Cleolinda everywhere

So the McJackass clan has passed two more checks--this time at Target and Home Depot--so they're up to something like $2400 now. But that's not $2400 coming from us--as raven_feathers succinctly pointed out, "It's not about your money in your bank. It's about the swag." They're actually stealing from the retailers, not us, since banks tend to back their customers up, it seems. Of course, if the McJackass clan starts applying for credit cards under our name, we're screwed, but there you are. And it's already hellaciously inconvenient to go around with certified bank letters explaining what happened to everyone my mother's written checks to in the last two weeks. Plus, any automatic payments made on that account will have to be updated to the new debit/credit card as well.

(Since people brought the issue up: my mother does drop checks off to be mailed at official USPS boxes, so they weren't poached from our mailbox.)

I'm starting to worry about my mother's health, actually--my grandmother's had shingles for nine weeks now, and while they're almost gone, this has necessitated my mother and my aunt taking turns to go by her house to fix each meal and help her with the ointments, and the strain of constant running-around is starting to get to both of them. So then we have the Great Check-Washing Scam of 2008 and all the crapfulness that's entailed, and today my mother had to stand in line on her lunch hour (after taking care of my grandmother) at the DMV to re-pay for the family car tags, since those checks had bounced. Since it's the first of the month (which was particularly galling, since she'd gone out of her way to pay for our tags early), there were about a hundred people in line. And then the presiding deputy told eight of the ten women working the counters to go on to lunch. All at once. 80% of them. With a hundred people in line. "You have another story to tell your people," she said grimly when she stopped by the house (she calls y'all "my people"). "I'm standing there with steam coming out of my ears afraid I'm going to sink down through the floor because it's melted underneath me." That's not really a story; it's more just "a thing that happened without any climax or comeuppance or dénouement," but I wasn't about to tell her that.

My point is, I'm really worried about her stress levels. I mean, she's always been a type A personality, but I think she's got an overload of fuckery on her plate at the moment. I'm really hoping that I can finish these annotations (which I originally thought, somewhat hilariously, would take me a weekend) a few days before Mother's Day, so that hopefully I can write her a check and wrap it up in a pretty box and give it to her as a surprise. Any little bit I can pull together would help at this point, I think.

Oh, and the police department here said they would need to go to Columbus, Georgia, to file a report. The bank's already dealing with it, obviously, but they'd suggested we go to the police as well. So my mother's going to talk to her people--the UAB police department, whose benefits she administers and firing squabbles she mediates, to get their advice. (See, she has people, too. Everyone should have people, I think.)

Another massive linkspam--sorry about my spam management, you guys. : ( I've got some reader links, but I'm saving them for tomorrow so they're not completely lost in the tidal wave of awesome. ( Read more... )

Currently obsessed with New Order. I haven't listened to actual radio stations in years, so "Crystal" and "Jetstream," if they were even played over here, completely passed me by. So now I'm obsessed with finding the perfect remix. That, and I have finally identified a song I heard on the speakers at Bath and Body Works as Hooverphonic's "The World Is Mine," but--unless it just sounded different over the speakers--I can't quite seem to find the right version of it. The one I heard seemed a little dancier, so... I don't know. (Ooo! I think I just found it!)

I had half an entry about movie merchandise written, but it just wasn't coming together. Suffice it to say that the phrase "Barbie Loves Kraken" was involved. But that's okay, because I've been writing an average of five pages a day for nearly two weeks now, which is why you're not hearing from me much.

Rilly, rilly good POTC2 trailer caps. Like, "I can count Davy Jones' fillings" good. More screencaps: Casino Royale. Superman Returns. Tristan and Isolde (What? I really wanted to see this! PRETTY DRESSES!).

(Speaking of Isolde, what's this I heard about Sophia Myles being on Doctor Who? Something about Marie Antoinette and dating David Tennant?)

Lost links: Here's what happened if you called the number in the Hanso commercial. More on the Lost Experience. More clues. Were the Others were communicating with Henry? "Lost" Book Clues In Fans. WAAALT! (Hang on, guys, I screwed up the links. I'm trying to go back and fish them up.) (There we go.)

Yes, I have heard about the original Star Wars DVD release. (ACK. That ought to be all the links fixed.)

Meg Cabot addresses the Viswanathan plagiarism. Kind of, because she's too classy to actually mention the girl by name. Remember, she originally weighed in on the whole thing--and then it came out that Viswanathan had ripped her off, too.

(Can I just say that I have seen so much plagiarism that does not make sense to me at all? I mean, if you know exactly what you're doing and you know it's wrong and you do it anyway, I can at least understand that. You're cheating, and you know it, because whatever attention you get from "your" writing makes it worth it to you. What I don't understand are people who take someone else's work [cough], doctor it up a little, and then seem to get genuinely upset when someone calls them on it. This is generally what happens to me. I mean, people who take the entire parody, unaltered, and post it as theirs or [innocent look] "never said they wrote it!" but didn't say who did, I understand what they're doing. They want the attention, and they'll get more attention by reposting the entire thing than just posting a link to it, and they'll get even more attention if they coyly allow people to think they wrote it. I can understand the motive there, and usually if you call them on it, they'll sheepishly take it down. What I don't understand is how someone could take, let's say, the Phantom parody I did, change 50% of the lines while keeping the essential format--that is, the scenes as I wrote and described them [example: I have been known to do a scene in one or two lines, combine scenes, or skip scenes. This is left unchanged, is what I'm saying], my scene titles, and, oh, HALF MY LINES, and this person will not consider it plagiarism. A message board mod actually got involved between someone tipping me off and my actually getting there, so I didn't have to do anything. And you know, it's the internet. I've come to realize that there's not much to really do about it anyway, which is why I stopped hunting this kind of thing down a long time ago, but... once someone points it out, it's hard to just sit there and not do anything about it. Anyway. Why would you think that you could take someone's work, change it a little, and that would make it yours? But people apparently do. And there are moments when I think that Kaavya Viswanathan might really have written compiled Opal Mehta herself, rather than a hapless typewriter-for-hire at her book packager, and that she therefore did all that plagiarizing herself because she thought it was okay. I mean, you steal from so many sources, that makes it yours, right? Except that, while all of us, as artists, steal to a certain extent, most of us don't take other people's actual WORDS. In fact, I don't even really know how to tell you what kind of "stealing" is okay, except that I know it when I see it. Maybe a lot of it has to do with stealing in a way that the reader recognizes what you're doing--that you're doing it for effect, and that the reader recognizing your sources is the whole point of the game. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is okay. How Opal Mehta Ripped Off Three Different Chick Lit Writers and Salman Rushdie (I KNOW!) is not.)

The strange story behind the LJ outage last week. "So, returning to my original point: saying that Six Apart’s services were taken down as the result of a 'sophisticated distributed denial of service attack' is an incredibly gracious statement that only addresses about 10% of the whole story. The other 90% of that story is that Blue Security, a company with already-shady practices, decided to solve its problems by dumping them onto Six Apart’s doorstep, something I’m pretty damn sure isn’t part of the TypePad service agreement. I know that ultimately, the denial-of-service attack came from the spammers themselves, but it was specifically redirected to the Six Apart network by Blue Security, and I hope that they get taken to the cleaners for this one."


ETA: Cruise's "Mission" underwhelms at box office. THAT'S RIGHT, TOOTHY!