Meaty Clown Holes Plagiarize Brooklyn Writer

I feel almost sufficiently recovered to cook up the usual succotash.

1) Tim Blair covers the most amazing patent pending: a personal wormhole generator for teleportation. The invention's based on a man in Puerto Rico's spontaneous hyperspace travel while walking to his bus stop.

2) When you stare at yourself and question how it started, why you wanted to get tattoos, why you liked the bright lights and the smell of sweat and the bodies climbing over you to reach for the stage only to jump back in the crowd, you have to wonder where the beginning of all that was, don't you?

This entry from A Small Victory wasn't about my personal beginning, but definitely reflected part of the ride. After John Lennon's murder, not everyone was grooving to the Meatmen's One Down, Three to Go, but I laughed in my graveyard-whistling way. This album is the definition of politically incorrect, and I enjoyed it as eye-poking fun, not manifesto. The musicianship wasn't epic, hardly existent really, but the aesthetic was all stompy goodness. I can't tell you how my heart crinkled just to see the album cover again and the links to the horrific tracks.

3) The final performer, also a notable singer and musician, to play Clarabell the clown has died. Clarabell is special to me as a clown, because I didn't (although others might've) find him particularly skeezy or creepy. Go figure.

4) Don't let the three names fool you. Reed Farrel Coleman is a real Brooklyn guy and the kind of hard-working author who keeps finding practical ways to help other writers. He'll share whatever he's learned, drag you around and introduce you to people, and always seems genuine, not fatuous. Heck of a writer, too, as if that weren't the most important part. Here's a great article about this local hero of the NY MWA chapter and the national board. Read it before it disappears into the NYT pay hole.

5) From the justice grinding slowly file: Plagiarist of text and art as well as faux-Indian Ward Churchill has been cited for misconduct by the committee at University of Colorado, where this lousy wretch has tenure. It comes simultaneously with the revelation of yet another incident of mistaken attribution and fact-skewing from a careful and serious scholar, Brenda Child, an actual Ojibwa tribe member as it happens. I don't care a fig about his politics- a rat is a rat is a skunk.