We wrote off this video of the Harvard Quidditch Team running around clutching wood between their legs as a (kind of sad) joke, at first. Then we did some research. THIS SHIT IS REAL!!!

By the looks of both national and local news coverage of Ivy League quidditch, the sport is spreading faster than chlamydia amongst teenagers in the plot of a LifeTime movie. According to NECN, over 200 colleges are riding shafts and juggling balls in the Harry Potter tradition. Even Alana Biden, team co-founder and niece of Vice President Joe Biden, is straddling for the new Cantab club sport.

According to the Crimson:

Rush and team co-founder Alana J. Biden ’11 received a $600 club sports grant to fund their equipment, which, according to Rush, is the typical sum allotted to a club team. The team used the money to purchase two Quaffles (volleyballs in Muggle parlance), two Bludgers (kickballs), three hoops for use as goals, and 14 broomsticks.

These brooms, which were the priciest item on the team’s shopping list, were purchased to comply with Intercollegiate Quidditch Association (IQA) regulations. The team bought 14 Scarlet Hawk brooms—for a total of $583.10—from Alivan’s, a Florida-based company that markets Harry Potter-themed products.

Are you kids out of your minds?! That’s nearly $42 per broom!!! For a sport made up by a foxy blonde who smiled when her publicist cupped her Bludgers at the British Book Awards, couldn’t you make this game a little bit more interesting? Count the innuendos in this post and get back to us.

After the jump, videos from On Harvard Time, our favorite quotes about quidditch, and the picture of Rowling getting groped.

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On Harvard Time, a weekly comedy news show at America’s preeminent institution of higher learning, recently parodied a Harvard Admissions video directed at prospective students and their parents:

The footage from On Harvard Time’s iteration is ripped directly from the dated “Experience Harvard” video; what changes in the parody is the text at the bottom of the screen. The result is subtly humorous: a line of librarians holding numbered placards outside the library has been modified to refer not to the number of books in the University’s collection but the number of “Asians photographed on these steps.”

Other highlights include: “Times you will read the Crimson”: 1/ “Times it will be given to you”:  14128. “Hours you’ll spend on your application”: 120/ “Seconds they’ll spend reading it’: 12.

The Harvard-Radcliffe TV station has changed call letters from HRTV to HUTV and changed its tone from soap opera to silly. Besides abandoning their Seven-Sisters roots, the HUTV site also appears to have abandoned any attempt at serious television. But this video of Stephen Pinker–known on campus as “The Hair”–smashing a TV is aight.

The show line-up includes some standby favorites like On Harvard Time alongside less serious-sounding shorts by the Harvard Hooligan, but even the most informative HUTV News pretty much just covers students talking about Obama. It’s a nice try, but we’d rather watch the Mather House video.

That said, one has to wonder why HUTV would invest their resources so heavily to make a website of B-grade viral videos. (Well, make that bacterial videos since nobody’s really catching on.) Harvard has a recent history of really good comedy and a short history of bad jokes. But since a Brown alum basically owns TV news, you’d think HUTV at least try to report on some real current events to build a legacy. Those Harvard kids love legacy, after all.

So c’mon HUTV. Let’s see some real balls-to-the-wall, unembedded reporting! In the meantime, just leave the real journalism to us.

At 5pm today, about 27,066 of the record 29,112 students who applied to Harvard this year will get the thin email from 86 Brattle St. These down-and-out overachievers will be weeping into the AP test prep books until they hear from the other 7 Ivies. But that doesn’t mean that the Cambridge crowd can’t laugh at them first.

Who says that Harvard students are arrogant about being Harvard students, anyways? (A few different sources, actually.) Well, any doubt can be assuaged by the warm pat on the shoulder offered by On Harvard Time. Reports of a new record low 7% acceptance rate guarantee that OHT’s new video, “You Got Rejected,” beats the Yale Amazing Race audition tape for the most relevant video of the day.

Read advice from Dean Fitzsimmons about money and the waitlist after the jump.

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