By CHRIS PACKHAM
Chariots of Fart: I don't much believe in literary epiphanies. Nothing breaks the verisimilitude of a narrative faster than a passage that says, "As she gazed out of the window, suddenly, she realized her whole life had been leading up to her anal bleaching," or whatever.
And then I suddenly have my own epiphany that my whole life had led up to accidentally buying a book with a big pink 'O' on the cover. As it turns out, I'm as embarrassingly prone to real-life literary epiphanies as any character in books by Jacquelyn Mitchard, only most of mine are too filthy or disturbing to get me on twee public radio epiphanyfest This American Life — for example, the time I invented the medical sharps container of mystery, a terrifying guessing game for children. I try to plow all my epiphanies back into Daily Briefs, so here's the one I had last night while driving my car to the Valero to pick up my carton of GPCs and a bucket of gas station chicken, and which nearly made me crash into a school bus: As I gazed out of the windshield of my Dodge Reliant, I realized that my whole entire life had led up to that moment of passionately not caring at all about the fucking Olympics.
"Wow!" I said to my girlfriend, pulling in to Valero. "I really, really don't care one way or the other about the Olympics!"
"Big deal," she said. "You have that epiphany every two years. Don't forget my cherry blunts."
Now that I've had that important and apparently biennial self-realization, I can go back to my regularly scheduled international-sports-related total incuriosity. After the jump, a pretty amazing tale of plagiarism. Click here, or on this artist's concept of how Joe Biden may have decided to plagiarize British Labor Leader Neal Kinnock's speech:
I get all my ideas from the MySpace pages of 14-year-old girls: This is completely amazing. It's a Slate story about a Texas alt-weekly called The Bulletin that has been plagiarizing basically all of their editorial content for years from obscure sources nobody would ever think to check, like USA Today, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Dallas Observer, and Slate, the online news magazine with the world's ghastliest color scheme and ghastlier user interface. So maybe it's time for a refresher on passing off the work of other writers as your own. The key is attribution: Not only do I make sure to include a full MLA-style bibliography with every blog, I set apart all quotes from the main text by printing them in pink sparkle graphics. Here's an example:
That is, of course, the most hilariously un-self-aware sentence ever written by dainty conservative pundit George F. Will, from this column. The pink sparkle graphics set his sentence apart from my own snotty copy while making his quote even funnier. Okay, one more:
The writer? KMBC Channel 9 news anchor Larry Moore. Good day.
Join the Daily Briefs Facebook page. People who join the Daily Briefs Facebook will have ten years of good luck! Gavin joined the Daily Briefs Facebook, and his father was shot to death by an international assassin, leaving Gavin a fortune worth $1.5 million. Heather rejected the advances of the Daily Briefs Facebook, and the $2 million fortune she inherited after her father was shot to death is still tied up in a contested probate dispute. DON'T BREAK THE CHAIN.
Your proclaimed disregard for the Olympics is called into question when viewing the picture of you linked to my name (since The Plog only enables limited HTML and prevents Plogmentary from including links) in the 2008 Eating Olympics.
Most concerning is the Zima disguised as water in the Miller Lite pitchers.
I also see what appears to be a purple banded medal around your neck, presumably from a previous event.
Also, your text is much more effective in delivering the absorption message...I can actually see the absorption taking place within the text.
Posted at: August 8, 2008 5:42 PM