So Wednesday morning I wrote a column making fun of Maureen Dowd (I know, low hanging fruit), where I composed a new Maureen Dowd column by extracting the ridiculous sentences from all of her previous columns in the past year and reassembling them. I described it thusly:

In fact, as I’ve theorized for some time now, Dowd’s aimlessness has become so pronounced that it seems as though her florid sentences could be arranged at random, with little discernible difference to her usual columns. The opening of the New York Times archives has finally given me the opportunity to test this hypothesis.
I spent an afternoon reading Dowd’s columns from the past year, and have produced the world’s first op-ed column mash-up, or MoDo Mad-Libs.

This morning I got an email from a reader that said, “Tell Joel Stein to quit your stealing your ideas.” Here’s Joel Stein in today’s LA Times:

After all these years of Coultering, people still get riled up over her obvious attempts to make us mad. Which makes me horribly jealous. Just how easy is it for Coulter to offend someone? Would any words from her mouth do the trick? To test this theory, I developed the Ann Coulter Mad Libs.™

I went on to write a fake column entitled “Lost in Hillaryland by Maureen Dowd;” Joel’s was “Liberals Are Wusses by Ann Coulter.” Okay so I’m not going to pounce on Joel because Mad-Libs as a satirical device isn’t the most novel thing out there — though I like to think my “mash-up” put a new spin on it — and there certainly exists the possibility he came up with the idea all by himself. But two days apart? Really?