Howlin’ Leroy Eenk Accused of Plagiarism

Please, Unabomber, don't sue 'em

From the Editors:

WASHINGTON — Howlin’ Leroy Eenk, the stalwart of high-brow public affairs news and opinion that has dominated the media landscape since its inception, has become the latest newspaper to caramelize in the bubbling sauce pan of plagiarism.

A Topeka, Kansas lawyer said Friday that in dozens of stories over the course of the past three years, instead of delivering readers the freshest and most insightful coverage of the issues that matter most to them, Howlin’ Leroy Eenk reporters and editors, mostly the reporters, have been padding their stories with giant chunks of Industrial Society and Its Future, commonly known as the Unabomber Manifesto.

Plagiarism is considered a “carnival sin” in journalism. It is an offense that if proven leads to the banishment of the now former reporter. It is akin to fictionalizing editorial copy. It is an offense that can, often does, and should sink an organization, even those with similar accolades as those that have been bestowed upon Howlin’ Leroy Eenk, our “Purple Goose.”

Attorney Horace Cumpercrumb, representing convicted unabomber, Theodore “The Unabomber” Kaczynski, says that Howlin’ Leroy Eenk should make a public apology, publish Industrial Society and Its Future, and pay both of them an amount of money that cannot legally be disclosed.

Upon hearing the news of the lawsuit, we were stunned. The effect on the public has not been scientifically tallied, there have been no polls. But an unscientific poll among Howlin’ Leroy Eenk editorial staff spouses and children found increased groundings, erratic mood shifts, fight or flight temper tantrums and crying jags.

To maintain the appearance of objectivity, senior editors at Howlin’ Leroy Eenk tasked us with the task of assigning a “task force” to investigate the allegations and file a complete report. We didn’t object, because with these kinds of things the boys upstairs generally don’t care if you order a few pizzas, have a few beers, or call over a few hookers. Just as long as the job gets done.

The investigation took many hours, and led to a series of bad personal decisions, and was more boring than anything. We never read our own paper, so it was a real drag to actually have to sit down with it. Can you believe that they fill up A2 with celebrity news? And what the fuck is up with the front page? Since when do we sell ads on the front page? That’s fucking sacred ground, man. That’s bull shit.

After blowing off some steam, we got down to business. Some did more work than others.

Passages caught our eye as suspect after skimming just one edition, like this Nov. 16 story by Howlin’ Leroy Eenk reporter Lance Carbunckle about a measure in the U.S. House of Representatives to require states to provide scratch-and-sniff ballots to the blind:

Some fear that the “smellots” will create opportunities for mischief and corruption, with one party dousing the others smellot with an unpleasant odor, like poop.
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“The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs,” said University of Croton Political Science Prof. Geoff LaGnarflle. “Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system.”

Now compare that to this excerpt from Canto 119 of Industrial Society and Its Future:

The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system.

At first we were split, some of us slowly, if not hesitantly, edging toward hedging on the possibility that a staffer at our beloved periodical could have perhaps considered filling out their stories with blather from the Internet. Others were unconvinced by the evidence.

But the following lead and nutgraph from this Dec. 2 San Antonio-datelined Dolores Hazen profile of Barack Obama raised eyebrows.

By Dolores Hazen
Howlin’ Leroy Eenk Staff Writer

SAN ANTONIO — The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in "advanced" countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world.

Compare that to Canto 1 of Industrial Society and Its Future:

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in "advanced" countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world.

Or, another example is this pull-quote from a Dec. 5 critical review of the family film “Night at the Museum” written by Bonita Applebum:

In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we've had to kill people. Bring the whole family!

Compare with Canto 96 of Industrial Society and Its Future:

In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we've had to kill people.

In this example, if you look carefully, you may note that it somewhat appears that the two lines may resemble each other.

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After careful consideration and robust deliberation, marked by several stirring speeches and one guy actually doing the work, our task force reached this conclusion:

Although there is no concrete evidence that Howlin’ Leroy Eenk reporters and editors, mainly the reporters, stole Mr. Kaczynski’s treatise and passed it off as their own work to fill in the pages of this august publication, this public trust, we have decided that if they did, it may have actually constituted an improvement.

Therefore we find the allegations, like our employers, are without merit and recommend that no further action be taken.

Problem solved

2006 Would Have Sucked If Not For Our Jam Box

The two albums released by DangerDoom, “The Mouse and the Mask” and “Occult Hymns,” are the co-winners of the Howlin' Leroy Eenk Best Co-Albums of 2006 Award

From The Editors:

Late this afternoon, about 3:30 p.m., when everybody is finished burping from a long lunch and people are starting to actually make calls and do some work, right before nap time, a superior blustered into our sanctuary and assigned a column for tomorrow’s paper. But not just any column, in fact, it wasn’t a column at all, something else entirely.

It was list, a Best Of... list, the most popular and unnutritious fact-based entertainment product humanity has produced.

As far as editorial boards go, we’re not the most “sober,” “informed,” or, as they say, “cooperative,” band of opinionmakers. But instead of slamming our fists on our desks, snapping at our authority figures (the advertising director, in this case), swearing up and down that we are this close to quitting, then saying something like, “Let’s burn this motherfucker down!,” we took the challenge and whipped up a Best Of 2006 list, a year we never really got to know as well as we should have.

It’s a Best Of list, all right, and it’s pretty great, because it doesn’t restrict itself to 2006. We sat down and found that it made more sense to list the best albums throughout the history of recorded music that we started listening to in 2006 because it was easier.

The year was significant in that it saw our little department make a shift from a predominately punk rock playlist to a more subdued and diverse collection of artists and genres. We listened to more jazz, bought a new copy of a classic, got reacquainted with an old friend called rap, and began listening to a couple new punk bands and even discovered for the first time a fusion band that hasn’t made a record in almost 10 years. And after several years of diminishing interest, country, blues, and classic rock music played less than a minor role. For the first time electronic music played on our stereo resulted in greater frequencies of “Ah, that’s my jam!”

So feast your eyes on the most arbitrary and unreliable information conveyance device in the Modern Paris Hilton Age, and come away less of a person.

The Top Ten Albums/Songs We Started Listening To In Earnest And Started Really Digging in 2006 That May Not Have Been Recorded Or Released In 2006

1-DangerDoom

The Mouse and the Mask (2005) Occult Hymns (2006)

The El Chupa Nibre alternate on the Occult Hymns album (which is free to download here, do yourself a favor) is speculator (Doom’s counting chickens like a colonel on D-Day), and by chance it’s a 2006 release. Perhaps we should award these two efforts with the coveted Howlin’ Leroy Eenk Best Co-Albums of 2006? Yes, we think so too. So it is.

2-Everything MF DOOM has ever done under any and all of his names. He is our hero right now.
(If I may speak freely, nasty like the freaky-deaky at your local sleazy speakeasy.)

3-Rashaan Roland Kirk

"Old Rugged Cross" – Trance inducing and should be avoided by pregnant women and those with heart conditions.

4-El-P

"Deep Space 9mm" – (Behind the walls of New Rome, you want to buy the farm but the land is not yours to own) And beside that, in the video for this Mad Max plea, El-P looks exactly like our friend Vern. We’re talking spitting image.

5-John Coltrane/Metric - Live It Out

We couldn’t decide between the sax legend and the Canadian electrorock. Last year we were pretty Stan Getz heavy in our musical selections, but we’ve drifted from the dreamy Westcoaster.

6- Pearl Jam – Pearl Jam – 2006

We’ve long been a fan of some Pearl Jam songs, and we’ve often sung the praises of “Do the Evolution,” but it wasn’t until this eponymous landslide that we actually owned a Pearl Jam album and played it regularly.

7-Sublime

"Santeria" – About the time this song was a hit we were studying the collected recordings of Robert Johnson and only heard popular music in the morning if our clock radio happened to randomly be turned to the right station. It’s a truly original song, not only in its aesthetic, but the juxtaposition of its soulful, melodic reggae/punk/rap form to the narrative, told through the perspective of an evil bastard. And like a character out of Milton, this devil has us actually rooting for him to hunt down his cheating girlfriend, who probably hates him because he’s an evil bastard, and beating her up and blowing the head off her suitor. He’s so consumed with rage at this relatively commonplace snub that he doesn’t care about his soul. His greatest joy is revenge. We play this one a lot, over and over.

8-Charles Mingus

It’s a better world because of Charles Mingus. And you owe it to yourself to check him out.

9- Fugazzi/Catheters/Dub Narcotic Sound System

We first heard these bands years ago, the Catheters at Bumbershoot 2003, DNSS in the kitchen of the 10th And Miller Pagliacci Pizza in 1996, and Fugazi sometime in high school, and were impressed and just got around to actually buying one of their albums this year. That’s how qualified we are to compile a Best Of ... list.

10 Mozart- Requiem

This has long been a favorite, but about five years ago our copy got scratched and wouldn’t play. We weren’t able to find the Robert Shaw version with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, so we broke down and got a different production. The Shaw version gets dissed a lot, but it makes us feel cozy.

Go to hell Stephen in advertising.

The Battle for Seattle

“There’s a rainbow of ways to profit from war — dissent is small potatoes.”
-Bill Gates

From the editors:

At times, we worry about the state of dissent in the U.S.

There’s always been pamphlets, and Wobblies, and organizers, and with some luck there will always be rabble-rousers and nogoodniks and punks. Every country has them, even ours. Ours is a philosophy of individual conformity.

Dissent is on the rise, it’s in the news, you can tell from the letters to the editor, the bumper stickers in rural towns, and other harbingers, like the Nov. 7 election.

It’s the war. It’s increasingly becoming the one thing Americans can agree on.

Buildings were felled, three-thousand lives were lost. Those with allergies know too well: it’s not the irritant that kills, it’s the reaction to the irritant.

We’re close to killing ourselves, but we’ve been closer. For the first time in many years, things are looking up.

Violence is also on the rise. Most of the world is a military-industrial disaster zone, and the rest is fat. Like us.

But we if we look really hard, we think we might see a speck of hope in this six-year restless night.

The last time we reckoned our eyes weren’t playing tricks — that ..., yes, my man, I think that is light! — the last time we could bring ourselves to begin considering the well-quantified possibility that the American people, society at large, the average citizen, saw the light, a collective satori, the hundredth monkey, was about seven years ago.

Nov. 30, 1999, 50,000 people occupied the streets surrounding the Washington state Convention Center in Seattle as a direct action to disrupt, and if possible, shut down, the third World Trade Organization ministerial.

We at Howlin’ Leroy Eenk were there. We had reporters at Pine and Sixth, and standing alongside pop star Dave Matthews we saw more than a few dramatic examples of courage and conviction, and stupidity and systematic cruelty. It was a monumental experience for each of us, in our own ways, and for the rest of the 50,000 plus who planted their feet in defiance, and for the rest of the world who demonstrated in sympathy or screamed at their televisions.

But what changed us, the experience that altered the direction of each and every one of our lives, and our families lives, was what happened when we got home and turned on the television.

In-between the lies, the teleprompter-readers packed bullshit. When they ran out of bullshit, they used up their remaining lies to fill in the gaps, and there were many gaps. Then they sanded their horror of nature with falsehoods, applied two coats of half-truths, two coats of unattributed facts, and strung up a grand opening ribbon made from that linguistic vampire VIOLENCE. We also witnessed the coming out party of ANTI-GLOBALIZATION.

The revolution we saw on television was not the revolution we fought. We were demonstrating against our global trade system, the one that turns lack of democracy and education in poor countries into a comparative advantage, that conscripts the world’s poorest people and bitch slaps the planet all so some first-worlders can throw away their refrigerator when it clashes with new spatula.

What we saw on television was fiction. And while we took bong rips and screamed at the television, we reaffirmed our commitment to serving the public interest.

That said, we probably should not be surprised that a cheap profiteer is going to film a fictional movie about the demonstration, cleverly entitled The Battle in Seattle.

We here at Leroy Eenk aren’t known for being prone to snap judgements or grossly uninformed mudslinging, although we do it fairly regularly. Such is the case with our denunciation of this movie.

A high-quality documentary exploring the unrest is in order, we believe, and we would be the first to pledge $500,000 to the production of the high-quality documentary and then back out.

However, the Battle for Seattle is not going to be a documentary. It’s going to be something else.

You know when you take a dump sitting sideways on the toilet — because you are poor and your lavatory is tiny — and you get that brown streak of shit on the side of he toilet bowl? The Mark of The Beast?

That’s what this movie is going to be: relevant as a shit stain in the toilet bowl of popular culture.

So that’s strike one.

Strike two: scenes of the movie will be filmed in Seattle, but the production is taking place in Vancouver.
Nothing against Vancouver, and it might save a buck, but what’s the opportunity cost of disingenuousness? The people most likely to see the movie are those who were there, some 50,000 of them. (citation needed) Is it a good idea to give 50,000 people who already don’t like the idea of the movie the right to say that The Battle for Seattle is fecal matter?

Strike three arrived in Friday's Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which reported that former Seattle Mayor Paul Schell, the disgraced white settler, had not been contacted by the filmmakers.

That’s a little shocking. We can pretty much rule out the chance that The Battle for Seattle will be a Battle for Algiers, or a serious reflection on the actual events.

Strike four ... we weren’t asked to be stand-ins. We hear they make $100 a day.