I took the day off work, mostly to go visit two different doctors (minor visits -- nothing serious -- good reports from the docs). The folks are in town today, but it looks like I'll be able to avoid them completely. I love my parents, but too often, they want me to come spend the whole evening visiting them and my grandmother, then we do nothing but watch whatever's on network TV.

Anyway, after getting home from my appointments, my attention was drawn to this article from the World O'Crap weblog. To quickly summarize: a Wells College student named Nicole Krogman isn't being allowed to graduate. She says it's because she's a conservative -- the college says it's because she's a fairly clumsy plagiarist. And one of the sites she stole from was our own beloved E2 -- specifically, SlackinWhileSleepin's densely researched political correctness writeup.

Basically, this pissed me off, so I decided to send Ms. Krogman an e-mail. Here it is:
Listen, I don't know who the hell you are, and I don't particularly care to. But from what I see on the World O'Crap weblog, you stole from Everything2.com, my favorite website in the frickin' universe. I've been writing for E2 for over six years and was an editor for quite a while. While I was an editor, we had a lot of trouble with some of our users who would steal content from other websites and pass it off as their own. We finally got them to either behave and be honest, or get the hell off the site and quit bothering us.

Ms. Krogman, first of all, you owe us an apology. It was not a compliment that you thought we were good enough to steal from -- it's an insult that you made us complicit in your own dishonesty. Second of all, frankly, I doubt any of us at the site ever want to hear your name again. Please don't come back. Don't look at the site. You stole from us, and we don't like thieves hanging around our place.

Sincerely,
Scott Slemmons
And that's it. If you send her an e-mail, please don't copy-and-paste my letter. It might look pretty damn goofy if a plagiarist gets a plagiarized letter taking her to task for plagiarizing, right?

UPDATE: I wonder how common plagiarization from E2 is. Lometa sez: "Some reporter in the Midwest plagiarized my write up for the Great Depression. With some encouragement from bones, I sent them a scathing email telling them to either cite E2 or me as the source or take it down. Sometimes I find the subjects for my write-ups in the paper and they plagiarized something awful. Peanut butter is one from years ago that the AZ Daily Star cut and pasted from some of the sources I used. I recognized it right away. The last one was spring cleaning and do you know the article I used was a cut and paste job from three different web sites! They took one section from the Good Housekeeping web site, another from the Merry Maids and I forget the third. It's cited in my write up instead of the paper. Oddly enough there was no author listed. It was on a flyer for a grocery store ad."