JK Rowling has captured the imagination of the young, and every now and again she puts cigarettes out on its arm until it tells her how to get richer.

This makes JK Rowling the most uniquely qualified person on the face of the earth to speak at Harvard University’s spring commencement yesterday. For only JK Rowling can fill those students’ young hearts with the hope that they too can one day rip off the Narnia books and make a sodding fortune out of it.

In her spring commencement speech, JK Rowling told the Harvard students not to fear failure, that they should never let go of their imagination and that real strength of character comes through adversity – proof that if her money ever runs out, JK Rowling has a lucrative future writing inserts for those horrible aspirational greetings cards that only creepy friendless wimps buy.

You know what the most insufferable invention of all time is? Spring commencement, that’s what. A ghastly self-congratulatory aren’t-we-great parade of ‘cherish the moment and be all you can be’ oversincerity that people apparently manage to sit through without vomiting, spring commencement is essentially the last shove that university students get before they forge long-lasting careers for themselves as the sad-eyed people who stand in town holding signs for Subway sandwiches in the rain. It’s dreadful.

But it’s not entirely worthless, because occasionally famous people get to dust off their Big Book Of Mawkish Catch-All Sentiments and indirectly explain exactly how rich and successful they are to the outgoing students. This year at Harvard, it was Harry Potter creator JK Rowling’s turn to do exactly that.

And JK Rowling really had her work cut out for her, because she knew only too well that the sheer scale of deprivation among Harvard students has rendered them completely hopeless – several of them won’t be given flashy-sounding but meaningless vice president jobs in their fathers’ corporations for up to 18 months, and it breaks our heart to report that a handful of them don’t even own yachts yet.

So yesterday in her spring commencement speech, JK Rowling dug deep and basically went through the lyrics of The Greatest Love Of All, changing all the words with a thesaurus to make it sound cleverer. The Associated Press reports:

“We do not need magic to transform our world,” she said. “We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already; we have the power to imagine better.” Imagination gives one the ability to empathize with others, she said. “Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation,” Rowling said. “In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity; it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.”

“But don’t your imagination to write children’s book about wizards,” JK Rowling added, “because that’s my turf and I’ll sue your bollocks off if any of you little fuckers try it.”

Honestly, those Harvard students get it all handed to them on a plate. In the space of one year they’ve had talks by both Paris Hilton and JK Rowling – and the knowledge gained by those two speakers means that they’re now perfectly primed to grow up and become the next generation of global leaders.

Well, that or they’ll suck a bunch of men off and then make a rubbish-sounding theme park about it. One or the other.

The good people of Rotherham know all about famous people – after all, the town is responsible for producing not just Jive Bunny and the Chuckle Brothers but the fat bloke from Hi-de-Hi, too.

However, that's all been blown out of the water now that Dolly Parton has bewilderingly decided to use Rotherham as the UK launchpad of her new pre-school literacy drive. From now on, thanks to Dolly Parton's good work, every child born in Rotherham will receive one book a month until they are five. Sounds like a good idea, but it really isn't – what Dolly Parton doesn't know is that Rotherham is also the UK base for the Children's Picture Books For Packets Of Hard Drugs trading foundation, along with being a crucial annex of the worldwide Stack Kid's Book On Top Of Each Other Until We Get High Enough To Kill God campaign. Poor Dolly Parton, she's just a patsy in all of this.

Not much happens in Rotherham. Sure, there's the annual 'Steal Stuff From Washing Lines' day, the occasional twinning ceremony with old discarded prams found around the world and every now and then visitors will provide locals with important nourishment by letting them take turns at trying to chew dead woodland creatures from the grill of their car, but that's about it.

Equally it's not much fun being Dolly Parton. Every morning Dolly wakes up, counts all the mile-high stacks of I Will Always Love You royalty money that have built up overnight, spends a couple of hours playing around in the theme park she owns, takes a break to count the mile-high stacks of I Will Always Love You royalty money that have built up throughout the morning and then spends the rest of day eating endangered animals from bejewelled plates and laughing contentedly about the time she made Jessica Simpson cry.

So basically what we're trying to say is that Rotherham and Dolly Parton are essentially identical. 

And that's why Rotherham was a not-at-all confusing first choice for Dolly Parton to launch her Imagination Library pre-school literacy scheme in the UK, as she did yesterday. Thanks to Dolly Parton's help, every child in Rotherham will receive one book per month until they turn five, which they can use to hammer in nails, de-stone horse-hooves or just sellotape to their feet to act as shoes as they see fit.

Why Rotherham? Well, Dolly Parton puts it down to a visit by Roger Stone, the leader of Rotherham council who visited Tennessee a few years ago on an important business meeting that absolutely had to take place in Tennessee. Dolly told BBC News:

"I didn't know much about Rotherham other than what we heard when we started talking to Roger Stone. He had been over to the States and found out about our programme and asked if we would bring it here to the children. He thought it was a wonderful idea, so two years later we are here, and we are very excited about it."

Yes, we know we're wrong to mock such an important literacy drive, and that Dolly Parton should be credited for choosing somewhere other than a London suburb for once to launch her campaign. Because Dolly Parton is doing a very good thing to the people of Rotherham.

Face it, with her influence, the children of Rotherham now all have a shot at getting a piece of what Dolly Parton has in the future – that is, a role in an unsuccessful Sylvester Stallone movie and a song that was only slightly popular until Whitney Houston decided to rerecord it.

Read more:

Dolly Brings Scheme To Yorkshire – BBC