It remains the unofficial official position of many of the TBT posters that Jacob Peterson really is simply Peter Vermes's mascot, and that as such, he should be included in much more of our site material. I will readily admit that I cannot top the comic genius exhibited by one Mr. Will McDonald in his letters home by Mitch Maier from summer baseball camp, but I think my book reports by Jake Peterson are good for some lol's at the (entirely good-natured) expense of Vermes's class pet. This is the second installment of "Book Reports by Jake Peterson," with the first being a report on Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Please enjoy!

~DY

A Report on the Harry Potter series, by Jake Peterson

After A Christmas Carol, Mr. Vermes assigned the class to read the entire Harry Potter series for our junior high English class. Holy cow! That's eight movies! I'm glad that Kevin, Erik, and Jon all came over to my movie marathon night for this assignment, because I made way too much Jiffy Pop popcorn for just me, and Mr. Vermes told me to stop bringing him popcorn in class because all it did was make him want to throw it at the fourth officials during our games.

So this series is about a boy named Harry Potter, who looks a little like Connor, only instead of playing soccer, he plays this sport called quidditch, which sounds kinda dirty if you ask me, but I suppose nobody did, so I'll just keep going. Quidditch is like soccer but it is played on broomsticks with weird names like Nimbus and Cleansweep. I bet if I played quidditch, my broomstick would have the best work rate of all the broomsticks. But I also never read about Harry's team having any substitutes, so I don't know if I'd even be able to play.

Harry's best friends are named Ron and Hermione, and they cheer for him at quidditch games, and Ron even joins Harry's team eventually, although it turns out he isn't a much better keeper than Luis. I think I would be a better keeper than either of them, because Mr. Vermes tells me I can play any position awesomely, but Tim refuses to let me wear his super-special gloves and shirt, so I guess I'll never know. I don't know if I like Tim very much, because he really stole my lovable underdog style and now all the cute girls are more interested in him than me. When I pointed this out to him, he told me maybe I should stop pretending to be Chance and get a haircut already. He's definitely not getting any leftover Jiffy Pop now, that's for sure.

Harry's enemy is named He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named or You-Know-Who, which I feel like is just a mean trick the characters are playing on me, because I don't know who they're talking about because they won't say his name. So I'm just going to refer to him as Brad Davis, who's this lame-o elf who plays for another school's team and thinks he's as cool as Harry when he obviously isn't.

There are lots of other character who say British-y things that, being a proud American, I didn't understand, so I assume that none of that was important. Mostly, this series is about a plucky underdog like me, except he looks like Connor and plays his sports as good as Tim and has cooler friends than me and does this magic thing that I wish I could do because then maybe I could magic the ball into the goal during a game sometime and make Mr. Vermes proud of me again.

Man, for supposedly being a children's story, Harry Potter has got me all depressed about my life now. I think that's what being a "Muggle" is about, though. But if Mr. Vermes gives me another A for effort for this book report, I'll be happy again. I live for his approval so much, it actually hurts my brain some days.

I wonder if I should go see Kenny and Chet about that. Ike says they're really nice guys.

JAKE