On the episode of NCIS I’m watching right now, they are dealing with a case of something which may be spontaneous human combustion. So I went to read what Cecil had to say on the subject. While I was reading, one of the characters repeated this line nearly word for word:
Thanks for bringing this to our attention.
Uh-oh. I wonder what’ll happen next?
Check this out too.
I’ll go out on a limb here and say that they will chase a red herring for about 45 minutes and then the writers will pull an explanation out of their ass to show that the person who found the body did it.
GOD I LOVE NCIS!!!
Ahem, excuse me.
Huh. I thought Askia was talking about NCIS and Ellie Crystal (follow Reeder’s link and you’ll find that she did much worse than NCIS) borrowing from Cecil’s column.
Eh, hard to get excited about the theft of a paragraph. When the musical based on the ode to Schroedinger’s cat comes out, however, there will be hell to pay.
Yeah, I was talking about the plagarism and the Reader’s possible response to it. I think DrFidelius is just really into whooshing people.
Ellie Crystal basically cut and pasted that whole section on spontaneous human combustion without attribution to Cecil. No, no, no, no. makes me wonder who else has been cribbing Cecil’s columns on the internet.
According to TV Tome (see how carefully I’m attributing?), the writers for tonight’s episode of NCIS are George Schenck and Frank Cardea. One or both of them is potentially in a lot of trouble, I’d imagine.
Hell – somebody plagiarized huge sections of my Wacky Millennium article for their “Timeline of the Renaissance” webpage at http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hangar/6739/timeline.html.
I e-mailed 'em about it, but wonder of wonders, they never replied to me.
Yah…but how many lawyers do you have at your beck and call?
I bet the Reader has one.
Nearly word for word.
And unless Cecil was the one who personally witnessed and reported the findings of that supposed SHC, then Cecil also was quoting or paraphrasing some other report to which the writers of NCIS could also have had access.
And I doubt that Cecil was their source because their two science geeks believe in SHC when Cecil’s article shows it to, in actuality, not be so spontaneous. In another episode, one of the geeks believed in crop circles, but the other geek was a skeptic and proved it to be man-made. If the writers read Cecil’s article, they wouldn’t have been able to resist having one of the characters debunk SHC.
Peace.
Unless it, you know, made for a better story. They’re not in the debunking business, they’re just writing for a TV show.
If you’re gonna check that out, how about:
this?
Or how about this one?
Or this,
or this, as well as this and this and this?
And, of course, this,
and this,
and this.
And this
as well as this and this and this.
And finally, this
and this.
Amazing how many people converge to the sane wording, right down to the “black stain slipper” typo.
I know this was just an example of Gaudere’s law, in a way… but I can’t help wondering who would be drawn to the insane wording. 
Of course, it’s hard to know how many of zut’s links plagiarized from each other and how many copied directly from Cecil’s column, but that’s still pretty unbelievable. And that’s just one column.
You know, I could probably credibly claim that I purposely included a typo as an homage to Cecil, much the same way that some rug-makers purposely include a point of asymmetry to demonstrate their humility before God. But let’s face it, the “m” and “n” keys on my computer are way too close.
And, as far as plagiarism goes, try Googling some distinctive phrases from Cecil’s more popular columns:
“I have been in repeated contact with the Beijing government” from If all Chinese jumped at once, would cataclysm result? (06-Apr-1984) results in eighteen matches.
“The boring truth is this: Catherine the Great died of a stroke” from Is it true about Catherine the Great and the horse? (17-Nov-1978) results in ten matches.
“I think it is poetically appropriate that Joseph Pujol” from Did a French vaudeville star once specialize in trained flatulence? (06-Jul-1984) results in fifteen matches.
“Heinz, as may already be evident, was something of a character” from Why does Heinz ketchup say “57 varieties”? I only see one variety results in seven matches.
“practitioners do have one thing in common: they’re incredibly stupid” from Is it true what they say about gerbils? results in twelve matches.
And a bunch more with three or four repititions apiece. Some of these are legitimate quotations with attributions, or course, but many are not.
I tried to give this show a chance, mostly because there is nothing else on at that time, but when I reached the fifteenth, “G-d, this show really sucks,” in as many minutes I concluded that it probably did really suck, to such a great extent that it can be used as a counter for the argument that CSI:Wherever really sucks. “You think THAT sucks? Try sitting through an episode of NCIS! The lack of sexual tension between Sara and Greg pales by comparison.”
CSI:Navy is horrible, I agree. So is CSI:TV for the Attention Deficit.
I hate both shows with a passion. My wife hates Law and Order:SVU (which I find tolerable) this means that we have whole evenings with which to read and get to know each other better 
I love the show. Is it Masterpiece Theatre? Nope but it’s not intended to be. And last week’s episode with Charles Durning was just wonderful.