I have been trying to figure out why some delusional shitpig named Bryan Lamb would blatantly plagiarize from Tequila Mockingbird and others on his crappy Blogspot site and then threaten a defamation lawsuit when called on it. Or, more to the point, why Blogspot is continuing to host his site.

While I think swift and righteous smackdown is definitely in order here, I’m not entiredly convinced that it’s serving a better good–that it has a purpose beyond getting to see justice administered with the big hot spatula of mass outrage. Which is a hell of a lot of fun in its own right.

But I guess I’m a little distressed that whenever a plagiarism like this happens, it’s not enough that the facts–the Google caches, the comparisons, the basic understanding of the way the “copy” and “paste” keyboard functions work–speak for themselves. And for Christ’s sake, a rip-off of one Blogspot site by another is probably one of the easiest forms of plagiarism to prove.

While it’s great to rally in the name of intellectual property protection for all of blogdom it feels like–well, it feels a little like championing the principle that “murder is wrong” when a psycho serial killer is on the loose. The crime is ugly, the fight against it is indisputably the good fight–but fails to address one totally exasperating little truth, which is: as long as there are creepy, personality-disordered kookoopanted fucknuts like Bryan Lamb on the internet, there will be online plagiarism.

And when it happens, Blogspot and other service providers need to shut that shit down as soon as there’s credible evidence. Julia shouldn’t have had to even consider getting a freaking lawyer. We shouldn’t all have to fight this hard against some little pissweasel who can’t spell “derogatory” and who threatens pretend lawsuits for kicks.

I have more to say about plagiarism and why I think people like Byran Lamb rip off other people’s websites, but I’ll have to post that later. In the meantime go ahead and celebrate original expression by signing this guestbook (courtesy of Sour Bob) and coming up with new ways to tell him what a complete double-assed dickclown he is.

That I’m posting to Damn Hell Ass Kings just because I want to see what my new icon looks like?

You know, usually I never associate with those little pukes at Diaryland, but when Disco the Kid and Shandy came through town this weekend I made an exception. Plus they’d gotten Erin to tell me where I lived and they came over and cornered me intimidatingly.

Really, though, it was good meeting them. D-kid is like that one guy in high school who is like Jesus in that he’s clearly really popular but also just a really cool, sincere guy, although to be honest I guess I am not thinking so much of Jesus himself now as I am of the guy in high school who everyone actually called Jesus on account of his long hair and beard and winning Messiah style, and at graduation everyone yelled Jesus! when it was his turn to cross the stage, but anyway, Disco is like THAT guy except not as full of himself and he dresses better too. And right away when you meet Shandy, you like her and want to have the guy she’s with killed so you can spend the rest of your life with her. But, aha, it turns that guy is Disco, so you’re foiled!

Here it only looks like we shot up heroin for five hours and made a death pact with each other.

It was a fun time. Disco wanted to use my audblog feature to broadcast his nutty conspiracy theories but we couldn’t get the number to work on my cell phone that night. We’ll try again sometime soon.

It’s been less than a week since I bought this damn camera and I’m already a proponent of the dorkiest Blogger With A Digital Camera cliche there is: excessive cat snapshots. Which is pretty alarming considering I don’t even have a cat.

Yeah, you know my neighbor’s kitten that made an audio guest appearance here? This is her:

She was in my hallway on Saturday morning. I mean I opened the front door to go downstairs and she tried to come in. My neighbor had gone out somewhere and evidently the kitten had slipped out into the stairwell.

What the hell was I going to do, just leave the thing out there?

I put a sign up on the lobby door downstairs (“FOUND: KITTEN”) and left my front door open so I could keep an eye on her. Then she came in.

Um, okay. Hi.

The kitten went into my bathroom, which I guess is a total theme park of weird hard-to-reach nooks and crannies. She got in my bathtub and then kept moving her crazy miniature head around so I couldn’t get a clear picture of her face.

Then she found some dental floss. That didn’t seem very sanitary, so I took it away. She was pissed, but shit happens when you go AWOL, cat.

I took about 900 more pictures of this thing. You don’t even want to know. Just now I had to stop myself from posting half of the shitty pictures where I only managed to get part of her ass or three of her legs in the frame because she was so damn kitten-ny and wriggly, and I was actually going to show them to you but …no.

I was a foster parent for less than an hour, because the kitten’s owner finally came home. My neighbor seems really very nice, so I’m trying to figure out how to tell her I’ve been exploiting her pet on the internet using all kinds of multimedia techniques. Should I leave her a note or something?

January: My reality-show recap assignment at TWoP is to write about the drunken pixellated-bare-ass antics of people I went to high school with. The nickname “Man Boobatos” catches on more than I’d anticipated.

February: Aforementioned high school classmates invite me to the show’s final episode party and apparently neglect to kick my ass. (As for the rest of that post: I never did get to see the piece about Pound that was supposedly in this Swedish magazine and any info is welcome.)

March is when my whole freaking life changes after I put up the Weight Watchers recipe cards. They get a lot of attention within just a few days, and it continues for a few more months. After about ten days I have to move my site to a new hosting company and after another week have to get a mirror site set up because of all the motherfucking traffic.

Also, there’s a war or something.

April: I launch Pound’s sister site Candyboots and put the Weight Watchers recipe cards there. I also drink a lot this month, if you must know.

May: I finally move to a bigger apartment and I get to be on the radio.

June: I don’t do much in June except write my first column for BUST and also meet Pinky. HI PINKY!!!!

July is when I patiently explain the difference between online diarists and bloggers to all you people, and then I drink lots of cheap beer in Andersonville and then August is kind of a blur, but that’s when that whole New York Times thing went down, right? Yeah, it’s a blur.

In September Michael comes to town for our friend Amy’s wedding and we have a fine time and take lots of naps, and then later that month I begin my long-overdue campaign of Jemima J. hate which continues into October.

And then in November I meet some bad-ass bitches and um, Clifford, and then I do some other stuff in December, but really you should just scroll down this page to see whatever the hell that was.

My God. I don’t know what to tell you about next year. I mean, I have lots of things to say about what could happen in 2004, but they haven’t happened yet, and I hope they happen, and if I’m posting less frequently here in the blog and then not at all in the journal it’s been because I’m working my ass off on this other stuff, and now I’m getting all vague and goofy and I’ll shut up. The plans for next year also include a collaborative blog to be launched sometime in the spring, and I hope to get the Disturbing Children’s Book gallery up on Candyboots before 2004 is over. And of course I plan to laugh, love, and walk on a beach somewhere in soft focus at sunset being OH GOSH JUST THE BEST THAT I CAN BE.

Happy New Year and thanks for reading, kids.

Last night a reader wrote me to let me know that this gender language analysis algorithm indicates that I am most likely male. He said my December 19th entry resulted in a “481 Male/191 Female” score. But when I tested the December 10th post I got a “female” verdict, and I wondered if maybe it’s a matter of me using girlier syntax when I talk about knitting than when I discuss obscure Star Wars crap and hootchie dancers–you think? Then again, it seems that even in this post where I am deeply moved by the meows of a kitten I have a set of linguistic testicles that I scratch with my pronominal usage.

Not that any of this gives me a complex or anything. I mean, I’ve never been mistaken for a boy. Nope. No way.