America, I had set myself to the task of ruining the ending of Harry Potter for as many innocent, doe-eyed children around the world as I possibly could. After nabbing a copy of Mrs. Rowling’s manuscript, I had only a mere three months before the book’s “official” release. So many hopes and dreams to dash, so little time. I devised a plan. Each week, I would travel to three cities and locate the die-hard Harry Potter fans (who tended to congregate in and around book stores, easily identifiable by their tendency to shout garbled Latin while pointing twigs at each other). My goal was modest: to seek out and destroy utterly the imagination and wonder of the young at heart.

My first stop: Seattle, WA, land of milk and flannel. Manuscript in my hand, murder in my soul, I moseyed over to a gaggle of wideeyed Potterphiles one afternoon and casually dropped a dirty bomb: “Hey guys, the seventh Horcrux is Voldemort’s sled from when he was a kid. It’s called Rosebud. See, it’s all right here.”

The ones that didn’t pass out from the shock fled in terror, their screams echoing up and down the corridors of Borders. No one gave me any trouble on my way out; after all, I was just another jackass dressed in black plastic with a Sharpie scar smeared on my forehead.

It wasn’t always so easy. I spent one night hiding in a cornfield in Iowa, fearing for my life. Local and state authorities were scouring the area for the person or persons responsible for disclosing on an online forum that Verbal Kint was Voldemort. Scholastic had alerted them to my presence and use of deadly force had been authorized.

Sometimes it was all just too much. More than once I nearly gave up my quest. But then I would always remember the best part, the thing that made it all worthwhile: watching the little Harry and Hermione wanna-bes try not to cry. You’ve seen it before, that little tremble of the mouth, the puckering of the eyes, the fierce battle to keep all the tears in…a battle they always lost. The image of those children nursing their newly broken hearts induced a nearly orgasmic rush of euphoria that went beyond words. In my darkest moments of self-doubt, those faces always put me back on course.

In Chicago, a nine-year-old girl confided to me that Mrs. Weasley was her favorite character. “Mrs. Weasley?” I sneered, “Mrs. Weasley’s been dead since Book 2, sweetie. But the loss was too much for Fred and George, who have been taking turns dressing up as their dearly departed mother ever since. The real Mrs. Weasley’s corpse has lain in the Burrow’s fruit cellar these five years, treated with preservatives to keep her as fresh and alive as possible.” My young victim’s mouth dropped open, her eyes went wide, and for a moment I knew I had seen the face of madness itself. And I loved every moment.

She started to run. “And Hermione’s a guy!” I shouted in her wake. “His real name is Dil!” Her perturbed father proceeded to snatch a hardcover copy of Order of the Phoenix from a proximate toddler and threw it at my face. I awoke two days later in a dark brick room, roughly twice the size of a coffin. In Guantánamo, I think. The bastards kept me in solitary confinement until Deathly Hallows went on sale. Interrogators applied electroshocks to my nipples while wearing industrial earplugs so they wouldn’t hear me revealing that Snape is Tyler Durden. For a while, things were really looking awful, dear reader. Mrs. Rowling’s attorneys were pushing for the judge to drop the old Avada Kedavra on my ass. And my legal counsel refused to return my calls, because they hadn’t read the book yet.