October 2nd, 2003
To have no errors
Would be life without meaning
No struggle, no joyby Me :-)
Remember that contest back in 1997 by Salon Magazine to find Haiku Error Messages? A co-worker of mine pointed out the contest and I submitted three haikus that I wrote--two that I spent a few minutes on and a third that I just threw together to round out the number. I didn't hear anything more for a couple of months, until I received a joke email that listed all of the winners and runners up. When I looked through the list, one of mine--the quick-and-dirty one (of course!)--was one that received honourable mention.
Well, it was a tiny bit of a thrill for about 10 seconds, but after reading the other entries I realised that, in comparison to the others, mine wasn't particularly good. So I counted myself lucky to have been included in the list at all, and forwarded the email to my mother.
Every once in a while I still see mention of these haikus, though six years have gone by. People often add their own to the list, and there was even an operating system (BeOS 5.0 PE) that had mine and a few others as real error messages. I've never minded that people distribute the haikus without crediting the authors; in fact, it makes some sort of sense to me, considering the free and gentle nature of haiku (and the ubiquitous nature of errors). And the idea of the list being added to and distributed, all anonymously, really appeals to me. I like this little piece of Art For And By The People. I see it as something good coming out of the vast SPAM-riddled culturally-questionable wasteland of email.
But the thing that really chokes my chicken is when people slap their name or a copyright notice on the end of these little poems and stick them into a post or web page somewhere, claiming they wrote them all themselves. It's the laziest form of plagiarism there is, and I really can't stand the fact that people think they can believably be credited with them all. The styles are all so different (being written by so many different people, duh) and they are sometimes mutually contradictory.
BTW: I'm not criticizing people who quote them, just those who claim they wrote them themselves.
It certainly isn't the first time in my life that something I've written has been plagiarized. Why, I even once "lent" one of my old A-grade papers to a girl in a 2nd-year English course because ... well, I don't need to go into details about why, do I? But this one really hurts because one of the very few Internet-based movements I've seen that I think is worth anything is being debased and cheapened by laziness and unoriginality.