Rabbits and Robots

 I haven't blogged in a while, but I'd like to interrupt my hiatus to endorse the Hwang/Wong "Dismantle the UC" ticket for the UC Presidency and Vice Presidency. If you're the kind of person who gets fed up with the UC, this is the ticket for you: they advocate transferring party and House Committee funds directly to the HoCos themselves, letting existing student groups take care of advocacy to the faculty on policy issues and creating a more responsive, democratic body to allocate student group funding.

For more information, see their blog at http://dismantletheuc.blogspot.com/
and consider joining their Facebook group at http://harvard.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2220771657
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According to this article, which I found through the newly Conde Nasty reddit, the frat boys depicted in the Borat movie are suing the makers and distributers of the film, alleging that they, in an event unlike anything that has ever happened within their wholesome fraternity home, were given large amounts of alcohol to turn them into misogynistic pigs willing to sign waivers willy-nilly, told they were appearing in a documentary to be shown only within "Europe," where they apparently believed Kazakhstan to be located, and placed in a motor home with "prankster" Sacha Baron Cohen to make fools of themselves. They seek an injunction banning the exhibition of the film, which they claim falsely depicts them as racists, and monetary compensation, presumably to outfit their frat house with HBO so that this sort of thing never happens again. (Apparently Bill Maher showed up the other day, but CNN refuses to air the footage).

The pair, John Doe I and John Doe II, who may be the only two fratboys in America who have never seen Ali G, must have been pretty drunk to think a foreign documentary-maker would place them in a trailer with a strange mustached man sobbing over Pamela Anderson's sexual history, but perhaps the most amusing part is that they seem to have hired one of Borat's relatives as a lawyer.

In just the first couple of pages of the complaint, we're told that Cohen enjoys "unleashing these characters into[sic] selected individuals for public viewing," and that these "musings" of his originally "only aired on HBO." Through his ability to "lie really well," Cohen managed to fool "Congressman[sic] from both sides of the isles[sic]" despite the legislators having "staff whose job it is to screen such pranks." Admittedly, the defeat of Senator Rick Santorum alone should save the American taxpayer several million dollars a year, as his extensive staff of prank screeners can be returned to their original tasks at Best Buy and Home Depot.

Anyway, the court is told that "Borat, it seems, has overgrown his pint size format and has become a full length picture" in which "people are tricked in[sic] making fools out of themselves."
As they put it, "[t]he film has been described in many, colorful ways. Some call it hilarious and some call it offensive. Where one falls on that line depends largely one's [sic] tolerance for incest and penis jokes."

Anyway, even if you haven't just seduced your first cousin with witty banter about the one-eyed spitting cobra that dwells deep within the pants of all men, Borat is pretty funny. I'd recommend it.
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From today's Crimson, and definitely not plagiarized:

Dear Sara,

I can’t stop thinking about anonymous hookups, and I really want to try one! Where should I get started? What’s the etiquette on things like this? What are the risks, and how can I best avoid them?

—Horny at Harvard

I don't think we need a punchline today.
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Freshman Girl, Sister of  Crazy:  Where is the Quad, anyway?
People: It's up Garden Street... The street past CVS.. Not the street with the movie theater, the next one.
Freshman: Movie theater?? That's what that is? I always thought it looked like a movie theater! It had that sign out front that looked like a movie theater but I didn't think it was one!
Me: Yeah.. Didn't you notice the marquee had the names of current movies?
Freshman: I guess, but I never made the connection.

(Later)
Freshman: Did you know that thing next to CVS is a MOVIE THEATER??
Others: Yeah...
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According to today's Crimson, Kathleen Breeden claims that she only actually copied the Handelsman cartoon and offered to take a polygraph test to prove that she didn't copy the others. Somehow I doubt (and really hope) the Crimson newsroom is not equipped with polygraph machines and syringes full of sodium penthothal, but I guess it's a nice gesture.  She also sent an email to Handelsman apologizing for her indiscretion. Both she and Victoria Ilyinsky will be allowed to reapply for columns next semester; Breeden indicated to the Crimson her intention to do so, and Ilyinsky said the same to me.

In other news, the aforementioned uTube versus Youtube battle is heating up, as the Universal Tube and Rollform Equipment Corporation(uTube) actually filed suit against Youtube. Any visually impaired readers using text-to-speech software might just want to skip the rest of this entry, unless the previous sentence included the phrase "ut oo bay." The documents are made available at The Smoking Gun. Also, you might want to take a minute to visit the hideous utube site. Here's a good example page, for their Universal Controls Group, a corporate division that sounds like something sinister in a Philip K. Dick novel.

Note the irregular capitalization and odd choice of font color. I think if someone started a MySpace clone just for machine tool makers this is what it would look like. Incidentally, check out http://www.myspace.com/utube and look what happens when you create a profile and don't friend anyone besides Tom, i.e. "dc has 1 friends." 80 bazillion pageviews a second and they can't even write a simple if statement. But I digress.

Anyway, according to the suit, "uTube primarily sells reconditioned equipment that makes pipes and tubing," while "YouTube condones the public exhibition of lewd and other  disgusting videos." uTube helpfully links to a number of such videos in the filing, and complains of 70,000 "confused" visitors who are "not the kinds of visitors that Plaintiff wants at its website." These confused, certainly-not-from-around-here surfers "often fill out Plaintiff's sales request form... in a vulgar and belligerent manner," saying things like "WHERE THE FUCK ARE ALL THE VIDEOS??" and, to paraphrase, "I am an Australian police officer and you are hosting a kiddie porn film called 'Cunt: The Movie.'" Even worse, one misdirected videophile, asking "where r da videos," even went so far as to misrepresent his email address as "fuckyou@utube.com."

As the lawyers put it,  uTube has lost the right to "quiet enjoyment" of its domain name, and lost,haha, "its kingdom with its domain." They claim that YouTube is infringing on their trademark for the term "uTube." Good luck to them. Personally I think it's pretty frivolous and I'll just be taking my tube and rollform equipment business elsewhere.
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I'm getting an unbelievable number of hits based on searches for phrases like "Ilysinky literally" and "Harvard Handelsman." Why does everyone care? Some Crimsonian fools copied articles and cartoons from other publications, so I see why that's exciting on campus, but why do random people from Ohio have any interest in it whatsoever?

On another note, check out this US Central Command PowerPoint slide in this article in today's New York Times. Aside from the amusing "Last week, Current, Chaos" timeline, look how ugly and difficult to read the slide itself is. The "Index of Civil Conflict" chart uses the same colors as those used to indicate the bizarre, seemingly unrelated categories of "Routine," "Irregular," "Significant" and "Critical," the overly wordy yet vague bullet points and the summary outlined in an ugly purple box at the bottom... Maybe it's time to draft Edward Tufte. If they can't win the war, at least they could do a better job of showing why they're losing.


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I'm a little late picking up the story this go-round, but I'm sure this isn't my last chance. Apparently a series of editorial cartoons in the Crimson by one Kathleen E. Breeden "bear similarity to" (the less potentially libelous way of saying "were copied from") a number of prominent syndicated editorial cartoons.

The Crimson doesn't seem to want to incorporate the copied cartoons into their coverage, so it's hard to the see them back to back without clicking on links, but the no-longer-anonymous Ivygate authors seem to take a broader view of fair use, so you can see the original Walt Handelsman cartoon and the Breeden copy here. They also have some coverage, complete with leaked emails, of the internal strife over who would get to publish which part of the Ilyinsky story first - the editorial board or the news reporters. Apparently that pompous Crimsonian tone isn't limited to editorials; it's actually how they communicate with each other! If a Crimson editor falls in the woods, or perhaps in the street outside a "semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization," and there's nobody there to hear him, does he still scream "Alas! This University administration should, nay, MUST send qualified medical personnel to rescue me forthwith or suffer great losses to overall credibility and national recognition!"? Answer: yes.

The funny thing, of course, is, as somebody points out in the IvyGate comments, that political cartoons are very seldom original or funny, so it's particularly striking that someone did such a bad job of recycling the catchphrases of the day that it's being called plagiarism.

I don't know anything else about Ms. Breeden (e.g., whether she's secretly royalty(good "Breeden"?) or a Jehovah's witness, as commenters variously alleged about my last duchess, Tori Ilyinsky), besides this fairly innocuous Crimson profile:

Kathleen E. Breeden ’09 is a prospective history and literature concentrator in Hollis Hall, where she’s petitioned for a resident cat to assist in the ongoing war against mice. This Kentuckian enjoys making tea, building shrines to C.S. Lewis, and pulling all-nighters in Lamont. She swears she won’t procrastinate on drawing submissions, though, so you can look for her cartoon on Thursdays.[Blogger comment: Not anymore!!! Muahaha!!!]

I'm not sure an organization that considered that funny, original and publishable should be so shocked to find plagiarism in their midst...

Breeden's deleted her picture and locked her facebook.com profile, but inquiring minds can still see her picture on the Harvard College Facebook. I'm not a stalker, and neither are you (please don't call me a sex god or invite me out for crepes, okay?), so I won't reprint it here.
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How do you know when you're a pompous ass of a Web 2.0 guru? When you're in a foreign country, get lazy, eat at McDonald's and decide to write an imitation Paul Graham essay about it, perhaps. An essay called "The Interface of a Cheeseburger," with paragraphs having names that seem like pickup lines out of My New Filing Technique, like "I'll Fill you Without Any Brain Stress," "Sandwiches Can Be Complicated at Times" and "I Have to Print This Cheeseburger on my Business Card." The essay is basically about how many sandwiches are often difficult to use and full of nasty surprises, like, say, Microsoft products, but cheeseburgers function perfectly like iPods, or like iPods would if you ate them before the batteries had time to run down. The essay is really about whether the Zune will beat the iPod, but he suddenly becomes vague when it's time to actually make a prediction...

Also, Anne-Marie Zapf-Belanger is upset I no longer blog about her, and Serena Rezny is quite glad I don't blog about her or mention her by name in this dubious forum. No, this is not a real post by any stretch of the imagination. But check out http://regrettheerror.com, which I never heard of before they linked to me over the Princess Ilyinsky story - it's a collection of amusing newspaper corrections.

Example (from http://regrettheerror.com, where screenshot is available):

John Gray, a relationship expert and the author of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, writes a syndicated advice column for Creators Syndicate. The October 15 edition of his column included data from a Mars/Venus/Redbook poll of women and their bedroom habits. Unfortunately, the data was, er, perverted by the inclusion of a response from a previous poll.
The result was the revealing assertion that 40 percent of women say "We both love any and all animals" when asked, "How kinky are you?" Not surprisingly, we're told the previous question was, "Do you and your guy match up in the pet department?"

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Because my blog is apparently the new headquarters for Crimson bashing after Gustavo abandoned ship (or did he?), I've been asked to post this by the self-proclaimed wannabe "next Lena Chen,"(edit: sorry boys of the Internet, she's just wishing she could nipple wink!) which is certainly better than the "next Kaavya."

Dear Rebecca,

I'm a reporter with The Harvard Crimson, and as I understand, you're the
Communications Manager of the Harvard Computer Society. I was wondering if
you had some time to talk with me about Macs and their presence on the
Harvard campus. Apple Computer recently announced that it was emerging
from its best ever back-to-school quarter for its higher education division,
and I just wanted to ask you a few questions about why you think this
occurred,  what gives Macs appeal on college campuses, what has Apple done
differently in recent years to improve this appeal, etc. If you could give me a call
at [1-800-CRIMSON] sometime this afternoon, that would be great.

Thanks so much for your help,

[Dr. Magenta]

Dear Dr. Magenta,

I am no PR shill for Apple and the story you describe below sounds
better suited for a paid advertisement than a news article. If you are
looking for actual news about technology, consider covering electronic
voting machines and the threat they pose to democracy in this country.
The machines responsible for the election in two weeks are rife with
enough security holes and opportunities for abuse the fill an entire
edition of the Crimson.

http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/34051.html

Best,
Rebecca

And I'm not even gonna tell you what she did to the guy who wrote this article...
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The Crimson issued a new Editor's Note and took away Ms. Ilyinsky's column. Apparently she also copied some content from this blog that tracks usage of the word "literally."

See also Boston Globe coverage here.

Don't plagiarize, kids.
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