Alone for the Holidays? Paint the Bathroom -- or Plagiarize.

This morning's "Feeling Fit" tab in the Charlotte Sun-Herald features Barbara Pierce tucking bits and pieces of an Internet site, eHow.com,  into a seasonal feature: "Alone for the holidays?  Meet the challenge."  If Pierce is on someone's gift-giving list, she needs a good book on ethics, attribution, and the fundamentals of research.

In a perverse way, however, Pierce's plagiarism is less terrifying than the advice she makes up.  The retired social worker advises lonely readers to  “think about the reasons you are alone.”

And, if contemplating the reasons one is alone on a major family holiday isn’t cheering, Pierce asks readers to answer the question, “if you are alone because you don’t have a partner, why don’t you have one?”

But to really feel good about being alone, Pierce advises cleaning out a closet and painting the bathroom.  And if that is still not cheerful enough, “cry,”  perform a “ritual of remembrance,” spend the day at a nursing home or animal shelter, and finish some old needlework. Oh, joy!

Plagiarism by Pierce isn't the only "Feeling Fit" item this week that has its roots in the Internet.

Regular columnist Tom Cappiello couldn't figure out how to express simple ideas using his own words even though he's describing a singer he really likes.

Cappiello needs to learn that writing "according to several sources on the Internet" in the fourth paragraph is not a license to cut and paste Wikipedia a  couple of paragraphs later.