Let’s call it an honest mistake

Oops: A draft version of an honor code to deter cheating and plagiarism at a Texas university appears to plagiarize another school’s code. The student currently in charge of the project says the missing attribution was an oversight. Either that, or the earlier participants somehow kept their fingers crossed while they typed the code.

Also on the subject of honesty, a 67-year-old has written Dear Abby to ask when it’s permissible to start telling off “low-life” relatives. Our answer: Right before you enter the Witness Protection Program.

From the research department: On this day in 1880, Wabash, Ind., became the first town in the world to use electric lighting. The city’s Web site includes an 1880 newspaper article that praises the light as the cheapest in the world and the City Council as “the most careful and judicious body of men in the state as well as the most enterprising.”

Those probably aren’t the words the people of Wabash use to describe elected officials when they open their electricity bills nowadays.

Ooh, shiny: Today Kristi O’Harran writes about an Everett woman who has a 9 1/2-inch-tall pile of used staples in a bowl on her desk at work. It took 16 years for the pile to get that high, and it will probably continue to grow — as long as she never has a co-worker with a magnet collection.