'Who asked YOU?'

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Gee, guess what? Megan McAfferty ain't buying Kaavya Viswanathan's explanations or apologies.

A piece in today's Washington Post, McAfferty's people don't accept the young author's claims of "unintentioally" reproducing what some might consider significant chunks of scenes, ideas, and words that seem to have found their way into Viswanathan's novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life.

What happens next? Stay tuned.

From this point, all information given to the media will be known as a "Snow job."


According to the AP report:

President Bush on Wednesday named conservative commentator Tony Snow as White House press secretary, putting a new face on a troubled administration.
Snow, a Fox news pundit and former speechwriter in the White House under Bush's father, replaced Scott McClellan who resigned in a personnel shuffle intended to re-energize the Bush White House and lift the president's record-low approval ratings.

Seems apologies and promises of revision are not enough in the case of Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard author accused of lifting passages from the works of Megan McCafferty.

According to the April 25 Publisher's Daily e-mailing:

Random House spokesperson Stuart Applebaum called Viswanathan's explanation about how she came to use passages from McCafferty "at best disingenuous and at worst literary identity theft." He noted that there are approximately 40 cases where Opal mirrors passages from McCafferty's works. Although Applebaum declined to comment if Random will file a lawsuit against Viswanathan, he said "Crown and Random House support our author in seeking a proper and full resolution to this matter."

The New York Times ran a story by Dinitia Smith today about Kaavya Viswanathan, a 19-year-old author of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life (Little Brown), who is "accused of plagiarizing parts of her recently published chick-lit novel...." The Harvard sophomore "acknowledged ... that she had borrowed language from another writer's books, but called the copying 'unintentional and unconscious'" (emphasis added).

The plagiarized language came from two books by Megan McCafferty, author of popular young-adult books such as Sloppy First, Second Helpings, and Charmed Thirds. Viswanathan admitted reading the books when she was in high school. Evidently they made quitye an impression on her. She said she wasn't aware how much she "may have internalized" from McAfferty. ("May have?" Didn't know it was a moot point.)

In the meantime, Smith writes, "there are at least 29 passages [between McAfferty's books and Viswanathan's] that are strikingly similar." The Boston Globe lists a few examples of the questionable prose.

The Times' reporter quotes Viswanathan's agent as saying: "Knowing what a fine person Kaavya is, I believe any similarities were unintentional. Teenagers tend to adopt each other's language" (emphasis added). With all due respect, McCafferty is no longer a teenager; she's 33 according to her Web site.

So here's my question:

Adopting language patterns unqiue to each younger generation is one thing. Writing or typing someone else's words is something else. I'll grant that if something is done unconsciously, it probably follows that it's untintential. But how can someone "unintentionally" copy something? Miriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (Tenth Edition), defines "copy" as "an imitation, transcript, or reproduction of an original work." In other words, it takes a concious effort to copy something.

When I was a kid, we copied passages from the encyclopedia. Our teachers were always on us to express the ideas in our own words. Nowadays there's a lot of lip service paid to the sins of plagerism, but it seems at least some teachers allow their charges to cut and paste from Internet sources. While the Web may been a good source for working on research skills, it's also a breeding ground of dubious academic behavior.

     I was listening to Mike and the Mad Dog, a talk program on WFAN, an sports talk station in New York City.
     Today's topic was the Duke lacrosse team. Chris Russo, aka, Mad Dog, was going off on how all the evidence -- or lack thereof -- points to the players' innocence.
     One guest, who identified himself as a "former prosecutor," lambasted Russo for basing all his information on newspaper accounts.
     I don't claim to know anything about the situation; I wasn't there. When it comes down to it, despite all the rhetoric, those are the only ones who know the truth. Someone is clearly lying. To give credence to the athletes because the woman involved was a stripper smacks of elitism. On the other hand, to condemn the boys because they were involved in a party that would engage a stripper in the first place is unfair, too.
     Earlier in the day, on the Imus in the Morning program, Nancy Grace, who appears on Court TV, clearly was on the side of the accuser. When Imus asked her point blank if she believed the woman's story, Grace hesitated and evaded a direct answer.
     Nevertheless, given the radio duo's history of histrionics, their downplay of all things Mets, their tangents, Russo's endless fawning ("You're absolutley right, Mike. I couldn't agree with you more," etc.), it's difficult to lend any credence to anything they have to say on just about anything.
     Russo told the caller who criticized him, "I can say anything I want," adding that the caller could ignore him or disagree with him. He left out one thing: The caller could call him a jerk.
      Sports are interesting in that there are facts (statistics, scores, standings) and opinion (Willie was better than Mickey, the '86 Mets were better than the '45 Cubs). But to devote endless hours listening and, worse, calling in to these shows, just to be able to say you were on the air, or that Mike and the Mad Dog said you made a good point (which they rarely do, from what I hear)...sorry, I just don't get it.

Washington Nationals' general manager Jim Bowden was arrested for DUI during the team's Florida trip. Given the situation in Washington -- lousy team, no ownership, indifferent fan base -- the question was not "if," but "when"?

An item in the Union County section of the April 2 Newark Star-Ledger reports on a presentation at a local college on the evils of objectifying women as evidenced by a Burger King commercial featuring The Whopperettes.
Said commercial -- a Busby Berkley-type extravaganza featuring women dressed like the components of one of the fast food franchise's signature burgers (lettuce, tomato, pickle, etc.) -- evidently raised the hackles of the vegetarian and/or feminist communities.
Carol Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat, guest speaker at the event, complained that "Women are fragmented into butchered animals in the media. The double entendres, the puns, the visual substitution -- it all makes animals female and consumable."
The following is excerpted from PopPolitics.com. (Click here for the complete essay.)

While the ad features women doing a musical number, the women are not
overtly sexualized (although one of them is swimsuit model Brooke Burke) [RK: The hussy! As if her appearance alone pushes it into the realm of soft-core porn.] and the ad initially has a gender-neutral and somewhat satirical “it’s an extravaganza!” feel. The women, after all, are dressed up in ridiculous outfits representing the many ingredients in a Whopper.

But as the ad continues, its message becomes disturbingly clear [RK: emphasis mine] -- and it’s nothing new: women are to be consumed by men. [RK: Would it have made them feel better if the roles of the ingredients had been played by men? Or would that have enraged the anti-gay crowd?] These women are objectified -– and even worse, dehumanized and de-animatized [RK: ?]-– but they are able to do something that most sex objects are unable to do without forsaking the illusion that they are simply passive vessels for man’s pleasure: They speak.

“We’re always willing,” they say up front. A few lines later they continue: “Yes, we’re tasty and eye-popping/we don’t blame your jaw for dropping.” The jaw, in this case, is simultaneously dropping to gawk and eat -– to watch and to consume. The movement toward consumption becomes explicit near the end of the ad as the women, by limply flopping and folding into each other, form a burger.

By deftly combining these complementary desires -– to both look at and physically have women -- this ad is, in a way, revolutionary. “Have it your way!” – indeed.

....Do we really have a chance?

Sorry, I'm not buying it (the Whopper or the argument).
Like the blue noses who are looking for satanic messages by playing records backwards or looking for sexually explicit images in ice cubes, it seems some people are just way too sentitive. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Would these anti-Whopperettes be happier if men had played the "roles?"

Have a nice day?
What do you mean by THAT?"

This morning on WINS-AM in NY, a reporter used a reference to a character on Hogan's Heroes, a semi-controversial TV comedy from the sixties about American POWs in WWII.
The WINS story, about a man who was jolted by an electric shock as he walked on a metal grate in Tribeca, stated that the electric company pulled a "Sgt. Schultz moment" when it claimed not to know anything about the situation.
Sgt. Schultz, played by John Banner (right, shown with Bob Crane in the title role), invoked his catchphrase "I see nothing!" whenever he encountered funny business going on in the POW's barracks, effectively disassociating himself from any problem.
Question is: How many listening to the radio report wondered who the heck Sgt. Schultz was?
Similarly, unless you're a devotee of South Park, you wouldn't get the following cartoon:

Go look it up. Here's a hint: "Kenny."

Exclusionary elitist bastards.

It’s opening day at last. Time for rabid fans of pitiful teams everywhere to delude themselves into believing they have a chance to play those “meaningful games” in September based on a 1-0 start.
Conversely, do we wring our hands when our favorites start off poorly? (The Mets Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran and Carlos Delgado and Cliff Floyd went a combined 0-15).

A few observations:

• Jimmy Rollins, the Philadelphia Phillies outfielder, continued his hitting streak, moving one game closer to Joe DiMaggio’s 56. Rollins’ hit came on a 3-0 count with two outs in the eighth inning with his team down 13-5 to the St. Louis Cardinals. So are some of the pundits going to complain that Rollins was being selfish, as some did when Kobe Bryant scored 81 points against the Toronto Raptors in January?
  
• Should we look at the scores of the Yankees (15-2 over Oakland), Cubs (16-7 over Cinncinati), Cards (13-5 over Philly), and Braves (11-10 over the Dodgers) and wonder if steroid testing is in order?
  
• TV replays showed Mets catcher Paul Lo Duca dropped a ball on a play to the plate that resulted in an out instead of the tying run for the Nationals in the Mets 3-2 win. Aside from blaming the home plate umpire for being blocked out, I wonder what would have happened if Lo Duca, in a display of sportsmanship and honesty, would have admitted that he made a muff? Just sayin’.
  

SPRING HAS SPRUNG AND BASEBALL RETURNS, on Bookreporter.com