Sweet

Aside from watching Rumsfeld walk the plank, do you know what I really love?

Catching my first plagiarist of the year. It never fails to satisfy my inner rent-a-cop, that little, irrelevant man with a badge and a minimal sphere of authority. From what I hear on the street, the anti-plagiarism speech I deliver on the first day of class is nothing short of terrifying; depending on my judgment of the audience, the phrase “I will post your head on a spike” may or may not actually be used, but I do explain to my students that I have a long and successful record of identifying academic misconduct, and that I will treat such cases with a cold, inhuman lack of sympathy for the accused. Nevertheless, there’s always someone who takes up the challenge and tries to put one over on me. Today’s catch was easy — five seconds with my good friend Google turned up two web pages from which every single word of the student’s paper had been pilfered. S/he didn’t even bother writing an original introduction, a transitional sentence, or a conclusion. Like the Fiji Mermaid, this paper looked like a monkey’s head sewn to the body of a fish. I could have been half asleep or even — just speaking hypothetically here — terribly, terribly hung over and I would still have rooted out the fraud.

All this, of course, made me think of that lovable scamp Ben Domenech (whom I see has his own entry in Wikipedia. Born in Jackson, Mississippi? Who knew?) In case you’re wondering what the hell ever became of the man formerly known as “Augustine,” he appears to have started a new project called The Critical — a print journal with an unbearably awful title that compiles some of “the best online writing” and asks you (and the phrase “I shit you not” leaps to mind here) to actually pay for it. As near as I can tell from the journal’s website, this brilliant idea didn’t make it past the first issue and the launch party in August (which appears nevertheless to have boasted some compelling appetizers and — am I to assume illegal? — Cuban cigars). I mean, who would want to cough up $9 to read Josh Trevino’s comparison of DKos to the John Birch Society?