Aside from Gladwell’s pit bulls and the ferocious Spot, there are a few more tough dogs in the February 6 issue. For instance, on p. 49, in John Cassidy’s “The Red Devil: An American in Manchester”:

Then [the Glazer brothers] ate dinner in a corporate suite in one of the stands overlooking the [Manchester United] playing field. Outside, the protesters were loudly threatening to murder their father: “How we’ll kill him, we don’t know; cut him up from head to toe. All we know is Glazer’s gonna die.” Eventually, riot police arrived with nightsticks and German shepherds and secured the area under one of the stands, around a tunnel designed to give emergency vehicles access to the field.

At about ten-thirty, two vans carrying the brothers emerged from the tunnel. The protesters pounded on the vehicles’ roofs and sides and threw stones and bottles. Several were injured as the police, using their dogs and batons, tried to clear a path through the crowd. Finally, the vans sped away….

Perhaps we should start trying to identify potential football-club defenders in a crowd as well as bad dogs and smugglers. When Man U fans get mad…

Aside from the fluffy, presumably nice dog on p. 32 in the Jack Ziegler (him again!) cartoon, any other dogs in the issue? If you spot some, send them in. Muzzled, if absolutely necessary.

Please forgive me, Frank Harrell of Why My Blog Is Better. I must quote your entire post, because I love it so. Links are links to things I’ve posted about Martin before. In all fairness, I think we should note that despite questionable thespian decisions, Martin has achieved excellence on the banjo and gave lots of dough to the Huntington Library.

Steve Martin: Intervention

Stevie, listen carefully. This is for your own good.

In the past ten years, Bill Murray has made the following movies: Broken Flowers. The Life Aquatic. Lost in Translation. The Royal Tenenbaums. Rushmore.

In the past ten years, YOU, Steve Martin, have made the following movies: Cheaper by the Dozen. Cheaper by the Dozen 2. Shopgirl. Bringing Down the House. Bowfinger. The Out of Towners. Your upcoming movie, The Pink Panther, has had its release date postponed twice in the past nine months. Even worse, it co-stars Beyonce.

Seriously Stevie, and I’m not kidding here: what the fuck is wrong with you??? Why so many atrocious movies, one after the next? Are you using the same agent as Colin Farrell and Jude Law? Are you and Robert De Niro secretly plotting to fuck with us by taking every single role offered to you, and playing a variation on the same character in EACH MOVIE? Your stint as host of the Oscars several years ago stands out as the best thing you’ve done in 10-15 years. That basically makes you just like Billy Crystal, a far less superior comic talent.

I have not seen the Cheaper by the Dozen disasters. Thank God. However, I think it’s safe to say that between the God-awful reviews, the appearance in both movies of Hillary Duff, and (apparently, from what I hear) the fact the funniest scene in either movie involves a wheelchair-bound man losing control of said wheelchair and falling into the ocean, you could probably do a bit better in choosing your scripts. Shopgirl? Was a great movie — for Claire Danes. You, Steve Martin, played the Woody Allen role of a slightly pervy, emotionally detached, completely unlikable older man who dates girls in their early 20s. There is no trace of humor in your character, a big misstep for an actor whose greatest strength is his off-kilter sense of humor. Bringing Down the House was funny in that “isn’t Queen Latifah sassy? Oh, how I love stereotyped black women on screen” sort of way, but you, Steve Martin, had all of your scenes stolen by Eugene Levy. I’m not even going to comment on your other movies of the past 10 years. Because they were ass. And no one saw them.

I complain only because I am a BIG fan of your previous work. L.A. Story is a perfect comedic movie and one of my favorite movies. I’d even go out on a limb and say you are a better actor than Bill Murray, who has usurped your position as “older comedic actor with dark emotional undercurrents” while you were busy taking really shitty roles. Steve — take a supporting role in a quirky, off-beat independent film. You are not above that. It will probably do your career a world of good. Hell, even blow Wes Anderson if you have to, but just stop making crappy product. And don’t listen to De Niro. He’d play the monkey in a live-action version of Curious George if they paid him his $15 million fee. That is all.

Speaking of Jack Ziegler, he also illustrated this not long ago:

Fictoids? They are, writes Dutcher in Fictoids: Short Fiction … Very Short ($12 in hardcover from Dutcher & Co. Inc.), “a bit of fictional history, making a statement or telling a story in one sentence. A typical fictoid tells who did what, when and where. A fictoid may even be partially true, but is never entirely true, or it would be a factoid. In fact, a fictoid is just a fictional factoid.”

Dutcher’s Web site (www.fictoids.com) explains that he got the idea in the late ’90s watching CNN and its fascination with factoids…. No more wading through a long story to get to the stupid ending. The stupid ending is contained in the first sentence!

The invention of fictoids is also the story of a self-publisher. As Dutcher writes on his site, “In 2003, encouraged by family and friends, I decided to put my favorites into a self-published book. This led to a long period of negotiating with myself over which fictoids should be in the book. By this time, I had written hundreds of fictoids, but my inner-editor felt some of the fictoids were too easy, too abstract or just not funny enough to justify being in the book. There was also the issue of how many fictoids should be in the book.

“Once it was decided that the book should be around 200 pages, the editing continued, but each time I would write a new fictoid I would delete an old one.” Dutcher goes on to say how he picked the illustrator, New Yorker cartoonist Jack Ziegler. Turns out you can go on the New Yorker Web site and pretty much hire their cartoonists. So he did.
…
In the meantime, to the fictoids…. “In 1928, Fannie Footloose, a highfalutin flip flapper who loved to shimmy and Charleston, shocked Newport’s high society when she suddenly fled the social scene and sailed off for Paris with foppish fashion photographer F. Stop Fitzgerald.” More; sample fictoids.

(Emph. mine.) Here’s more from Bill Dutcher’s blog post about how he and Ziegler joined forces:

I also decided the book needed some illustrations. Whenever I think of cartoons, I think of the The New Yorker magazine. So I went to their website and discovered they had set up a Cartoon Bank, where you can license the use of New Yorker cartoons, or hire cartoonists to draw new ones. After reviewing the online samples of several cartoonists they recommended, I hired Jack Ziegler as our illustrator last fall.

We selected thirteen fictoids to be illustrated, and Jack came up with the idea for the cover illustration and drew it as well. I felt that his work was so good, it raised the bar for the quality of the writing. This led to another round of editing….

Here’s the first response I’ve seen so far to Malcolm Gladwell’s piece on various kinds of profiling, including smuggler-screening and canine prejudice:

But two points: first, pit bulls are more likely to be trained or abused in a way that makes them dangerous. Trends about Rottweilers or Dobermans may come and go, but pit bull breeds will always be popular fighting dogs. Why? Because they’re really good at it. This relates to my second point: if it turns on a person for whatever reason, a pit bull is a very dangerous dog. Have you ever seen a pit bull in a fight? Some of them have jaws the size of a football, and when they get a hold of something, it is almost impossible to free. Even the best-trained animal can get in a situation that is dangerous to humans — say, a pit bull is attacked by another dog, and that dog’s owner is a ten-year-old boy who runs up, screaming. Pit bulls are more likely to be abused and more likely, if involved in an attack on a person, to be involved in a serious or even fatal attack. And laws banning pit bulls are often the only way that the owners of fighting dogs are punished (which happens very rarely in the first place). Besides, anyone getting a dog, unless they’re a shepherd or a police officer, is best served by getting a mutt. All this talk of the best breed only encourages people to get pets that really aren’t best for family ownership and to leave great animals languishing in shelters or wandering as unwanted strays. More.

The critic above calls himself Drinky the Drunk Guy. I hope some angry pit-bull owners write in to defend the breed, just for fun. City and airport officials, etc., are busy arguing the civil-liberties and security issues Gladwell highlights, but there’s at least one simple conclusion to be drawn from the doggy part of the piece. Gladwell:

A 1991 study in Denver, for example, compared a hundred and seventy-eight dogs with a history of biting people with a random sample of a hundred and seventy-eight dogs with no history of biting. The breeds were scattered: German shepherds, Akitas, and Chow Chows were among those most heavily represented…. The biters were 6.2 times as likely to be male than female, and 2.6 times as likely to be intact than neutered.

The fellow whose pit bulls attacked a kid and his mom in the story felt that $100 was too expensive for neutering. It’s probably too expensive for a lot of people. Reduce strays and attacks and fix animals for free!

When I was in first grade, a boy I loved because his name was Shaun (as in Cassidy) invited me over to his house. Of course, I went. His dog bit my hand hard, and there was blood everywhere. The romance was through. I saw him years later in tenth grade; he had blond dreadlocks and played D&D. Nice guy, though. It was only his dog that left something to be desired. It didn’t turn me against dogs, just (for a while) boys.

Later: Speaking of which, in the same issue, the dog—let’s call him Spot—in the small illustration at the bottom of page 61 (mid-brilliant Katherine Boo piece, best in issue) sure looks ferocious…

At the Lorimer L stop, in the white space above Eric Bana’s head in the Munich poster, a hand-drawn thought bubble containing these words in elegant script:

“Jeeze, I can’t even ball my wife anymore without thinking about how violence begets violence…what a moral.”

Lower down, Partnership for a Drug-Free America-style: “DON’T LET VENGEANCE RUIN YOUR SEX LIFE.”

As always, Scott McLemee, a.k.a. The Bravery, stylishly whips centuries of thought into a graceful meringue in his essay about, among other things, confronting a “light-fingered academic” with the evidence of his crime:

I would give him a chance to explain himself, of course. But really there was not much he could say. Plagiarism is one offense where simply presenting the evidence often amounts to conviction.

To be honest, researching the story had involved a certain amount of aggressive glee on my part. There is a special pleasure that comes from establishing an airtight case. (Besides, the superego is a bit of a sadist.) But now, with the prospect of actually talking to the guy looming, it was surprising to feel contempt give way to pity. His luck had run out. In a couple of days, he would be notorious. It felt as if I were serving as his judge, jury, and executioner—not to mention the court stenographer. Oddly enough, I felt guilty.

Besides, the psychology of the serial plagiarist is so puzzling as to be a fairly absorbing mystery…. Continued.

He also reviews the new journal Plagiary: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification (which, says its editor, may even be “willing to consider articles from plagiarists”). Scott writes: “[T]he topic of plagiarism itself keeps returning. One professor after another gets caught in the act. The journalists and popular writers are just as prolific with other people’s words. And as for the topic of student plagiarism, forget it—who has time to keep up?” He goes on to consider the tricky distinction between “allusion” and “theft,” as well as the revealing roots of the word “plagiarism” itself.

I’ve long been happy that plagiarist.com is a poetry-resource site, and a pretty good one. I like to think of students happening on it by accident in a caffeine fog and smiling for a second as they realize the little joke that’s been played on them. And then they read some poems and…but let’s not get out of hand.

And for all your New Yorker needs, here’s that Malcolm Gladwell piece about plagiarim that everyone liked so much. Except I didn’t, really, because although it’s a fun story, Gladwell falls into his tendency to set up straw people and subtly polarize his subjects—nice, flower-bringing playwright; modern, laid-back journalist; literal, stingy psychiatrist—and that makes it all seem a bit unfair.

I like the typeface on the Plagiary website; is that New Century Schoolbook? It reminds me of a type I used to like to write in. Maybe when I was turning down my overwhelmed roommate’s offer of $100 to write her First-Year Seminar paper, then realizing how many hot bagels and scallion pancakes that would’ve bought. J., where are you now? You were so smart, and so stressed. I hope you’re calmer now.

“Run for your lives! A New Yorker editor’s note!” was the Regret the Error hed. I’ll say, so I’ve asked a veteran letters editor, Judith Long of The Nation (pictured below), to give us her guess about what’s going on behind the enigmatic non-admission. Check back soon.

A MamasInk writer digs last week’s Linda Gregg poem: “It’s the kind of poem that makes me remember that I do love poetry.” The full text is here, too! Bloggers wouldn’t have to resort to this if the NYer would put at least one poem per issue online. Poetry’s not being read—that’s ancient news. So how can you help, major literary tone-setting magazines?