Jan. 13, 2005
PDFs to download and read.

At the Cafe, by Rattawut Lapcharoensap

The Story of Her Breasts, Kirsten Menger-Anderson

In an effort to keep our dear readers at the top of their game, The Other Page design committee has created a beautiful, ornate downloadable, three-to-a-page bookmark for marking your place in our newsletter, with a story by Alexis Swerdloff writ on it. Because you, the reader, must print out the adult zine, photocopy it, and fold it, it's very easy to loose your place. We've been hearing this a lot from our readers, and we've listened, and we've responded.

Don't be fooled, though; this handsome one-of-a-kind placemarker can also be used to hold a spot in shopping magazines, guides to television programming, and even those books with made-up stories in them we occasionally see in the hands of men who smoke pipes.

Let this be a delicious reminder to you, the reader, that we care about helping you keep tabs on where you are, in life, in love, and in poorly edited reading material. Amen.

In regards to DJ AK-47's (soon to be DJ Biz Casual, at next NoData) danceable / moshable mash-up, I've decided to explore plagiarism. Jury is still out on whether the Zen-like simplicity of an aural abortion that Mr. Krucoff created is infringing on someone's copyright, we can say it ought to be illegal nonetheless. Mine ear cartilage has been bent like Beckham's morals because of Andy's white noise/white soul. AK has surpassed me in the "Look what I made, mom" realm.

Plagiarism is the new celeb sex-tape scandal (having already been Gladwell-ized in the New Yorker). The London Review of Books, tackles the sticky (ha!) subject in its tabloid-y ways. LRB shows that, as I always suspected, Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (a book I constantly pretend to have done more than thumbed through once) is the source of everything. Ever read it? It's a compendium of "a" to "yeah, Burton already said that." The LRB goes all: "The 'boundless textual promiscuity' (Mallon) of the web has also decisively altered the way we think about information; the point is not so much to be good at remembering things, as to be good at finding them quickly. Already web skills are playing an important role in the evolutionary struggle for survival."

Just what I expected: the Web is the collective memory of those who can't find vetted material.

Related:
- Plagiarism dot org gives you the low-down on how to get away with cribbing from someone else.
- Plagiarism is derived from the Latin plagiarius ("kidnapper"), and refers to a kind of intellectual theft defined as "the false assumptions of authorship, the wrongful act of taking the product of another person's mind, and presenting it as one's own." (Alexander Lindey, Plagiarism and Originality). [Internet World Stats]
- Computer manufacturers get in on the game, and take a dig at blogs. Or is that just the beginning of a meme in your post? [Wired]

and

Krucoff and I take a stand against right-click piracy, and produce a print-only newsletter -- right column of his newly "redesigned" site.

ps. Yes, I memorized all those URLs. No Internet was used in the citing of 'em

Jeez, someone already sent me an Xmas card, and I'm still trying to pass mom's "mashed potatoes" from Thanksgiving. Hey, here's a thought, since I have more time on my hands than I know what to do with... if you want a holiday card (xmas or... er, what's the other one?) from me this year, do some work for it and electronic mail me at info [at] kiddigit [dot] com and I'll make you a card -- a la kindergarten -- perhaps even a collage or something involving my handprint! That's the kind of content provider I am. Sometimes it's virtual, but sometimes it's on dead wood. Both sad, but multichannel nonetheless. Count yourself lucky that I am in your life, unless your the girl who gave me a wedgie at 151... I'm coming after you.

On another note.. anyone having trouble dealing with creditors? I have officially spent the past 4 days on the phone with a credit card company nagging me on. Argg!

Color me sad. Stacey and Epstein are moving to Seattle. A gaggle of giant heads with scary smiles came out to bid them farewell.

In other sites, HiFiNY covers the scene so much better.

Skip my crap intro below and go read Krucoff's, which is better and will send you on a roundabout way back to me.

I went on a trip to Prague. That's AK and KKo at Akropolis, where we hoped there would be a rock show but instead there was a very well-attended T-shirt raffle.

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Bonus-onus material. Get down, get down, get down. A page ripped right out of the Internet: disparate information put in one place. That's the Internet fer ya. It's like an old college prof used to tell me, "Kid, you ain't smart, you just know where to find the answers."

Me and Andrew WK, when the mood strikes us, put out this online (formerly print) publication called The Other Page. Originally, it was intended to be weekly, but you know how these things go. First you give a damn, then you don't. And by then you're once fortnightly and finally just once in a good, good while. Issue two came out though, with a CD, and it looks like a winner. If you want a CD mailed to you, let me know (info at kiddiging dot com) and I'll send it off to ya. Otherwise, download it from AK's page.

Watch Kelly make an honest man out of me in the wedding pictures. There are about 600 hundred pics in all in a shoebox at home, but here's three pages worth. The first page is the "pro" and the next two are friends who hooked us up.

I've done some writing doo-dads. Some of them are interviews from Gawker.com and some are things from Mediabistro.com, back when I, I dunno, had time? Was motivated? Man, I need a new gig. Now that I think about it, all that stuff was fun. Maybe someday I'll post the 100+ interviews we did for Gothamist. Oh, and that's awesome Phil Toledano's pic. Brutal and great.