26 Comments

ROFL. Thanks for the smiles but now I want to finish 'Cruising The Med' by Homer J Simpson. Just up to the bit where Cersei Lannister turns the sailors into sheep.

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Isn't it pigs? One of them, Peter Dutton, escapes being spit roasted by Cersei by pretending to be a potato, and...

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Jun 17, 2022Liked by John Birmingham

Here I go - capital letter already used - and words - and now coming up - a period. (I could go on - but what's the point - plagiarism gone mad!)

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This is some of your best work! Or some of someone’s best work… Who can say?

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Jun 20, 2022Liked by John Birmingham

I hear whole riffs in modern music straight out of Beethoven. No body modified and recycled music, texts and ideas like Cohen and Dylan but they constructed some of the greatest ideas and sounds of modern times. There's only so many ways that our limited human vocabularies and imaginations can be constructed on a printing press.

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Frankly John, i fear you have let loose the dogs of war.

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Read that as Crustaceous Park and thought how delicious.

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Bring back Helen Demidenko, I say.

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author

Is that you, Helen?

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She moved to Scotland and changed her name to Helen Mcdermidenghiachoch, but sadly, being next to Val Macdermid on the shelf did not help her sales. She was brought back to work for David Leyonhjelm, but that went about as well as you might expect.

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In a career of peak weirdness followed by peak weirdness, Helen [Insert name here] really did work for Leyonhjelm, which flew under my radar at the time. Madder than a boxful of frogs is young Helen.

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Sounds like the excuse given by one of the senior students at a school where I was working some years back. He'd changed a description of stars to a description of flowers; the rest of the narrative was identical to the original. He said he was simply appropriating, quite the buzz word at the time.

If I'd read your explanation perhaps I'd have accepted it.

Regardless, he's now doing very well in his chosen field, so maybe the talent for plagiarism can take one places (besides penury). (And the penal system).

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No idea what's happening here. Has someone accused Matthew Reilly of plagiarism?

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Absolutely Classic. Laughed my arse off.

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Thank for this advice, which I will apply to my work in progress "Pride And Persuasion", a 'bonnets & corsets' romcom set in Regency England

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I have read books by Bryce Courtenay, Wilbur Smith and Barbara Cartland under circumstances of no other unread books being available, and assumed Tom Clancy was in their "league". How do you plagarise a cliche? Well, you can't! Good thinking! Brazen it out.

I might read a book called "Jonathan Livingstone Budgerigar's Dogs of War".

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Laugh…I nearly shat! That itself is taken from the young ones, but as neither they nor I are young anymore it doesn’t matter.

I’ll be inflicting Hughes’ botched theft/creative thingy on the creative writing students in my side gig… oh the laughs we’ll have. Oh looking forward to Station Purple Aardvark or whatever it was you wrote.

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Do publishers have plagiarism detection software?

As Murdoch said of Piers Morgan, his balls were bigger than his brains. I think this applies to ole Johnny boy too.

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Obviously never heard the expression 'go obscure or go home'.

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Was it a blue submarine? Was it a French submarine?

Why are you appropriating the name of a city? Two cities, but the English one probably won't want royalties. The American "royalty shaped hole", is there a submarinated thesis in that, or at least one of those things on the ABC app calling itself an analysis? Who are these people writing those? Does the ABC have interns these days. Do they take it in turns?

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I looked for a ‘Buy Now’ button at the end of the article. That would have been too easy.

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Thank you John, that was delicious.

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