Wednesday, December 9, 2009

One bright Frazz episode

Frazz
Today’s Frazz comes from real life, and it’s not what you think. Sure, I get as annoyed as the next guy by drivers who seem determined to get their money’s worth out of their bright lights – it seems so selfish, like their ability to drive employing functional vision trumps your ability to drive employing functional vision – but I try to the very wise credo, "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.” (This supposedly coined by none other than Napoleon Bonaparte, though it sounds an awful lot like Goethe’s "...misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent." I’m tempted to say he stole it, but I’m kind of locked into considering that he probably just thought he made it up and didn’t get around to checking it out.)

No, this came from my friendship with Eric, who is way faster and smarter than I am in spite of (he claims) the world’s worst training and study habits. Maybe he’s right; at least he stands to have inherited some very good genes. I know his mother and she’s brilliant, and his father or uncle or somebody worked with the NIH and was one of the early pioneers in light therapy for seasonal affective disorder. The research timed out such that when Eric was in college at St. Lawrence University, which is as far north as it sounds, he made it through the long, dark winters with the aid of one of those super-bright therapy lights. Unconfirmed reports from NASA suggest you could see his dorm room from space.

So that’s the inspiration for today’s Frazz, and why Frazz’s t-shirt is sporting the St. Lawrence University seal. I hope they don't mind. I didn't mean anything by it. I'm just really incompetent at checking whether there might be any restrictions.

2 comments:

veloben said...

I'm just really incompetent at checking whether there might be any restrictions.

Your local public library could help you overcome that fact checking problem.

La Professora said...

I'm just really incompetent at checking whether there might be any restrictions.

Not that this should count as legal advice, but Frazz's shirt logo could be considered "fair use" under copyright law as you are using it as symbolic commentary. It could, if you stretch the concept a bit, also fall under the parody/satire exception.

See http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/ for clarification.