Steal This Blog

So I'm kicking around an entry about a fairly harrowing weekend of...househunting...in the suburbs...where I totally could have been killed...by a lawnmower or something like that...but I think I need another day or so to process that one.

And since I spent most of yesterday in a slack-jawed, masochistic haze of watching stuff like this and reading stuff like this, I've really got nothing to write about today.

Except...hmm. Hang on. Let me look around for any spare dead horses I could beat for awhile. I think there might be one out back...

(Neigh!)

Ah yes! MySpace emailed me back! You know in response to perhaps the sixteen dozen complaints of copyright infringement I submitted? Yes.

Hello,

Below is a pretty comprehensive overview on blogs presented in a FAQ format.  It should answer all the questions that you should have about blogs.

Questions about...blogs? The hell?

Q: What is a blog?

Oh helllllll no.

A: A 'blog' is an online journal. 'Blog' is short for Weblog. in recent years, 'blogging' or posting an online journal has become very popular. MySpace has incorporated a feature to allow users to post their thoughts, dreams, random internet findings, or anything their heart desires.

Yeah. It went on like that for quite awhile.

Thanks, MySpace. That was some super helpful keywording you did there.

I got that email on September 10th, three days after Claudia's profile was deleted. Which makes sense, since (sense, since, argh, that chafes mine ears and yet I am entirely too lazy to fix it, just ignore it, and DO NOT PLAGIARIZE THIS SENTENCE, IT DIES HERE) today I checked the email account I use for the Advice Smackdown and found that on September 7th, Claudia emailed me.

(Or at least, someone claiming to be Claudia, who I suppose could easily be as fake as a $250,000 freelancing career, but for the purposes of Restoring My Hope in the Youth of America, let's say she really is Claudia.)

She apologized. Profusely. And admitted that she deleted her own account.

Self-Policing Internet Types: 1
MySpace Customer Service: 0
Claudia: consolation prize, Miss Congeniality of the Plagiarizing Goth Nanny Set
Amy: two bags of Veggie Booty and a lifetime Internet ban on EVER MENTIONING THIS AGAIN

Tire: STILL HERE BITCHES

Into the Smoke

Judging from my archives, it appears I've spent the last two anniversaries of 9/11 obsessing about my womb, in one way or another.

I don't know why, but today is harder than previous years. It seems like logically, every year should be easier. It should be getting better. Right?

I started to write one of those minute-by-minute "where were you when the towers fell" entries but stopped halfway through and wiped the whole thing away with one long stroke of the backspace key. I don't know why. I've been reading the 2,996 project tributes all morning, and everything else is ringing kind of hollow right now.

I was stuck in traffic. I was close enough to the Pentagon to see wisps of black smoke on the horizon. It seemed to smoke for days afterwards and resembled a blown-out birthday candle.  The smoke told me that what I was hearing on the radio must really be happening -- the planes and the towers and the car bombs at the Capitol and the fire at the USA Today building and Air Force One being shot down and the world is ending and we were all going to die.

I drove to work anyway. I didn't know what else to do. My boss told me to get a hotel room in Virginia -- he told me not to go home to the District because...well, he didn't know. None of us knew. We were all targets, we were all sitting ducks, we were all going to die.

I went home and watched CNN for three days straight, trying to simultaneously numb myself to the horror while desperately wanting to feel something -- anger, anxiety, sorrow -- any feeling that told me I was still alive.

I was never in any danger. I didn't know anyone who died. I played the same six degrees of tragedy separation game as everybody else -- endlessly retelling the same stories about close calls and near misses and my brother's roomate's friend's cousin and the smoke I saw from miles and miles away.

Five years later, I'm still doing it. I'm still struggling to give my feelings some kind of context.

I watched Spike Lee's documentary about Hurricane Katrina on HBO the other day. The whole thing runs over four hours, but I didn't even make it through the opening title sequence before fat tears of rage started to pour down my face. The sight of a parent handing over their baby to a rescuer was bad enough, but it was the realization that the baby was wearing a goddamned swim diaper that sent me into big heaving sobs.

And maybe that's part of why today seems harder. Why the events of 9/11 refuse to fade into the past but instead seem closer than ever. I have less faith in our government's ability to protect us, to capture the bad guys, to provide us with food or water, or simply to not strand us on a highway overpass for days on end.

Or maybe it's something much simpler than that.

Welcome to the human race, sweet man. I'm sorry we suck.

Roll Credits

Well, there you go. I am totally sure Claudia will never ever plagiarize again. In fact, I bet we've eradicated the problem of Internet plagiarism altogether.

Except that I am also pretty sure poor, put-upon Claudia and her Kicky Flat Mary-Janes have probably already created another MySpace account and this one is like, at least 37% gothier and contains 45% more Morrissey lyrics and you know what? She's GLAD this happened. WHATEVER. She's way too hardcore to like, care and shit, especially since her freelance writing is like, going SO WELL and she's totally making $1,000,000 a year now because she is AWESOME and she RULZ! PISS OFF H8TERS!

The end.

Thanks to Mrs. CPA for finding Claudia's page in the first place, and then taking valuable time out of her cRuiZing 4 MySPAcE hOTTieS schedule to tell me about it.

Thanks to Mr. Nice Guy and MetroDad for also writing stuff worth stealing. Claudia's blogroll kicks ass!

Thanks to everybody who chimed in with advice and pointers and offers of legal help and dummy MySpace accounts. Oh, and the righteous fury. The delicious, buttery fury.

But mostly, thank you for keeping the comments section at a football-in-the-groin, clown-car fender-bender level, instead of letting it escalate to the five-car pile-up it easily could have become. Thank you for not being all, "I'll see your plagiarism, Claudia, and raise you a DEATH THREAT, MWA HA HA." I really hesitated to say anything about...well, any of it, because good Christ, you know how these things can get.

(But of course you know I HAD to say something, because I am totally Fake Internet Drama's bitch, and also I pretty much had NOTHING ELSE TO WRITE ABOUT, EXCEPT PERHAPS THAT I AM INORDINATELY FOND OF MY NEW TOASTER.)

Basically, thank you for not being totally monkeyshit crazy. If I had a MySpace page I'd like, totally friend you.

Now I must figure out how to make sure I never, ever use the word "friend" as a verb again, and to cleanse the images of dozens of seizure-inducing MySpace pages (white text on a zebra-print background, people! ZEBRA PRINT!) from my brain.

I'll probably need bleach, don't you think?

Entirely Hypothetical

So let's say it's been brought to your attention (thank you, Interpid Internet People! I owe you a Coke.) that some loser on MySpace (I know! A loser! On MYSPACE of all places!) is stealing your writing and photos and manufacturing a nice little fake life for her fake self.

Let's say you report a couple copyright violations to MySpace. Let's say you didn't initially realize just HOW many entries she's copied because...well, it's a MySpace blog. Have you ever tried to navigate through those things? Do they make anybody else feel as old as I do? Or am I the only one who gets a headache from trying to read a red font on a black background floating over a photograph?  While the Black-Eyed Peas are on auto-play in the background? Just me then? Fine, moving on.

Let's say you realize she's been posting your writing pretty regularly since at least June, which is when her entries suddenly disintegrate into day after day of cut-and-pasted song lyrics and seriously, if she's stolen shit before that you almost don't care, no way are you scrolling through yet another Elliot Smith song that just perfectly captures all the complicated hurts and feelings of some teenager for whom the fake life of a fake live-in nanny living in Vegas is pretty much the coolest and most glamorous thing EVER.

Let's say you also notice stuff that's not your writing, which obviously means she's plagiarizing multiple people because...please.

So with all that said, do you:

1) Break down and create a MySpace account so you can contact "Claudia" directly and ask her to take the offending posts down. Girlplease. Not happening.

2) Report the additional copyright violations. Wait a reasonable amount of time in patient silence to see if MySpace takes care of it. This would obviously be the most adult reaction, because while it's creepy as ALL HELL, she's not hurting you or anything, and really, it's fucking MySpace.

3) Take Yvonne up on her offer to "comment and go all Latina on her ass," because Yvonne has a MySpace account, HAAAA LOSER.

4) Stomp around in a petulant fit , post a link and unleash the Wrath of teh Internets on her. (She stole a picture of my TIRE, people. MY TIRE! I feel so violated.)

5) Stomp around in a petulant fit, post an entry without the link because you don't want to be some kind of Big Bad Blogging Bully, which accomplishes...pretty much nothing except to let "Claudia" know that you know and that you know she knows and that MySpace knows and seriously, knock that fucking shit off this instant.

I'm just wondering what you would do. In case, you know, this really happened instead of being entirely hypothetical.

Confidential to "Claudia:" There are no IKEAs in Las Vegas. Or even in the entire state of Nevada, dumbshit.

Day of Days

Labor Day 2006.

A big day. A huge day.

A momentous day.

The tire moved from the foyer to the bottom of the stairs, as Jason swears he will stick it "upstairs in the storage closet somewhere," sometime relatively soon.

And oh! Yes.

Noah took his first steps today.

That too.

*blubberweepsob*

Carefully Avoiding Any Mentions of the B Word

I am sick. A nice bleearghish sort of sick. Tropical Storm Ernesto* is blowing through town and has brought misery to each and every one of my head holes. My eyes are watering, my nose is running, my ears are throbbing and everything I eat tastes like linty socks. And the sinus pain! OH MY GOD, THE SINUS PAIN. I am discovering sinuses I never knew I had, like on the back of my skull.

* "Tropical Storm Ernesto" always makes me think of some tempestuous storyline on a Telemundo soap -- a storyline usually of my own invention because I love to watch Telemundo soaps even though I don't speak Spanish. Does anybody else do that? It's way fun.

Maria: Ernesto! Why you come into my life if all you do is destroy? Why you enjoy making me cry, Ernesto?

Ernesto: Because I do not like your hair. No one with that hair deserves of the happiness.

Maria: Ernesto!

Ernesto: I also probably slept with that nun from the last scene, I think.

Maria: Ernesto!

Ernesto: And now we make angry love. Ernesto OUT.

Yes. Clearly, I am sick. I may perhaps be at death's very door.

So here: a bunch of paragraphs and entries that I sort-of started this week before getting bored of them. Lucky you!

The new TiVo is working out well, thank you for asking. (Oh, did you not ask? Am I hearing those pesky voices again?) Although we're still getting to know each other. For instance, earlier today, according to the Now Playing list, it was recording Blue's Clues. But when I hit the "live TV" button I was affronted with some other random obnoxious children's show. I immediately yelled at New TiVo for recording the wrong damn channel, and spent several tense moments futzing around with the remote before I realized that it WAS recording Blue's Clues, albeit on that strange, mysterious other input it has.

So obviously I don't understand the Second Input of Dual Tuner Mystery yet, and then New TiVo got back at me for yelling by auto-recording Full House, the Munsters and two episodes of Sanford & Son as "TiVo Suggestions."

To help New TiVo understand what kind of wanton, sinful household it's been brought into, I'm recording five different showings of The Aristocrats. Just for fun.

It's taken a few weeks, but I think I've finally come to terms with the fact that I think someone stole my shoes at Blogher. My black Chuck Taylors never made it home. And since nothing is ever my fault, I am blaming y'all.

Or maybe the maid stole them. Or Ernesto! Maybe he followed the maid into my room and they made angry love on the bedspread and then he thought the sneakers were hers and stole them so he could finally prove that Umberto's baby was not hers, or something. Which would make sense because 1) my little plastic Philosophy powder scoop is also missing and could have been used to scrape DNA evidence from the insoles, and 2) the bedspread totally smelled like ass.

Or maybe I just forgot to check under the bed.

I have never read The Da Vinci Code. Or seen the movie.

I never saw the movie because I haven't read the book. I haven't read the book because everybody kept telling me don't buy the book, they would totally lend me their copy, seriously, they'd bring it tomorrow, totally. And then no one ever lent me their copy, and I cannot bring myself to buy the book now, because seriously, there are five frillion copies out there, I must have ONE DAMN FRIEND who will lend it to me, but I never remember to ask anymore because it's not like it comes up in coversation ever, and also, I'm too embarassed to buy it now because JESUS CHRIST, WHO HASN'T READ THE FUCKING DA VINCI CODE BY NOW? LOSER.

Hey! How about more pictures of a baby sitting on a broken TiVo?

By the way, anybody who mentions the words "September 30"...

...or "birthday"...

...or "one year old"...

...or "toddler"...

...is totally getting fed to the tire. The end.