Full Disclosure

 Hiding this sort of thing can only lead to trouble, so I must 'fess up. This is a friend of mine's operation, & she asked me to "like" this.

Unlike pink salt fan McArdle, my friend does this for a living (Produces both a product & a service, that is.) So it's perfectly OK to call for fine food at your next SoCal event.

Times, Well, Spent

McSleuth has found a minor instance of plagiarism. Apparently a single paragraph in a Times London article was lifted from a Fortune article that had been printed about 6 months prior. The paragraph contains some details about a surgery Steve Jobs underwent.

OK guys, calm down! I know, it's a crisis, but we need to stay focused. I, too, was terribly hurt to see that a writer pilfered a negligible amount of uninspired prose that contain readily available factual information. Fret not! Megan knows how to treat the broken heart; with humor:

It's possible that this is not plagiarism--that David Rose is actually Philip Elmer-DeWitt's alter ego and thus owns the copyright to that passage,

Oh man, that cracks me up! Where does she come up with those knee-slappers? Ahhh, I feel a bit better already. Still, though my wounds have been salved, I need to know that someone will seek justice in this horrible imbroglio!

I've emailed the Times for comment, and will report as I get any information.

PHEW! Megan's on the case. I can rest easy now. I'm sure, what with her tenacity and dedication, McGruff will ensure that justice prevails.

I just hope she doesn't get too distracted from her vital work of telling us useless crap and make "gee-whiz" comments about the economy. Oh good, looks like we're safe there, too.

PS Don't visit her main site. The idiot has a really annoying video for a Foreman Grill rip-off up that plays automatically when you go to her blog. I think, since she's realized that abject incompetence won't do it alone, she is now intentionally trying to annoy her readers away. After all, the fewer people that visit her blog, the fewer the emails she gets informing her of her failures and thus the less work she has to do. Everyone wins!

UPDATE:Case closed! No one escapes McArdle's crack detective work.

Because OT Posts are SO MUCH More Interesting than MM These Days

Two things:

First, I was thinking this morning in the shower about how Obama and Bush pare kind of similar in a way.

(ducks)

No no no, NOT LIKE THAT. What I mean is, in 2000 Bush played himself as a "compassionate conservative," essentially trying to say "yeah, I'm conservative but not too far out there" all the while sending signals to his base that he was, in fact, way way out there.

Obama has also presented himself as a left-leaning centrist, but, me, I'm pretty optimistic that he's a lot more liberal than he's been campaigning on and that upon entering the Oval Office Obama will rip the mask off and show the world just how liberal he really is, just like Bush did in 2001. I'm guessing a lot of other people further to the left feel somewhat similarly.

The fact that I hated Bush for pulling that shit but am almost banking on Obama to do the exact same thing is one of the biggest bits of hypocrisy I've ever noticed in myself, and I'm going to spend most of today thinking about it, I guess. (Update: I wrote the draft for this post this morning and then spent the rest of the day preparing my cryostat for a bake-out and pump down, completely forgetting to my early morning revelation. Damn you, grad school!)

Second, in a bid to become the next big "political analyst" I'm going to make this prediction about the election. I STAKE MY REPUTATION ON on the declaration that almost all of the polls will be wildly wrong. It's hard to say in which direction, but I'm guessing that Obama wins by an even larger margin than anticipated. Note my reputation is staked on the first claim. I'm not so sure about the latter claim.

If I'm right, I expect to be hired by the New York Times by the end of the week.

The machines are with us

As a lark, I ran Megatron's name through the Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator. The result?

"Fire Patriot Palin."

You know you're a crap Decepticon when even the dumbest of programs turns on you.

My name is "Steam Fang Palin," by the way.