Matt Elliott’s Online

Quidditch, anyone?

So Dalhousie University, with is kind of the university I went to – but not in the sense that I graduated from there or applied there or, really, liked it all that much (it is complicated) — has a big advertising campaign going in Toronto right now. I saw this subway ad on the Bloor-Danforth subway line. Sorry for the crappy picture: I was doing my best to NOT make it look like I was trying to take covert pictures of those two dudes across from me.

“Quidditch, anyone?” the ad says. And then there are people dressed like Harry Potter. What the fuck, Dalhousie. You have a medical school. You’re one of the bigger universities in Canada. You’re part of the entirely fictional Canadian Ivy League. (Sometimes.) And you decide to spend money advertising the fact that there’s some club on campus that plays Quidditch? A fictional sport from Harry Potter? Can these kids even fly on their broomsticks? Or do they just run around with the stick between their legs making wooshing sounds?

Because the wooshing sounds would just push me right over the edge.

I forget exactly what it was (possibly a news report), but I saw some video about Quidditch clubs at universities. They literally do run around in scarves holding broomsticks between their legs. I didn’t catch any wooshing sounds, but they were talking over most of the footage anyway, so yeah, probably some wooshing sounds in there.

Possibly the most mindfuckingly insane thing about these clubs is what they do for the golden snitch. They get somebody really fast (usually a member of the university’s track team) to dress up in a gold leotard and run around. As per traditional rules of Quidditch, once the snitch is caught (ie once the track dude in the gold pants finally gets tired and someone manages to touch him), the game is over.

But really, why wouldn’t you want to use that to advertise your university?