Daniel Radcliffe and The Trevor Project

Daniel Radcliffe, the rapidly maturing, title-role star of the series of movies based on J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels, is putting his celebrity to good use by supporting and endorsing The Trevor Project, a foundation that helps gay kids deal with adversity.

According to a news release posted today on PR Newswire:

The Trevor Project, the non-profit organization that operates the only nationwide, around-the-clock crisis and suicide prevention helpline for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) youth, today announced that it has received a major donation from Daniel Radcliffe, the critically-acclaimed star of the "Harry Potter" film series and Broadway's "Equus." The 20-year-old actor joined The Trevor Project's Circle of Hope, a community of major donors which plays an essential role in providing the financial leadership that makes the organization's lifesaving work possible.

The Trevor Project was founded in 1998 by three filmmakers whose film, "Trevor," a comedy/drama about a gay teenager who attempts suicide, received the 1994 Academy Award(R) for Best Short Film (Live Action). Since its founding, The Trevor Helpline has received hundreds of thousands of calls from LGBTQ youth across the country. In the past year alone, call volume to The Trevor Helpline has increased more than 300 percent.

"I am very pleased to begin my support of The Trevor Project, which saves lives every day through its critical work," said Daniel Radcliffe. "It's extremely distressing to consider that in 2009 suicide is a top three killer of young people, and it's truly devastating to learn that LGBTQ youth are up to four times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers. I deeply hope my support can raise the organization's visibility so even more despondent youth become aware of The Trevor Helpline's highly trained counselors and Trevor's many other resources. It's vitally important that young people understand they are not alone and, perhaps even more important, that their young lives have real value."

The Oscar-winning short film, Trevor, is available for purchase at Amazon.com. The Trevor Project has a web site with links to its various programs. There is also a Trevor Project page on Facebook.

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To Search, To Seek, To Find

I am sitting in the lobby of University Tire & Auto Center in Charlottesville, waiting for a diagnosis as to why my car's electrical system has collapsed. (I am hoping it is just a dead battery.) To pass the time, I have reviewed the search terms that brought the last 4,000 visitors to this blog and discovered, once again, odd and inexplicable examples of Googling.

After several other explorations of these phenomena, I have decided to retire -- at least for the moment -- substantial reflection on the numerous searches for nude, shirtless, or circumcised celebrities, or inquiries regarding the size of their genitalia. I am still struck, however, by the persistence of the rumor that actor Daniel Radcliffe ("Harry Potter") is or will be attending the University of Virginia (though you will note there is a new variation on this one, since people are now trying to find out if he has matriculated at Virginia Commonwealth University -- perhaps a judgment that Daniel was reaching too high with regard to UVa?).

Here, in alphabetical order, are the most recent illustrations of perplexing words and phrases that drove people here from Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, AOL, Dogpile, and other search engines:

aaron carter's sex drive is high

catholic male masturbators

Corigliano + Flintstones

dick cheney dances at national press luncheon

dismally resuscitate

don ameche and log cabin republicans

flintstone lesbians

fried fish gay sex

harry potter going to virginia commonwealth university

lsd AND "history of the american flag" "stars and stripes"

naughty medieval limericks

"other uses" viagra

perpendicular milwaukee

Petition to have candidate removed from ballet Maryland template

ronald reagan's library and fundraising and assortment of foods

"Ron Paul" circumcision

"r. steven landes" idiot

star wars nursing scrubs

thought of son as a fellator

tony danza gay male prostitute

vomit sex

was pope benedict ix gay?

where to buy bongs charlottesville

why are gays always shirtless?

will they ever let the cowsills sing at fenway again

Of all these, the one that strikes me as the oddest and most inscrutable is "fried fish gay sex." Is this some kind of fetish that has heretofore had no proponents? Is it an expression of multiple hungers? Is there a restaurant somewhere in the world with a unique menu? Someone, please, tell me.

Speaking of Harry Potter ...

More news from Britain, definitely not the disappointing sort:

The final Harry Potter book is slated for release on July 21. Scholastic Corp. publishes the book in the United States, while Bloomsbury Publishing handles the book in Great Britain.

The portentous title of the seventh installment in the series is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

MediaBistro's GalleyCat adds this enticing note:

Sale of the book in all time zones is embargoed until 00:01 BST (British Summer Time) on Saturday 21st July 2007.

If past experience is a guide, there will be attempts to break the embargo.

Coincidentally, the fifth movie based on the J. K. Rowling books will be in cinemas just days before the new book is released. Reports the Associated Press:

Four hit movies already have been adapted from the Potter books. The fifth film, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," is scheduled to come out July 13, eight days before the release of "Deathly Hallows."

My understanding is that the adult version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will be sold without a dust jacket, in tribute to Daniel Radcliffe's fast-approaching debut on the West End stage.

Harry Potter, Shirtless

For the (quite literally) hundreds of visitors to this blog pver the past couple of days who have arrived looking for "Daniel Radcliffe shirtless" and similar terms, I offer this link to an article from This Is London, previewing Mr. Radcliffe's West End theatrical debut in a new production of Equus, in which he plays troubled Alan Strang. There you will find two excellent shirtless photos to admire. (I do not reproduce them here because I respect the owners' copyright.)

The numerous seekers and searchers for moviedom's Harry Potter in a state of déshabillage remind me of the other odd terms that Google brings my way (not to mention Yahoo!, Dogpile, and Ask.com).

In the always popular "shirtless" category, we have, to start, "gerald ford shirtless photo." Others (in no particular order) include Aaron Carter, Alex Trebek, Andrew Sullivan, Hunter Parrish, Robert Redford, Jeremy Sumpter, Prince William, Euan Blair, Thomas Gibson, John Stossel, Jonathan Silverman, Glen Campbell, Jason Alexander, Jesse Eisenberg, Dan Quayle, Drake Bell, Bob Moffatt, William Moseley, and the Everly Brothers.

A lot of web surfers -- no surprise -- seem to have sex on their minds. Here are some of the odder things they have been looking for:

catholic view on erectile dysfunction
captain ahab porn
fred flintstone and betty rubble having erotic sex
how to attract a lesbian
pornography in lynchburg
pornographic photoblog
porn make you older
recreational uses of levitra

Then there are those search terms that are simply puzzling:

cannabis prince william george bush tinkey winkey
Is it a sin for a man to watch a woman urinate?
Sweeney Todd Sondheim review United States Catholic Bishops
Things I like about Catholicism
what leisure activities does guinea ecuatorial have for teens
was idi amin authoritarian

Finally, let me point out that there is no truth to the persistent rumor that Daniel Radcliffe is attending the University of Virginia. (There are hundreds of you, out there, who are trying to confirm that one.) As best as I can tell, it got its start with this article about social networking sites from U.S. News & World Report, which begins:

Harry Potter currently attends the University of Virginia. Actually, a search for the name Harry Potter on Thefacebook.com, a popular online social network for college students, retrieves 32 profiles for "Harry Potter" at universities across the nation.

A work of magic? Hardly. The number who use the boy wizard's name as their screen name when they log in underscores the books' popularity with college students. As the Harry Potter generation grows up, they're bringing a dash of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry to the quads and classrooms of real universities.

Eighteen-year-old Emerson Spartz founded mugglenet.com, a popular Potter website that receives more than 15 million hits a month, when he was just 12. This fall, Spartz heads off to the University of Notre Dame, and he says he has already been flooded with E-mails from students there begging him to start a Potter club. If he decides he has time to get one going, it won't be the first. At the University of California-Berkeley, 907 students are members of a Potter group on Thefacebook.com, while 943 Harvard University students list the book series as one of their interests.

I hope that satisfies your interest in this topic. Please don't be discouraged from making repeat visits here, though, and feel free to bookmark this site for future reference.

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Shirtless and Circumcised

A curious thing happened when I returned to Charlottesville from a short trip to the beach a few weeks ago. When I posted comments and some photographs from my trip (see "Beach Blogging," July 21), I did not expect many people to be interested in them. But then I found a handful of Usenet newsgroups with names like alt.beach.culture and alt.binaries.pictures.candid.beach. On a whim, I decided to alert readers of those newsgroups about my photos.

To my surprise, this led to a flood of traffic to this blog. ("Flood," of course, being a relative term; it would barely constitute a dripping faucet for Daily Kos or InstaPundit.) And, for the first time, a blog entry of mine that had nothing to do with Dave Moffatt or Aaron Carter was the most popular destination for visitors -- and it remains so.

What will attract blog readers and casual visitors is unpredictable. Besides "Beach Blogging," the remaining posts among my top ten are: "More on The Moffatts" (March 6, 2005); "Karen Hospital Opens Near Nairobi" (April 4, 2006); "Aaron Carter: Pop-Star Pot-Smoker?" (March 11, 2005); "The Odd and the Inscrutable," (May 6, 2006); "Blog Summit Photoblog" (June 21, 2006); "Karen Hospital Revisited" (June 22, 2006); "Dave Moffatt's Huge Surge" (May 30, 2005); "My Lunch with Dick Cheney" (June 19, 2006); and "Gas Prices: How Much Is Too Much?" (July 26, 2006).

Of these, I would consider only the last two named to be serious pieces of blogojournalism. The others are fluff, either celebrity gossip or showcases for photographs. ("Karen Hospital Revisited" is, to be sure, a serious and wordy follow-up to an earlier photoblog, but it's primarily a reprint of a speech from the Congressional Record.)

As I use Site Meter and Google Analytics to find out who is visiting this blog and why, strange patterns emerge, some of which I have addressed in the past.

At one of the break-out sessions during the Sorensen Institute Bloggers' Summit in June, I mentioned, semi-facetiously, that the most popular search terms that bring people to my blog tend to be looking for "shirtless celebrities." Let me amend that: "shirtless and circumcised celebrities."

In the past two or three months, visitors have arrived here looking for shirtless photos of, among others: Joshua Bell, Daniel Bruhl, Aaron Carter, Jesse Eisenberg and Josh Hutcherson (who both starred in an excellent film, The Squid and the Whale), Jesse McCarthy (perhaps meaning Jesse McCartney), Bob Moffatt, Frankie Muniz (in addition to a request for him in "Boxerbriefs"), Rick Nelson, Julian Ovenden (who was also sought "nude" and "naked"), Hunter Parrish, Lou Taylor Pucci, Daniel Radcliffe, Rex Smith, Jeremy Sumpter, as well as the generic "shirtless teen idol." There were no searches for shirtless (or topless) female celebrities.

There seems to be a lot of curiosity out there, however, for whether certain public figures have gone under the knife. Aside from generic searches for "circumcised celebrities," "images of circumcised celebrities," "circumcised teens," and "young celebrities circumcised," there were specific searches for the circumcision status of Joshua Bell, Aaron Carter, Frankie Muniz, Daniel Radcliffe, Peter Sagal (host of NPR's "Wait, Wait ... Don't Tell Me"), Jeremy Sumpter, and someone named "Steve-O."

There are also frequent searches regarding whether Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe -- who will be appearing nude on stage in London's West End next year, in a revival of Equus, which may finally answer those questions about Daniel's genitals -- will be (or is) attending the University of Virginia. This is extremely odd because when I follow the Google searches, there appear to be no Internet rumors to this effect (except for this one, brief mention). Nor are there any legitimate news stories. (In fact, my blog -- for inscrutable reasons -- is usually near the top of the list of Google hits for this search.) If this isn't an Internet rumor, what is its source?

Besides these thematically-linked searches, there are also the simply screwy ones, such as:

canadian national anthem pig latin
find bitch in charlottesville
free gay sausage sex
how to grow dagga
is aaron carter into homosexuality
looking for a lesbian Bar in Tacoma, Wa.
merv griffin and entebbe raid
naked strip game article in Ann Landers around 1981
needlepoint canvasses the prince is sleeping
"sex with old lady"
The moffatts and political issues
tom stoppard npr interview book interstate highway
Truth about Gender of Dave Moffatt
unpainted plaster clown
was bastiat gay
wisemiller's funeral home in southern calf

All I can say is, What were they thinking?

More Like This: See Harry Potter, Shirtless.