Shattered Glass, WULAD-Style Redux
Ah, it seems like only yesteryear that I stood perplexedly before you with a tale of deceit the likes of which I never expected to confront: I had discovered that some unfortunate and probably pimply fellow had borrowed a story of mine, changed a few bits here and there, and dumped it on a British Star Wars message board to win points with the Master Such-and-Suches and Darth This-and-That-and-What-Have-Yous.

My response was to send the hopefully young man (whom I affectionately dubbed "Jayson Blair") a gentle note complementing him on his revisions to my work and encouraging him to apply those skills to less plagiaristic endeavors in the future. (Others were not so kind.)

So it was with slightly less surprise that I read an email yesterday informing me that an intrepid internet sleuth had turned up another lame soul--let's call him, uh, "JT LeFrey"--who saw fit to snatch up little bits of other people's unremarkable mumblings--including mine, one of those "Excuses for Not Updating Blog" bits, set during the Cold War--and present them as his own. (Unlike the last fellow, who actually added what I judged to be improvements to my work, this one merely prefaced it with "Hi everybody. I moved, I have no time, I am stressed, I am broke, I don't like Ventura California, I'm adapting.")

Anyway, the biggest bummer to me is a comment left anonymously on the "borrowed" version: "I hate to do this but: The H-bomb test at Bikini was in 1954. Dr. Strangelove was released in 1964. Pol Pot and his buddies didn't start doing their thing until well into the 1970's (in the 60's he was probably still known as Saloth Sar and living in France). Sorry. Let him among you who is not anal cast the first stone."

I was filled with sudden anger upon reading this historically accurate crap, and was just about to rush to the defense of Mr. LeFrey's satirical license, when I realized that the piece in question had in fact been written by me, and our sticky-moused friend was no longer part of the equation.

You see, the pleasure of responding to that jackass heckler should've been mine. So although Mr. Anonymous Historian himself--let's call him "Howard Zinn"--will never read this, I feel the need to say my piece for the record and be done with it.

Hey Howard--did it occur to you that nitpicking about the details of when they blew the crap out of Bikini Atoll or when Pol Pot took a shit is missing the entire point because, as you might have noticed if you had a sense of fucking humor, the whole "Top Excuses for Updating Blog, 1960" bit is itself a bit of an anachronism because hey, they didn't have blogs in 1960, stupid. Which you might have gotten a better sense of if you'd read the other entries in the series (from the Colonial, Medieval, Futuristic, and Paleozoic Eras), but of course you couldn't have, because the goddamn piece of shit was plagiarized! So no, I'm not anal, and I hereby cast this first stone up your ass!

Ah, I feel better. Now, to what purpose our Mr. LeFrey might've borrowed this material, and who he was hoping to impress with my drivel, I don't rightly know. From what I can tell, aside from living in Ventura, he has a pretty good life--a new baby, a fondness for KISS, and a wife who's taller than him and makes "Pan-Seared Filet Mignon's with Wine Sauce(reduced)" [sic]--so I'm not sure why he thought that stealing from a bunch of meaningless internet vanity projects would enrich that life. It's not as if we're being graded on any of this.

Oh shit--are we?

UPDATE: Apparently one of the other victims of Mr. LeFrey's thievery took it upon himself to leave 8 billion comments on his site, all including the following threat: "*WE* don't like it. and we have access to all manner & means of Internet media. so before your name is M-U-D, grow up," which I have to say I find incredibly lame. The only thing worse than plagiarizing blog posts is acting like said plagiarism is really important and threatening to bring down the might of one's imaginary media empire upon the perpetrator. Because, if you think about it, nobody has a damn clue who any of us ("bloggers") are. Except Mimi Smartypants, who's a celebrity in Sweden.

Shattered Glass, WULAD-Style
Well, our humble little website has finally "arrived" on the internet literary scene: as of this weekend, we officially experienced our first (known) instance of plagiarization. Apparently an overzealous fan borrowed an old post of mine about the mysterious creature that lives in the waters of the San Francisco Bay (the Treasure Island Monster, or "TIM," for short), changed a few lines, and put it up on some Star Wars-themed message board as his own work.

(To make matters worse, I think his version may actually be better than mine: he put in a bit about "AquaChupacabra" that was pretty good, although it was an odd sensation to read about how he scuffed his "new blue and orange shoes," and then look down at the same shoes—though now significantly older and dustier—on my own feet.)

Fortunately, a diligent reader sniffed out the subterfuge and posted my version for comparison before the gentleman—let's call him "Jayson Blair Jr."—was able to reap the fame, fortune, and adoration of beautiful women that inevitably follows the publication of clever stories on a Star Wars message board.

In retaliation, I've decided to borrow from one of Mr. Blair's posts and present it as my own writing:

Today is one of those days where I realize I am way behind with all sorts of things: I'm almost out of shampoo, soap, toilet paper and toothpaste (so basically every bathroom item I use) and I also need to buy milk, pop and all kinds of food. Further, I need to do laundry and cut my hair and I also have a little pimple on my nose. I have waited this long to mention that I need to do dishes because for some reason even thinking about that gets me so so mad, I don't know what it is. Doing dishes, what a pain.

So how does it feel now, Jayson? I have pilfered the fruits of your brilliance and proclaimed them as my own!

Anyway, I must request that none of the WULAD faithful take the law into their own hands and contact Mr. Blair—I’m over it, and if I may quote from the original screenplay that I wrote for my film A Hanukah Story, "I'm sure that the guilt you must feel is far worse than any punishment you might receive. Now, don't you feel terrible?"

Self-Plagiarization is the Highest Form of (Self-)Flattery
The other day, while browsing a website that was pulling in thousands of readers a day long before your dearly betolerated WULAD was even a glint in its founder’s lazy eye, I came across a reference to an earlier piece from the same site which featured some sorta-chuckleable commenting from yours truly.

(For those new to the world of "blogging," it is the solemn duty of every "blogger" to comment wittily on no fewer than a dozen superior "blogs" each day. Exceptional examples of this might include such bon mots as "Ha ha! Your funny," or "You suck, nobody cares what you think," or "Get Lev1tra and C1alis, n0 pre$cripti0n needed!")

"It is a God-f*cking c*cks*cking damn mammajammin’ shame that this sorta-chuckleable material is hidden away on this very popular site," I thought. "Why not share this with my own handful of readers, so that they may sorta chuckle at it?"

And what are the ethical ramifications of this? I believe Hume put it most aptly when he said, "Bite my fat Scottish ass."

Oh yeah, the set-up... It’s a list of TV shows that have been retooled to be about animals. So sorta chuckle away, and feel free to add your own much funnier contributions (and see you at my gig tonight, Bay Area-ers).

The Must-See TV Fall Line-up, As Modified After the Great Animal Revolution of 2005

• Swinefeld
  
• Llama's Family
  
• My So-Called Lice
  
• Koala My Children
  
• Snapper Spawn, M.D.
  
• Family Flies
  
• Mad About Eukaryotes
  
• WCARP
  
• Sphagnum, P.I. (not an animal, I know)
  
• All in the Family Drosphilidae
  
• Designing Wombats
  
• Remington Steelhead
  
• The Wonder Yeast
  
• Jerry Springbok
  
• T.J. Hookworm
  
• My Favorite Marsupial
  
• The Love Boa
  
• CHimPs
  
• The Greatest American Heron

I only said sorta-chuckleable, all right? Jesus...

It’s that time again, kids, so buckle up for another edition of...

Plaigiar-rama!

That’s right, it’s America’s favorite blog pastime—where a new and exciting prose piece is constructed from only the most impressively crafted sentence from the most recent post (or, in some cases, most recent post featuring at least one complete sentence) of each and every website in the “Hostin’ and Postin’” area to the right of your screen. The result is wacky, zany, and contains 100% recycled material, so it’s good for the planet. Ready? No? Too bad, let’s begin:

En otras palabras: Relax, bitches, we're goin' to Mars! Beyond that, our intrepid, proboscidally-enhanced and tusk-bearing protagonist admits nothing. This must be what it feels like to be an Iraqi.

I had about three orgasms browsing through the thing. But I had a hunch this wasn't true–after all, I imagine the entire Washington State education system would implode in a abscence of Pee-Chees. I feel a term paper coming on, or someone wants to be very naughty next time they babysit.

Is Israel going to bake Iran a cake? As these cases go, this particular brand of political correctness reaches a new level of false history and hypocrisy. The mud was remarkable, filled with oils, swirling, stinking. Yeah, if ten thousand of them were dressed as empty seats.

Yeah, nothing screams Christmas more than Thuman's cold cuts, Pechter's bread and plastic cutlery. So don't you be fooled by all the propaganda coming from the plunger industy. A tad confusing at first because he tends to go, "Reality? Fuck reality!" only he doesn't tell you this upfront.

Yes, only a four-eyed weenie would step into the hardball of Texas politics because he didn't like his district's geography. Alternately, the guy could be a frat-boy date rapist who was off his game until he discovered Viagra.

But I finally got some time to myself, and I'm just going to lounge around. (Insert sound of record screeching backwards here, followed by the evil glares of Venezualan pop stars and horny Java engineers and the two out-of-the-closet latino Yahoo! employees.) Ever since then I have been thinking about trashy pregnant white girls with Iron Cross tattoos stirring butternut squash soup. Before it gets to the point where Morning is somehow...Broken.

Pocket Ninjas: FIRST STRIKE! is not only a subtle comment on a fine legal point, it also has one of the top-ten all-time best Voltron references. I'm calling it: that's it, election over.

I got that promotional idea from Joyce Carol Oates.

Maybe this is considered impolite in mixed company, but let me be the first to say: Mission Accomplished, you incompetent, despicable, lying dry-drunk sock puppet! The Tibetan glaciers are melting.

Yeah, there's gonna be a lotta broken pencils, all-nighters, Krispy Kreme runs, and sweaty brows as they try to triangulate around whatever they predict Kerry'll say. And he called President Bush "Satan ... with a learning disability."

But don't be like the kid on the playground who not only beat everyone at dodgeball but made them feel bad about it by bragging about it later. Just this one spot that looks kinda like Weezy from the Jeffersons.

You might say he lived by the freezer and died by the freezer. No man could film boobies better.

But mostly, I'm just wasting time, because I'm suppossed to be getting paid to write and yet all I want to do is crawl into bed with a bowl of lasagna and watch Ferris Bueller. It will be almost like we are having a threesome.

Happy birthday, Bruce. It's at this precise moment that an unseen force grabs me and I disappear into the bushes. I think once my neighbor's teenage sons leave their bedroom window to go buy drugs or harass squirrels, I'll take my pants off and stare at the computer screen for an hour or two.

Or would I rather be one of those new "fast" zombies, barreling through the streets like Gary Busey on a coke bender? Those women were the most acrobatically orgasmic group I have ever seen.

Plagiar-rama!
Today, WULAD would like to inaugurate a new form of space-filling known as Plagiar-rama!®, where a unique prose piece is created by selecting the most outstanding sentence from the most recent post of every website in the "Hostin' & Postin'" area to the right of your screen. We think you'll agree the results are Copyright-Infringe-a-riffic! Let's begin...

There is some passing resemblance to versimilitude here—if I were taking the sun on a porch in Jersey, and some asshole suddenly started raving about Mary Jo Kopechne, I might leave, too, just as I might leave a subway car occupied by a bum who smelled strongly of human excrement. It just seems like the scale is all jabberwocky.

If you're wondering what the deal is with the unique-looking animated elements, they're the work of none other than Henry Selick, the brilliant stop-motion animator behind The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and The Giant Peach. Comedy genius Peter Cook managed to do it on a 1979 episode of the show. The only thing rural South Americans like to do more than drink is to get the Gringo drunk.

Oh, well, brother, commander, Arabic, Kurdish, what difference does it make? But I've also read it, and if you've ever suspected that the history and present intricacies of the White House are deeply interwoven with the back-room wheelings and dealings of certain Presidential pets, well, this is your book.

And so he occasionally found himself at home with a barista, stroking blue-tipped pigtails as they slept, whistling through their noses. Short of them falling off the equipment, they all look pretty remarkable to me. However, her teeth are the color of a schoolbus and there's an issue with the freckles.

Now the most patriotic and American thing I could do would be to drive to an Indian Reservation and just start kicking people in the balls, but I wasn't in the mood for driving three hours to the Navajo reservation. It will be a sea of sweaty, grunting flesh, a pulsating mass of arms, legs, and fluids, shifting shapes continuously as Satan sits in the balcony strumming his ukelele of spiritual destruction.

I don't think it counts as a "review" when I already know it's going to ROCK.

Well, at least mom is making some good food, her potato salad is divine. My father was in the Taiwanese navy, where he used to boast that he was a big whiskey drinker.

Is this a writing workshop or is it the marijuana-soaked noodlings of some jam band? New Economist poll (8/16-8/18, 1799 sample size) has Kerry up 49-41 among registered voters, 51-42 among definite voters, and a 61 percent on dissatisfied. I love this shit!

I woke up with the distinct sensation that I had cried in my sleep. But I thought I'd alert the few ragged survivors of a once-great race to my recent ventures.

I know you're thirsty for good news, just like a cross-country rollerblading athlete is thirsty for new Triple X-treme Boysenberry-Vodka-Creme-Soda flavored lo-carb Powerade, now with 13% more electrolytes and 21% more amphetamines 'pep molecules', so here you go. Salman Rushdie argues for porn.

Karl Rove must be havin' a seance to get advice from the dessicated corpse of Lee Atwater on a break from its regular pitchfork sodomizings and shit-eating in hell. The first time I logged onto AOL, it was astonishing.

What does that say about how far we've come as a people? Even if they're dead. They'll then push, drag, or peddle these compu-scoots o'er hill and dale to remote villages throughout their clay-ovened nation in an effort to teach sub-educated sub-continentals about the glories Microsoft Word, Minesweeper, and www.preggos.com.

I wonder what it's like to be a useless fucktool in the employ of fake viagra rip-off artists? Especially if you're only half a Jew.

I didn't ask for a wooden turtle. What an asshat.

You remember the horse—that tan thing that 14 year old freaks of nature vault off of, and the thing that your Nazi gym teacher made you basically dry hump in order to pass 2nd Grade phys ed. While I like robots, I don't think that will make the audience love me and ask me to sign their breasts.

Yeah you, the one driving the raggedy ass 1970 Plymouth Challenger with rust spots the size of Kirstie Alley's ass. Grow up and stay grown up, you poopy celebrities.