NY Times and the Daily Telegraph

both have articles about the Cassie Edwards issue today. The NYT article is more up to date and informative. It's good to see that this is being taken seriously.

Does anyone else...

...obsess over which colours should represent their friends on their flist? I spend several minutes choosing each time I add a new friend, and have been known to go back and change colours that I didn't think were working (either in general or as a representation of the individual in question).

ETA: It seems no one else does this! You can check 'your' colours on my flist simply by looking at my friends page (make sure you don't have ?style=mine in the url). You can change your friends colours by clicking on Manage Friends. It'll give you an option to edit your friends list and change the colours used to represent them. Have fun!

Please Miss, I've got a note from the doctor

In the Washington Post article about the Cassie Edwards affair, they make mention of an incident a few years ago when one romance novelist, Janet Dailey, admitted she had plagiarised a fellow romance writer, Nora Roberts.

In 1997, romance novelist Janet Dailey acknowledged taking material from Roberts, saying that "my essentially random and non-pervasive acts of copying are attributable to a psychological problem that I never even suspected I had."

Which psychological problem is that, Ms. Dailey? Kleptomania?

You would think that once a problem of obsessive, unconscious plagiarism had been diagnosed, the sufferer would be best advised to pursue a career other than writing. Not Ms. Dailey. Let's hope her editors know how to check her work for originality before it's published in future.

Eats, Shoots and Leaves

This is a particularly fun punctuation quiz.