A Sincere Apology From Cracked to the Daily Mail
Look, we're not conceited enough to believe that Cracked is the only website you read. We acknowledge that we are but one potato among many in the Great Garden of Internet, a mere tuber overshadowed by the tumescent and terrible Sequoia of Porno.
"I require a steady diet of sunlight, fresh water, and anal."
Simply put, we don't expect you to use Cracked for all of your Internet needs. For example, we don't really do weather. None of our staffers are accredited meteorologists, so the best we can forecast is "all Earth weather, every day, until the sun becomes a red giant and annihilates our planet a few billion years from now."
"Expect sun until you go extinct or evolve into something incomprehensible."
Similarly, we don't subscribe to the "just pull sentences out of our asses and pretend it's real news" school of Internet writing, so we understand if you require the British tabloid The Daily Mail for your daily fix of ass-sentences.
And if you were reading The Daily Mail this past Sunday, you may have read the article "World's Worst Tourists Revealed" by DM writer Ruth Styles. This piece was noteworthy in that it was a carbon copy of "5 Tourists Who Managed to Be the Worst People in the World," an article Cracked contributor XJ Selman wrote for this very site this past Saturday.
Now, given The Daily Mail's track record of subtracting its own readership's IQ points and sympathizing with Adolf Hitler, some folks assumed that DM had ripped us off. Heck, even The Daily Mail seemed to have a crisis of faith and eventually cited Cracked as a contributor to Ruth Styles' article (in a tiny font, three paragraphs in).
Such a gesture was unnecessary, as we at Cracked are in the wrong here. Yes, our Saturday article flat-out plagiarized The Daily Mail's Sunday article. But how did this happen?
You see, when you sign up to write articles for Cracked -- which absolutely anyone can do, more information on that here -- you don't simply get the opportunity to pen monkeyshines for one of the most popular comedy websites on the planet. No, a singing jewel will descend from the heavens and mystically bless you with fabulous space-time powers.
"Dick jokes last so long,
Even after you're gone"
We're not 100 percent sure why this happens, but it does. And as a result, the Cracked editorial board has been forced to place a strict ban on what we colloquially call "timefoolery" (or "sportsalmanacking"). In other words, all contributors are forbidden from using their Time-Lord abilities to assist in the research or writing of articles. Otherwise, our site would just be a laundry list of tomorrow's lotto numbers and excerpts from William Shakespeare's upcoming play. (Spoiler alert: He was Thomas Pynchon all along!)
Most Cracked writers comply with these rules. But every once in a blue moon, we catch an author stealing an article from the future and passing it off as his or her own in the present. Hermit Crab Enthusiast and American Ass Quarterly have been past targets for these chrono-plagiarists -- we're sad, embarrassed, and sorry to add The Daily Mail to this list. As is company policy, the offending author has been sentenced to a week in the company of the singing jewel's cousin, the gemstone that screams the F-word.
"This is fucking outrageous! Fucking, fucking, fucking outrageous!"
So we'd like to solemnly apologize to The Daily Mail and Ruth Styles for this editorial oversight. We know plagiarism when we see it -- for example, John McCain absolutely ganked his talking points about Edward Snowden from this Cracked article -- and The Daily Mail and Ruth Styles did not commit plagiarism here. And to those readers who remain skeptical, we ask you this: What's less implausible?
A) A flying sapphire with the larynx of a thousand climaxing angels, or
B) That someone would plagiarize an article from a website that millions of people read and, less than 24 hours later, submit it to another website with a readership in the millions (and hope that nobody notices)?
And if it weren't for headlines like this, a million lives would hang in the balance EVERY DAY.
Exactly: the singing jewel! I mean, you'd have to be some borderline mythic genus of total dumbfuck with the career aspirations of a dead dog to pull the other one. We at Cracked wish all the best to The Daily Mail, Ruth Styles, and the spooooky ghost of William Randolph Hearst.
EDITORIAL NOTE: TO PREVENT JEOPARDIZING THE SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM ANY FURTHER, WE HAVE REFRAINED FROM LINKING TO THE DAILY MAIL'S ORIGINAL ARTICLE.
Cyriaque Lamar is an editor here at Cracked. You can find him on Twitter.
