Comments and bad English majors...

Well, here's an awfully odd thing: Student suing school because he plagiarised. Well, that's not quite the whole thing. Michael Gunn spent a hardy three years at Kent University plagiarising, mostly from critical internet sources. Then he got caught, months before his graduation. He's claiming they should have caught him sooner, simply. To be a bit more complex, he claims that he didn't quite know where the lines were on plagiarism, and if they had mentioned it with his first paper, legally he'd be fine. He's setting up a rough, simplistic Laches defence (the only reason I know what that is would be this site, where they're discussing it in detail). Hayden, the writer of the site, who is also an editor for TOR, feels what he is asking, which seems to amount to a "do-over," is relatively justifiable. Mostly, she's enraged that the school couldn't catch him for three years until they ran his paper through a piece of software that does their job for them. An interesting problem, really.

For the most part, I have viewed Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events books as an author and publisher riding J. K. Rowling's coattails through the dust. (As of this moment, I've no idea if they were being published first, second, last, or what. I'd just seen them in stores.) But I've bought the first book, and I shall let it inform my opinion, as I should have before. Honestly, it seems like the sort of slightly odd, vaguely Gothic horror/fantasy thing-bob I'd love. (See Neil Gaiman's Coraline. Snicket's books are getting a fair amount of press, at least from where I sit. Sehmket seemed to like the first book. It's being made into a movie. And it seems that my favorite angst bubblegum rock band, the Gothic Archies do the music for the audio books. Simply brill band, incidentally. All one of them.

For the curious, the BBC has more information about Venus' transit of the Sun.