Not All Who Wander Are Lost

It's All Mine, I Tell You

It takes a while to get to the blogroll on a dial-up. Here's what's new elseblog:

Item: Way back on Wednesday, Alex Halavais wrote of an article in today’s NY Times ... [that] indicates that 38% of undergraduates cut and pasted parts of their work from the internet in the last year. That’s up from 10% three years ago. Scary. [n.b.: In appreciation of Alex' fine work, I copied-and-pasted most of the last three sentences directly from his blog into mine.]

Item: It's Tricky to rock a rhyme to rock a rhyme that's right on time
It's Tricky...it's Tricky (Tricky) Tricky (Tricky)
It's Tricky to rock a rhyme to rock a rhyme that's right on time
It's Tricky...Tr tr tr tricky (Tricky) Trrrrrrrrrrricky

Okay, so I really got Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This, just like mrs_fezziwig. But only because there wasn't a Howard Jones song on the Which 80's Song Fits You list -- c'mon, quizilla, where's Howard Jones?

Item: Via Webraw, a Shock and Awe story purporting to debunk snopes for "making up" a story about binLaden relatives being flown out of the USA on George Bush's personal say-so two days after 9/11 despite the national no-fly zone at that time, and erroneously attributing it to Michael Moore. To be fair, snopes does seem to be eating humble pie, and rightfully so, for attributing all or even most of the runor-mill's worst-case-scenario broadly incorrect version of the story to Moore.

But Moore is no saint, and doesn't deserve our pity here, despite what SandA says. Because Shock and Awe, in order to show how Snopes was in the wrong, ends up having to assert that Moore's original statement on the daily show which seemed to relate to the being-debunked rumor is "a correct statement" as long as "...you changed "out of the USA" to "an undisclosed, secure location."

Sorry, Moorites -- not this time, either. This is exactly the kind of mental gymnastics that makes Moore so deserving of our scorn. There's a HUGE difference between flying within the USA and flying out of the USA (and with George Bush's personal involvement, yet!) during such tense, wartime moments. Time to face the truth: your hero is fast and furious with detail, making him an unreliable witness and a poor journalist. At his worst, like back when in Bowling for Columbine he "bent" the videography and edited carefully to make it look like banks were trading guns for cash with no waiting period (not true), he bends reality so far he makes shit up and then claims it's "basically true." He's managed to drag Tom Tomorrow, who used to be (sometimes) smarter than that, onto the bandwagon, too -- please, will somebody'd stop Moore before the entire world goes machiavellian and vague-minded? Doesn't precision count for anything anymore?

In addition: Hilatron goes to Lansdowne Street, one of my own old adolescent haunts, to party in Fenway's shadow; Ms. Bumptious has an Office Space-y day; total redesign at I Want To Hug Kafka has a turtle that makes me happy.