It’s colder than a witch’s tit out there right now…
It’s time for us to cozy up around the fire as we endure the harsh winter month of November… and what better way to light that fire than by burning a few brain cells coming up with our answers to this week’s Share Your World challenge hosted, as always, by Melanie. This one goes out to all of you who were dreaming of a white Veterans Day…
Time to get the world out of the icebox…
Is copying and pasting images or information off the Internet plagiarism? Do you credit those whose work you ‘borrow freely’ or do you think the idea is repugnant?
The internet’s a bit of a trickier “source material” than old fashioned forms of media. Words and images (ESPECIALLY images) get copied and recopied ad nauseum to where even the most “ethical” writer would find it near impossible to try and credit the true “owner” of said work. When I set about finding images off the internet to compliment my posts, I honestly don’t worry at all about where the image came from and what website I even got it from… because more than likely, the actual source is far down a virtual rabbithole I couldn’t trace if I wanted to.
All rights reserved, or I’ll throw a temper tantrum!
On rare occasions where the image is an actual artwork that I can definitely verify the originator for, I have credited the source in my caption. But other than that…. nah. Given the nature of the internet, and only exacerbated by social media… if you post an image online without some kind of digital signature in it, it’s pretty much de facto public domain. As for information, I do try to link to articles whose info I reference (particularly Wikipedia, which is my favorite source since I’m lazy) since images are much more likely to be hijacked than words…
As for those bizarre sites that like to copy and paste entire articles and post them without credit… I have no idea what their motive even is or if anyone even visits them. If a tree gets copied in the forest, and nobody’s around to be misled, is it really plagiarism?
Help! This tree’s plagiarizing my fur color!
Do you let sleeping dogs lie?
FUZZYWIG: Lovely. My favorite dope smoking chair is being occupied. Time for your 4:20 alarm clock, mutt….
FLEABAG: BARK! BARK! BARK! BARK! BARK! BARK! CALL BOB BARKER! BARK! BARK! BARK! BARK! BARK! BARK!
What’s the strangest pet name (for adults) that you’ve ever heard someone called?
I’ve got nothing. So instead, here’s a picture of Santa Claus wearing bunny ears in a hilarious Easter episode of Shelf Critter Theatre…
Need some fishnets to go with that look, Santy?
Do you like to dance? If yes, what’s your favorite and if no, why not?
I will move and gyrate to music with a nice beat, and that’s about it. Dancing is a social activity, so…. no. Back in elementary school, the PE teacher made us learn how to square dance…. and no, while my city is definitely white trash, we’re not a hick town. Absolutely fucking hated it…
I prefer to watch other people dancing, thank you…
November brings Thanksgiving to Americans. I know Canada celebrates Thanksgiving too, but I believe it’s in October. Does your country celebrate a similar holiday? If you’d like, share some traditions you observe around Thanksgiving or if you don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, what are some traditions you have?
My favorite Thanksgiving tradition is watching people make a fool out of themselves while I get paid for the privilege…
Pictured above: Sheep
Evil Squirrel's Nest 
You get to watch all the early shoppers clogging the aisles at Mecca – now that’s entertainment and certainly since you’ve worked there for a long time it must at this point be a “tradition”. Our Mecca has had holiday stuff out for at least a month now – Thanksgiving kind of gets lost in the Christmas shuffle.
Pam
It’s not as fun as it was back in the day when it was literally a “door buster” sale. I still remember the year me and another co-worker lucked into a break at midnight, which was when the big sale started that year, and we both watched through the windows of those swinging doors leading to the backroom. It was both hilarious and mesmerizing… until a customer spotted us and poked their head in to ask us a stupid question about something…
There’s always someone who ruins a good buzz…….
Good questions. I always try to use a photograph that I took myself or something in Creative Commons so that I don’t infringe on anyone’s copyright; otherwise I credit the source. It’s tricky because we know that posts tend to be read more if there are images with them!
I’m big on bookending each paragraph with images because I’m generally too ADD to read long, seemingly unending blocks of just words. In eight years of blogging and using thousands of images I’ve scavenged off the net, I’ve only had one person contact me about something I used in all those years. Trying to maintain credit for images on the internet is a lot like trying to maintain credit for any particular statement you made at a huge party… by the end of the night, your nugget might be all over the place and distorted into any number of things, and nobody’s going to know where it originated from anyway.
We celebrated Thanksgiving in October, minus the tradition of trampling people to death to buy a cheap toaster. Although that tradition is likely catching on and I’m just oblivious to it because I own 2 toasters (one was at work but since I’m unemployed…) 🙂
LOL, toasters! Ah, the good old days of Black Friday. Nobody comes for the toasters anymore. Now it’s the air fryers!
Right…for fried possum! 😉
Are those sheep RABID? Because that woman on the left looks like she’s willing AND able to kill to get the last Parcheesi on the table…the woman on the right is clearly stoned. The only way to shop such sales IMHO. Thanks E.S., for Sharing Your World and for not biting ME in the butt (figuratively of course. This IS on line after all) for ‘freely borrowing’ your fingerpainting child image for one of my endless SYW banners… I did give y’all credit and you can pass that along if the creator of that image comes roaring out of the ether…
I think most of the Black Friday customers are rabid and/or stoned… and the latter especially for one customer a couple years ago who seemed pretty exasperated by the whole experience and told me upon leaving the store that she “just came to buy a pair of shoes and had no idea any of this was going on.” Huh, what!?!?
I felt extremely honored to have inspired a SYW badge, and I’m sure whoever took the picture of that fingerpainting kid would feel likewise. I only had one image creator ever (in 8 years of “thievery”) contact me to remove a photo of theirs I used… and it was none other than a picture of a “Magic Fingers” vibrating bed machine you’d find at any sleazy motel. Gotta be careful with classy images like that…
ES,
I worried about using memes and photos and such until my tech guy told me not to worry so much about it. I think that if they already haven’t, someone will figure out how to control images so that they disappear (which some have on several of my various posts.) It’s all out-of-control, I tell ya!
I don’t bother other dogs, but my sleeping dog never lies…he’s truthful! I try and get the majority of my shopping finished prior to Black Friday. I sleep in on that day. Then I go back for Thanksgiving leftovers. Mmm…As a writer, I shouldn’t block out anything, especially gross pet names people give each other; but there’s the cringe factor to consider and so, yep, they’re blocked. I’ll do my best to try and remember cringey pet names in the future. What are some of the worst you’ve heard? I dance on the inside to music that only I can hear. 🙂 Have a great week, my friend! Mona
It’s a free for all out there in digital photo land. Look how many people became “stars” in memes who I’m sure would rather they didn’t. There’s no more sleeping in on Black Friday since it starts on Thursday now. It’s more like just staying at the table rather than in bed…
Thank you for the lovely photo of Lady Mitzi poledancing.
The Finnish speciality is to stand in a queue for 12 hours in dark and freezing cold weather at night, when a mall gives 100 free buckets for the first ones. Those queues are long, the last ones are many blocks away. I have never than that, I like to sleep in the morning.
They used to make those idiot shoppers stand outside in long lines in the cold here, but there were too many accidents with people getting hurt and even killed trying to run inside at the same time… so now people come inside and get tickets and don’t even have to line up until the item is given away. They should make the sheep earn their cheap, crappy Black Friday stuff…
What could be so important to buy you should wait hours outside. These people can’t be poor, because they no money to buy anything, is it just terrible greediness?
Terrible, terrible greediness. They complain about the sales being on the evening of Thanksgiving holiday now, yet they still come and they still line up and they still give up their holiday because they just can’t help themselves…
And they buy everything they don’t need.
I liked square dancing when I was in grade school. We kids complained at first, but later we came in early to dance. I live in the suburbs.
I’ve never shopped on Black Friday. I don’t like to shop.
I don’t think any of us kids like square dancing. And if anyone did, they probably got their ass kicked by the others on the playground…
Perhaps it was just us nerd types. 🙂
I knew somebody who named there dog Mark. Or maybe it was Eric? Anyway, it was stupid.
It does seem weird to give pets generic human names. Probably the same people who name their kids Dweezil and Moon Unit…
This made me laugh.
I have one question for anyone willing to answer it. Why does the lovely witch at the top of the page have brown plastic grocery bags under her top? Is she nursing? Waiting for rain? One of those people who sweats a lot?
I’m not sure what that accessory is…. and I did notice it since it was part of the gag. Perhaps it is merely an extra layer of protection to keep the witch’s tit from getting too cold. Which raises the question, can you get ice cream from a witch’s tit?
We’ve sem to have lost more than just the true meaning of Thanksgiving. Gobble, gobble. 🦃
Thanksgiving had a true meaning? Who knew?
You know, I have never shopped on “black” (racist?) Friday? I’ve never needed ANYTHING enough to wait in line to buy it. Hopefully, I never will.
The origin of the name Black Friday supposedly stems from the fact that it was the day that a retail store’s bottom line finally went into the black after operating at a loss for the majority of the year. There isn’t really any truth to that… especially since Black Friday sales mostly involve loss leaders. Retail makes it real profits in December, especially the weekend before Christmas. I’ve seen it firsthand year after year. It’s like people just need to buy anything and everything on December 20-something. Sheep! Baaaaa!!!
I look like a square when I dance. Does that count?
I think so. You might still need to dress up like a cowboy, though…
Holy crap, I remember having to do square dancing in PE in elementary school too! The crazy part is I that I was living in NY at the time, which just seems like a highly unlikely place for anyone to be square dancing. I guess maybe our PE teachers figured it was their duty to expose us to a variety of different styles. Personally, I would have taken dodgeball over that any day! 😀
I’m one of the few misfit geeky kids who LOVED dodgeball! I was sneaky good at most sports despite being one of the last ones picked. It’s too bad I couldn’t have been picked at all for square dancing…