WEST CHESTER, Penna. – Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards and Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan will turn to the courts to seek redress for their current misfortunes, The Wall Street Journal reported this morning.
Mr. Richards suffered a concussion when he fell out of a coconut tree at the Wakaya Club resort in Fiji. Ms Viswanathan suffered loss of face—and lucrative book and movie contracts—when she admitted she had unconsciously plagiarized the work of another author. Both Mr. Richards and Ms. Viswanathan will claim they were the victims of attractive nuisances.
A source close to the Rolling Stones said Mr. Richards will argue that no-trespassing signs should have been displayed prominently on all the coconut trees at the Wakaya Club. Mr. Richards, 62, will further argue that the trees should have been posted with no-climbing-when-inebriated signs and with signs warning that concussions are frequently associated with falls out of trees.
No dollar amount has been set for Mr. Richards’ suit, but legal experts believe a low-seven-figure amount is a reasonable estimate. Mr. Richards has been afflicted with slurred speech, blurred vision, inappropriate laughter, and—for the first time in his life—persistent hangovers since his fall.
Ms. Viswanathan, 19, will sue Megan McCafferty, author of Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings, over the numerous and distinct similarities between those books and Ms. Viswanathan’s first novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life.
According to an editor at Little, Brown and Company who did not wish to be identified, “Kaavya was devastated when she was informed of the blatant similarities between her work and Ms. McCafferty’s. Kaavya felt especially betrayed because Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings, despite the coarseness of their titles, were among her favorite books in high school, and she read them several times.”
At first Ms. Viswanathan was at a loss to explain how so much of Ms. McCafferty’s writing had found its way into How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life, but after being tormented for several says by the Death Cab for Cutie song “Different Names for the Same Thing,” which Ms. Viswanathan could not get out of her head, she realized she was the victim of a written earwig.
Although earwigs are, technically speaking, songs that lodge themselves in our brains and resist all efforts to evict them, Ms. Viswanathan will argue that Ms. McCafferty’s written words were earwigs because they were “consciously and deliberately fashioned to burrow into the subconscious of their readers.”
Ms. Viswanathan may also name Meg Cabot, author of The Princess Diaries, and Sophie Kinsella, author of Can You Keep a Secret?, as codefendants in her suit because passages from those books have also appeared in Opal Mehta.
In other news, folk singer Pete Seeger, who turns eighty-seven today, plans to record “Highway’s Jammed with Broken Heroes on a Last Chance Power Drive,” a folk-oriented album of twelve cover versions of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band songs.
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