What started with a tweet by JK Rowling on February 12, criticising British journalist and TV presenter Piers Morgan, has now snowballed into one of the fiercest Twitter battles in recent memory, with thousands of people taking sides, giving opinions and trolling — Morgan, of course.
Rowling called Morgan a celebrity toady and denounced him on the micro-blogging site for siding with ‘you know who’. Though Morgan used wit, sarcasm and whatever else he has (which is not much) to retaliate, the fact that his eldest son is a passionate Potterhead or that he himself once included Rowling in his list of 100 most important British celebrities, didn’t help his cause much. Add to it the unending army of Potterheads from around the world, wanting to tear him apart for saying he’d never read a single word of Harry Potter.
{{/usCountry}}Rowling called Morgan a celebrity toady and denounced him on the micro-blogging site for siding with ‘you know who’. Though Morgan used wit, sarcasm and whatever else he has (which is not much) to retaliate, the fact that his eldest son is a passionate Potterhead or that he himself once included Rowling in his list of 100 most important British celebrities, didn’t help his cause much. Add to it the unending army of Potterheads from around the world, wanting to tear him apart for saying he’d never read a single word of Harry Potter.
{{/usCountry}}In another testament to Rowling’s maddening popularity, a bookstore in North London — Big Green Bookshop — decided to make Morgan choke on his own words. Since the dawn of February 12, it’s been tweeting the first book in the Harry Potter series — Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone — to Morgan. Line by line. It’s been three days and 471 of the total 32,567 planned tweets have already been sent out to Morgan. Now he can never again say that he hasn’t read a word of Harry Potter, can he?
Sample some of these tweets, generously peppered with Big Green Bookshop’s caustic repartee.
And just when you start questioning if the person managing the bookshop’s Twitter account is human...
Big Green Bookshop’s laborious endeavour hasn’t gone unnoticed by the international media or by Piers Morgan. Laughing it off initially, Morgan finally acknowledged that the sheer number of tweets are creeping him out and he feels like he is being water-boarded.
Well, that’s how you manage mischief. A job well done by Big Green Bookshop, we say!
The author tweets @sneha_bengani
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