A few months ago, I reported that a student at Brigham Young University had written a letter to the editor of the school paper in which he swiped a joke of mine that I’d used in a “Snide Remarks” column in that very paper several years earlier. In the course of telling you about this, I also quoted (and made fun of) a letter that someone had written in response to the first guy’s letter, offended by some other, non-stolen joke he had made.

Well, the writer of the second letter has written to tell me this:

I googled my name for fun and was surprised to see that I’ve become “famous” for my “angry letter” in the Daily Universe. I just wanted you to know that Jon Harmon [the guy who wrote the first letter] happens to be my roommate and he wrote his letter so he could get out of a final…and I wrote mine as a joke to see if it would get published…I guess I suceeded in my endevor to appear as a “typical angry BYU student.” Just thought you might want to know.

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The studios have done a lot of comically inept things to combat movie piracy, but the funniest thing I’ve seen yet happened last week at the press screening for “Ratatouille.”

There was a sign-in sheet, which is common enough. You had to write down your name and what outlet you work for — makes sense. And then they wanted one additional piece of information: your driver’s license number.

This was so absurd that I was momentarily baffled, but I soon compiled a mental list of all the reasons that it was stupid to ask for the critics’ driver’s license numbers.

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