This is too funny. I wanted to check on Paul McCain's plagiarism. The site did not come up from an ordinary link at LaughQuest. Apparently only a mirror site was working, so I found that and called up a few posts.
I saw the Constantine post again, so I Googled part of it, with a typo, to see what would come up. Note that this is exactly what I found at this time, the same on two blogs at once.
McCain CyberBrethren: - 69.195.110.196.
"Constantine took an active interest in the life and teachings of the church and. He called the First Council of Nicaea in 325 at which Saint Athanasius and others defended and defined orthodox Christianity."
Aardvark Alley:
Constantine took an active interest in the life and teachings of the church and. He called the First Council of Nicaea in 325 at which Saint Athanasius and others defended and defined orthodox Christianity." AA has two links in the second sentence, which might have been too revealing if McCain had left them in.
When you see it, you will know. AA broke off the sentence at "and." McCain did the same thing. That was a quick copy and paste. If I want format code to drop out, I copy blog text into WordPad, which drops colors, links, and fonts. There is a tool in Blogger, a T with a red x, that also does this.
Nobody can accidentally write the same words in a row. I used to laugh at students who gave me material copied directly from Wikipedia. Several student essays had this classic copying error in them, not unlike McCain's:
The ambitious Holly became increasingly interested in the New York music/recording/publishing scene, while his band mates wanted to go back home to Lubbock.[citation needed]
I find it hilarious that someone would leave in an obvious editing note when his own material is seriously lacking in research or editing - just like McCain's.
Since McCain has an established practice of copying old material and pretending it is his, or masking the source in various clever ways, I have to assume that McCain copied AA.
Using more than five words in a row from a source should be marked with quotation marks or a similar device, such as indenting an entire block quotation.
I remember when McCain lectured everyone on good blogging practices. That is an example of irony.
