Mark Morford is always hilarious. Writing to lazy young democrats in the aftermath of the mid-term elections:

See what happens when you wallow in hollow disappointment, trudging all over your liberal arts campus and refusing to vote in a rather important mid-term election, all because your pet issues and nubile ego weren’t immediately serviced by a mesmerizing guy named Barack Obama just after he sucked you into his web of fuzzyhappy promises a mere two years ago, back when you were knee-high to a shiny liberal ideology? Well, now you know. This is what happens: The U.S. House of Representatives, the most insufferable gaggle of political mongrels this side of, well, the rest of Congress, reverts to GOP control like a brain tumor reverts to a more aggressive form of cancer, and everything gets bleaker and sadder and, frankly, a whole lot nastier.

For everyone who’s ever had their eyes/brain manhandled and condescended to by the likes of Pollock and Motherwell, know this: the CIA was using that art as a weapon against the Soviets during the Cold War. According to a former CIA case officer:

“Regarding Abstract Expressionism, I’d love to be able to say that the CIA invented it just to see what happens in New York and downtown SoHo tomorrow!” he joked. “But I think that what we did really was to recognise the difference. It was recognised that Abstract Expression- ism was the kind of art that made Socialist Realism look even more stylised and more rigid and confined than it was. And that relationship was exploited in some of the exhibitions. In a way our understanding was helped because Moscow in those days was very vicious in its denunciation of any kind of non-conformity to its own very rigid patterns. And so one could quite adequately and accurately reason that anything they criticised that much and that heavy- handedly was worth support one way or another.”

Awhile back, Monica Gaudio wrote a cute story/recipe over at Gode Cookery entitled “A Tale of Two Tarts.” However, last week, Gaudio was informed by a friend that her piece had showed up in Cooks Source magazine, an interesting development seeing as how Gaudio had never provided permission for them to publish it. When Monica e-mailed the editor of Cooks Source (I feel like there should be an apostrophe in there somewhere?) asking for an apology and a $130 donation to the Columbia Journalism School, she got this reply from editor Judith Griggs:

Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice, Housitonic Home and Connecticut Woman Magazine. I do know about copyright laws. It was “my bad” indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things. But honestly Monica, the web is considered “public domain” and you should be happy we just didn’t “lift” your whole article and put someone else’s name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me… ALWAYS for free!

Ballsy and reprehensible. So Monica posted the story on her livejournal and the entire thing spread around the internet because it made for great tweet-material. “Writer gets story jacked, then thief asks HER for money!” and so on.

Now Cooks Source Facebook page is getting inundated with derogatory messages from all across the internet. I’ve screencapped a few of them, seeing as how I anticipate the page will be taken down by the end of the day.

I confess there’s something gratifying about seeing this completely unknown magazine burned in metaphorical effigy for their incompetence. People are threatening to make phone calls and e-mails to the magazine’s advertisers, and undoubtedly, some already have. There will likely be real-life consequences for the magazine and for Griggs, and they will be well-deserved.

Still, I can’t help but wonder how easy it is to rile up the mob these days. I have every bit of faith in Monica’s integrity, but nonetheless, all it takes is for someone to claim that you said some crazy sh*t in some e-mail to turn the collective might of the internet against you.

Update: Looks like the good folks at Reddit are investigating other instances of plagiarism in the magazine. In addition, Facebook users are determining where recipes from the current issue originated from (via onlinejournalismblog).

Update 2: In the time since this post was written, this story has gotten even bigger. Time has an interview with Monica and the LATimes has a good breakdown of events.

From Abovethelaw (via Lafsky) comes a flyer about a “professional clothing drive” for law school students:

The Duquesne University School of Law is holding a Professional Clothing Drive for Law Students.

We are accepting gently worn professional clothing* for 1st Year Law Students preparing for the Oral Argument Program in the spring and all Law Students preparing for job and internship interviews.

Clothing can be dropped off at the Main Office of the Law School between the hours of 8:30 am and 8:00 pm (Monday through Friday) and 9:00 am to 12:00 pm (On select Saturdays please call for dates). A receipt will be provided for your tax-deductible donation.

* We are accepting business suits for women and men as well as shoes, ties, belts and accessories.

As Elie Mystal at Abovethelaw puts it:

It’s the footnote that kills me. Ties, belts and accessories. You’ve got to be kidding me. I mean, are there really law students running around in desperate need of a freaking interview-appropriate handbag? Are there guys who got through four years of college and into a law school without owning a basically acceptable tie? My ties suck, I don’t really want to spend the money on a really nice one, at least not in a world where I need to update all of my Rock Band peripherals. But I go on television with my crap-ass ties. Call it an overdeveloped sense of pride, but I’d be horrified to accept a tie upgrade in a clothing drive.

While I think Mystal’s response is hilarious and worth reading, I have a little bit more sympathy. If you’re already sinking in $150,000 into a law school education, you might not have enough money to spend on nice clothes. I’ve been in a variety of professional settings in my life and I don’t exactly have a dazzling array of suits in my closet. Still, I do agree that the ad raises the question: What the hell were these students doing (in life) until now?

Despite the financial horror that this flyer portends, I’d still like to attend law school some day, but given the current economic climate, I think I chose my current Masters program wisely.

Update: I’m reminded of this conversation I had with Jesse Thorn from Sundance this year:

Some software developer got so tired of repeating the same old arguments to climate change skeptics that he created a Twitter bot to do it for him:

Every five minutes, it searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments about how global warming isn’t happening or humans aren’t responsible for it. It then spits back at the twitterer who made that argument a canned response culled from a database of hundreds. The responses are matched to the argument in question — tweets about how Neptune is warming just like the earth, for example, are met with the appropriate links to scientific sources explaining why that hardly constitutes evidence that the source of global warming on earth is a warming sun.

You can actually follow this bot on Twitter and test it out if you’re so inclined (via Jeff).

One week ago, I announced that I’d be moving all my Twitter content to my blog. There were many reasons for this, but the biggest one was that I wanted to permanently own all the content that I created, rather than surrender it to a third-party (Twitter). In order to drive traffic to my blog, I used TwitterFeed to auto-post a link to every blog post onto my Twitter account. I plan on doing this until my blog gets enough organic traffic where I no longer feel this is necessary (That could take awhile…).

Now that I’ve been doing this for about a week, I have some interesting results to report from my experiment. Here are my main findings:

Fewer posts – Blog posts, even extremely rudimentary ones, take a LOT more time than tweets to produce. Moreover, it’s virtually impossible to create a blog post on the go, whereas with my iPhone, I could easily find an article on the go and send it out to Twitter. As time goes on, I will have to find a balance between which articles require a quick tweet, and which articles deserve the fuller attention of a blog post.

Fewer retweets – Because many of my tweets no longer link directly to the source material, the number of retweets that my tweets receive has plummeted. On any given week, I’d usually have at least one tweet that got a few dozen retweets; not so anymore. I’m not sure if there’s anything that can be done about this, but on a personal level, I’d rather have a few retweets to my own content than a ton of retweets to someone else’s content. Anecdotally, I believe that retweets have very limited ability to drive more follows to my Twitter account, so I don’t know that I’ll miss the retweets too much, but who knows what other consequences losing retweets may have.

Better analytics – Because I have Google Analytics and Site Meter, I can see what people are clicking on, and what content attracts people more. There’s also a much greater capacity for discovery, in that people can click around, check out older posts, etc. This is much less likely on Twitter.

MUCH better comments and responses – People’s comments on my blog posts have been great so far! And when people are not limited to 140 characters, you can really have meaningful interaction and discussion in a way that’s impossible on Twitter. When you have to put a good 5 minutes of thought into what you’re writing, I think the discourse improves.

Miscellaneous – It’s a lot easier to link to blog posts than to tweets, so I’m getting a lot more inbound links via my blog than via Twitter. Moreover, I suspect people think it’s more meaningful when you praise their work in a permanent blog post rather than an ephemeral tweet, so it’s been gratifying to see that in action.

I feel better about myself as a person and a writer – Impossible to quantify, but still true. 

T-Mobile just launched an ad in which they claimed to have the country’s “largest 4G network.”

Cute. One problem, though: T-Mobile’s network is not technically 4G. According to BGR, the International Telecommunication Union has already issued an official definition of 4G: 

In this context, here’s what you need to know: for a service to qualify as 4G, it must deliver peak download speeds of approximately 100Mbps in high-mobility environments (cell phones) and peak download speeds of approximately 1Gbps in low-mobility environments. Current technologies such as WiMAX, LTE and HSPA+ certainly do not meet these criteria.

It’s going to be years before cell phone companies have the capacity for what the ITU has deemed “4G.” So with the holiday marketing season upon us, companies will do anything they can to get an edge, even if it means using the term “4G” in a way that renders it completely meaningless.  TechFlash puts it best by saying that “rather than suggesting its rivals back down from their 4G claims, T-Mobile has decided to join them.” BGR suggests that lawsuits will follow, claiming false advertising, but don’t expect any telecom companies to change course: “Settling will be infinitely cheaper than rebranding. They’ve made their beds.”