For many public figures, Facebook and Twitter activity reached an all-time, polarizing high yesterday, and no local politician’s account had as much activity as our former Vice Mayor Jim Gray’s. While some politically charged pundits crafted well thought out opinions, the rest just typing their thoughts in all caps, our newsroom kept seeing Facebook notifications from Gray, only to visit the page and see no new content.
“I wanted my post to be just right, and every time I posted, it was wrong so I took the post down and tried again,” Gray began his explanation for the disappearing statuses, “everyone knows I belong in Gryffindor, but I kept getting put in Ravenclaw on this darned quiz. Just a bunch of hufflepuff if you ask me.”
It seems Gray took a brief break from his standard afternoon routine of Facebook games, and while he waited for his friends to respond to the Dragon City and Bejeweled Blitz requests he’d sent out, he decided to keep himself entertained by finding out which Harry Potter house he’d be placed in.
“I was out of lives on Bejeweled and needed something else to occupy my brain for the next four minutes,” Gray said as he stared deep into the middle distance, looking in our direction but you could tell no true eye contact was being made, his eyes, sort of glazed over. “It’s a strange and dark time we live in, you can’t begrudge a guy from wanting to get away from thinking about the bi-partisan yelling and screaming, so what if I run off to Hogwarts for a minute to see where the sorting hat would place me.”
Gray shook his head, and laughed as he realized there were other people in the room, he made eye contact with a reporter and his pupils returned to their normal size, “Hahaha, oh and ol’ Steve Kay loves the books too, he’s a real Pot-head just like me, in fact I got hooked by reading the books to Steve every afternoon before his nap time.”
“Anyway, you were asking me something about Facebook? Oh, yeah, do I feel like it’s cheating to retake a quiz? No. There were a lot of answers where I could’ve gone either way. People change their minds you know,” an increasingly defensive Gray explained. “I’m a Gryffindor! Got it? Maybe it took a couple of tries but you don’t read a choose-your-own-adventure book once and throw it away! I’m a Gryffindor.”