For 15 years, BC, (Before Computer) I put out a little silly holiday season greeting each December in the form of a pocket-size gagged-up newspaper. It was an actual paper thing, with articles and pictures pasted in position with actual white paste, copied on actual Christmas-green paper, folded and inserted into actual, hand-addressed envelopes, with actual tongue-licked stamps, hauled to the actual post office, and actually mailed at considerable expense to nearly a hundred actual friends, relatives and colleagues each year, as stated above… for 15 years. The taxing syntax of that sentence indicates the exhaustion of the annual effort, which I couldn’t get out of until so many people actually begged to be on my mailing list that I was forced to sever my connection with the post office, and post the thing on the internet, where it resides to this day at www.genedeitch.com and is occasionally up-dated.
I wouldn’t even mention this to you, except that on the last day of May, 2012, when digging in my dungeon for anything at all interesting, I came across a gag drawing I made 22 years earlier, that might be marginally amusing. I showed it to my perceptive blog techie, Hary Jordanov. He didn’t laugh.
“Gene, you’ll make fool of yourself with this. That gag’s been all over the internet. I saw the same idea over ten years ago!” (I told you he is perceptive.) He quickly pulled four versions onto my computer screen. I nearly blacked out.
“Come on!” I yelped. “These are not just four other guys with the same idea. These are word-for-word, image-for-image knock offs of my 22 year old drawing!
Was my 1991 quickie gag better than I thought, or is it that toilet humor is a sure winner? Should I have copyrighted it? That t-shirt gimmick could actually make money!
In this detail of my old drawing, you can see the hurried white-out correction fluid, the pasted on labels, and the unmistakable old time dot-matrix printing. I did a later version with the title header, “Understanding Computer Technology,” over the same 1991 drawing,” and emailed it to a few people. It was probably from that later email version that these guys stole it.)
So toilet t-shirt marketing is flushed down the drain for me, but listen here, you all: everything in “Roll The Credits” is copyrighted!!!