Word: wizarding
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Although heavily skewed to the soundtrack of the baby-boom generation, the poll was not confined to rock 'n' roll, thus "Over the Rainbow" from "The Wizard of Oz" and "Strange Fruit," popularized by Billie Holiday, weigh in at number 3 and 7, respectively. Like most of the songs on the list, these are cultural phenomena as much as songs, and this applies as well to Motown and Bob Dylan, represented on the list by Smokey Robinson's "The Tracks of My Tears' (5) and Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changing...
...this morning at a "Harry Potter" party at my local Barnes & Noble. I don't know who was more excited - my 11-year-old son, or me! The store provided cake and lemonade and coffee (lots of coffee), and entertainment by a magician in a cape and wizard's hat. All of the employees of the store were in costume as characters from the book. Just before midnight, the manager climbed up on a table to lead the "countdown." Right at the stroke of twelve, employees started opening boxes and passing books into the outstretched hands of hundreds of children...
...seconds past the wizarding hour of midnight Saturday, the most annoying and unnecessary marketing campaign in publishing history finally delivered the goods. J. K. Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" (Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic Press; 734 pages; $25.95) would have sold millions of copies had its U.S. and British publishers simply dumped them in bookstores, unannounced, and then got out of the way as word of mouth spread among stampeding Pottermaniacs. That is pretty much the way the first three books about the boy-wizard so phenomenally caught fire among young readers and then their parents...
...some summer suffering at the home of the Dursleys, his dreadful Muggle (nonmagical human) relatives; transporting him and his two best friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry; and then exposing the hero to another threat from Lord Voldemort, the fearsome Dark wizard who murdered his parents but mysteriously failed to kill the one-year-old Harry at the same time...
...past books, Rowling introduces new elements and characters to keep readers on their toes. This time the trip to school on the Hogwarts Express does not occur until Harry and friends attend the 422nd Quidditch World Cup, pitting Ireland against Bulgaria, in front of a crowd of 100,000 wizards and witches, all of whom managed to assemble unseen by any oblivious Muggles. Back at Hogwarts, the students learn that something called the Triwizard Tournament will take place during the school year, involving competitors from two other magic-training establishments, Beauxbatons Academy and Durmstrang Institute. (Guess, from their names, where...