Tuesday, March 11, 2008

plagiarism beckons

Here you will find the online presence of Owen Hathaway.

Well, I was looking for a blog I came across the other day, Sit Down Man, You're a Bloody Tragedy, run by one Owen Hathaway, a 26-year-old in London who writes about pseudomodernist architecture and other joys, so I was obviously looking for the online presence of Owen Hathaway, but when Google, that goofy bird dog amongst search engines, served up a site billed as the online presence of Owen Hathaway something told me this was not THE Owen Hathaway. Not the master of pseudomodernist discourse. Some other Owen Hathaway. An Owen Hathaway, I could not help feeling, from a simpler place and time.

Those of you with websites and blogs of your own, those who have been bullied by webdesigners and consultants, will understand. Understand, I mean, the urge to appropriate.

Here you will find the online presence of Helen DeWitt. My goal for this site is to represent myself online in an accessible way.

That's all I ever wanted. Why not just come out and say so?

The OTHER Owen Hathaway turns out to be a specialist in security management based in Fort Collins, Colorado. He has an impressive array of qualifications in IT; he has concentrated on security management in healthcare. He is, in other words, the sort of person who would probably make himself unpopular in Britain, with its happy-go-lucky pop-it-in-the-post leave-it-in-the-taxi approach to data protection.

THE Owen Hathaway, anyway,

um

is actually called Owen Hatherley

The OTHER Owen Hathaway is actually THE Owen Hathaway.

THE Owen Hatherley is THE Owen Hatherley.

and

has a blog called Sit Down Man, You're a Bloody Tragedy, blog address nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com. While he may not be making himself popular in Britain, in Fort Collins he would probably be locked up as a raving lunatic:

I'll tell you who makes the Nazis...Here's Two excellent pieces on the BBC's ridiculously dangerous 'White' season, in which the experience of the 'white working class' is boiled down to having a bee in one's bonnet about immigrants - something motivated, as Lynsey Hanley's piece points out, by the Beeb's own cossetted middle class fuckwittery, in a world where these things are excitingly exotic. Note also that on the comments appending her piece the working classes are accused of stupidity and smelling of piss by someone clearly unfamiliar with the niceties of English grammar. An interestingly common thing on Comment is Free and its ilk, the grammatically and verbally challenged rantings of right-wing arseholes who still, somehow, manage to maintain a sense of impregnable superiority.

and so on


Lessons to be learnt:

1. You can cope with senile dementia as long as you keep your sense of humour.

2. Plagiarism never looked so good.

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