👋 Hi fellow dumdums,

Have you ever stared at a blank slide, doc, or canvas and thought, “Everything I dream up feels like a rerun”?

Welcome to the club, my friend.

Originality can be less lightning bolt, and more like a Lego pile where we snap little bits together, tilt our heads, and marvel when the dragon suddenly looks new.

Here is a juicy secret I only tripped over last week while doom‑scrolling the internet:

Shakespeare, the poster child for creative genius, was basically a professional cut‑and‑paste artist.

He lifted tragedies from Boccaccio, swiped English history from Holinshed, and pinched jokes from Plautus. Then he sprinkled in sharper sword fights and filthier puns, and people threw roses at his feet.

What Shakespeare did was like Aunt Patty swiping Mom’s carrot‑cake recipe, sneaking in pickled pineapple, rechristening it Patty’s Pandemonium Pie, and setting the family reunion on fire with fork fights, frosting tears, and one cousin storming off with a Tupperware.

But honestly, good on Aunt Patty. That cake was 🔥 

Exhibit A‑ish: Three glorious remixes

Kogi Korean BBQ Tacos!!!
In 2008, Roy Choi jammed Korean short‑rib into a corn tortilla, parked a truck, and tweeted the coordinates. The mash‑up tasted like Los Angeles itself—half K‑pop, half mariachi—and ignited the modern food‑truck boom. Same tortilla, new tongue‑twister.

372 Samples of Pure Musical Joy
Mash‑up maestro Gregg Gillis stitched together fragments of 372 pop songs for his incendiary album All Day. It’s theft on paper, but alchemy in headphones—transforming familiar hooks into something nobody’s mom can quite Shazam.

CRISPR: Stealing from Nature to Edit Nature
Bacteria defend themselves by filing mug‑shots of past viruses inside their DNA, then unleashing Cas enzymes—molecular scissors—whenever a matching invader shows up. Jennifer  Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier peeked at that microbial playbook, swiped the guide‑RNA‑plus‑Cas9 combo, and rewired it so the “most‑wanted” sequence can be any 20 letters we choose. Same scissors, new target: now we can snip sickle‑cell mutations, tweak tomatoes, or write glow‑in‑the‑dark poetry in yeast. That’s not copy‑and‑paste. It’s copy‑and‑upgrade.

Dumb Word of the Day: Cento

Pronounced: CHEN‑toh (noun) — rhymes with “went‑oh,” as in “I went‑oh and plagiarized politely.”

Meaning: A poem (or prose nugget) quilted entirely from lines lifted off other works—a sanctioned literary smash‑and‑grab. Think ransom note, but with scansion.

Why it’s the poster child for today’s theme
A cento is not copying, it is copy‑curating. You grab Shakespeare’s thunder, Frost’s snowy lane, Beyoncé’s hot sauce, stitch them end to end, and out pops something no one has heard before, yet it feels oddly familiar. The result is legal(ish), cheeky, and proof that originality often wears hand‑me‑down sleeves.

Try it in a sentence
“Karen’s wedding vows were a cento of Nicholas Sparks, Yoda grammar, and Olive Garden ads. Guests sobbed, then craved breadsticks.”

(Bonus The Latin root means “patchwork cloak,” so ancient Romans basically invented the thrift‑store remix.)

Dumb Challenge of the Week
The 30‑Minute Remix

1. Pick something ordinary—a recipe, a slide deck, your boss’s motivational poster.

2. Copy it shamelessly.

3. Alter three elements (medium, tone, context).

4. Share the remix with one unsuspecting human. If they blink twice and say, “Wait—how did you even think of that?” you’ve nailed the assignment.

Essentially: Copy. Tweak. Serve it hot.