Some Words

Despite my resolution of last night, there has been some unavoidable poddling around, in part because I left Boing Boing on my RSS feed.

Boing Boing is a double edged sword by its very nature, one day bringing a surfeit of internet riches, while the next plunging you into boredom when one of the posters has an ax to grind. Mind you, I am not saying that they don’t grind good axes, almost all of their causes are ones that more people should be getting very angry about, many of which involve attempting to counter powerful lobbying efforts regarding copyright. But sometimes I just can’t take the sheer weight of how much big media is bearing down on things like that.

Today has been a good day though. It would be a good day if there were only two posts, the first two posts I saw.

One post links to this LA Weekly blog post with video of a loop of Shatner’s famous “Khaaan!” dissected and reassembled into a film that lets you examine every twitch of the face. It is nothing short of amazing, and I wish I could see the whole thing.

The other was this post linking a post on plagiarism by the president of Jacksonville State University. The Wikipedia article seems to imply that the scandal has passed, but I take that with a grain of salt where plagiarism is implied. Sadly, with cases of plagiarism, it is often not the gatekeepers, but the victim that must police the crime. Because the amount of text out there is so large, I’m fairly certain that large portions of the plagiarism that goes on these days goes uncaught. My father once found someone having plagiarized a part of his dissertation, and got the person’s degree revoked, but it was mere chance that he happened upon it. He saw it in a list of dissertations and thought it would be interesting to see what it had to say about a topic related to the book he had written. Part way through he felt it seemed familiar. A little farther he realized that it was using part of an interview he had used (I think with Norman Mailer? Not his own interview, but sighted.) with all of the pronouns and names changed.

When I was younger, I was always worried that I would somehow accidentally plagiarize something. Then I read Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote I calmed down a bit.