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Journalist Paul Tolme recounts in Newsweek the unusual experience of discovering that an article he’d written about ferrets had been plagiarised – by a cheap, slightly erotic romance paperback.

Now, normally that would be a bad thing; plagiarism, after all, is a pernicious and dishonourable practice that needs to be stamped upon heartily. But the plagiarism, in this case, has given us some of the most giddily wonderful, utterly un-erotic dialogue ever squeezed between the warm, heaving covers of a soft-core potboiler.

The scene: a Native American called Shadow Bear has just boffed a young pioneer lady, Shiona Bramlett. Then, er, they see some ferrets:

“They are so small, surely weighing only about two pounds and measuring two feet from tip to tail,” Shiona said. “While alone in my father’s study one day, after seeing a family of ferrets from afar in the nearby woods, I took one of my father’s books from his library and read up on them. They were an interesting study. I discovered they are related to minks and otters. It is said that their closest relations are European ferrets and Siberian polecats. Researchers theorize that polecats crossed the land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska, to establish the New World population.” …

“What I have observed of them, myself, is that these tiny animals breed in early spring when the males roam the night in search of females,” Shadow Bear said, watching as the last of the ferrets bounded off and disappeared amid the bushes away from where they had first been spotted. “Mothers typically give birth to three kits in early summer and raise their young alone in abandoned prairie dog burrows.” …

“I read that ferrets stalk and kill prairie dogs during the night. Using their keen sense of smell and whiskers to guide them through pitch-black burrows, ferrets suffocate the sleeping prey, an impressive feat considering the two species are about the same weight,” Shiona said, shivering at the thought, for to her one animal was as cute and precious as the next. It was a shame that any had to die to sustain the other.

It’s fantastic stuff. It’s Atlanta Nights meets Bulwer-Lytton meets David Attenborough. You should head over to Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books, who uncovered the plagiarism and who detail, in gleefully exhaustive fashion, every painful, jarring, sub-Dan Brown passage. Outstanding.

Orgasm – 32,700,000
Wargasm – 222,000
Nerdgasm – 43,600
Geekgasm – 21,700
Foodgasm – 17,800
Floorgasm – 12,300
Assgasm – 7,900
Obamagasm – 2,520
Applegasm – 926
Techgasm – 791
Feargasm – 448
Pottergasm – 341
Sexgasm – 314 (Seriously, “sexgasm”? There is already a word for this, people.)
Poorgasm – 289
Facegasm – 185
Sportgasm - 93
Gungasm – 65
Gasmgasm – 46
Kneegasm – 27
Knifegasm – 8
Ronpaulgasm – 6
Jockgasm – 5
Kittengasm – 4
Tentaclegasm – 2
Microsoftgasm – 1

Stop it.

An idle thought occurred to me while looking, despairingly, over the deluge of posts in my Google Reader that I’ll never get round to reading. The masses of unread entries come in clusters – and so, naturally, do the ones with no unread entries. Perfectly understandable – you read one thing, then there’s a good chance you’ll read the thing next to it. Of course, that got me wondering if there’s any boost in readership from having a blog name that’s likely to crop up next to prolific, highly-read blogs. So, for example, would Kopblog (say) get read more because it’s right next to Kottke? Does Boi From Troy pick up a little more audience simply by being directly above Boing Boing on a couple of hundred RSS readers?

Obviously, this doesn’t take account of loads of things – how people organise their RSS feeds into folders, the fact that similar blogs often have similar names (like Languagehat and Language Log), and so on. But I couldn’t help wondering if, somewhere, there’s a tiny, infinitesimal bump from having a name that’s a bit like someone else’s. No idea how you’d go about teasing out that variable from every other, of course. Or, indeed, why you’d bother.

After a hiatus last year, when I forgot to do it, here’s the 2007 instalment of this blog’s ongoing project to fight the crude pigeon-holing tendencies shown by other end-of-year lists. No longer shall Neon Bible be relegated to the “best albums” parade, just because it was, in fact, an album. If Gordon Ramsay’s refurbished gastropub in Limehouse wants to compete for Best Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, rather than best restaurant, then it is free to do so. We not not bracket, compartmentalise, or divide. We celebrate unity through diversity.

So, here you go – here are the 19 best things of 2007:

19. The Arcade Fire at Glastonbury
Was it such a borderline epiphanic experience in spite of the drug-addled hippy with a poor sense of personal space who kept on trying to walk through my back during the entire set – or was it, in part at least, because of him? No. It was nothing to do with him. But thankyou anyway, kind sir.

18. Tony Blair fucked off
And for a precious, golden few days, it seemed like good sense, quiet competence and a dignified sense of principle might be restored to our government. Of course, not so much. But it was nice while it lasted. A clear winner of Vegetarian Restaurant of the Year.

17. The finger-tapping, eye-staring thing that The Rock does in Southland Tales to indicate that he’s going mad which is a bit like someone doing a Stan Laurel impersonation except they’ve never actually seen footage of Stan Laurel and have in fact just read about him on Wikipedia
Majestic.

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