Back in the 1990s when Tom Spurgeon was editing The Comics Journal, he was kind enough to publish some of my short comics reviews. Since the irascible publisher of the magazine was named Gary “a man should be judged by the quality of his enemies” Groth, some people thought my byline was actually his nom de plume. This led me to write an About the Contributors note reading, “Gil Roth is not a clever pseudonym for Gary Groth. In fact, he’s not very clever at all.”
More recently, and for the same reason, I was convinced that the “comic” strip Gil Thorp is a bizarre prank targeting me, and only me. (Okay, and him and him.)
But none of these odd connections can top the incredible screwup that took place last week, when a drug company’s outside law-firm accidentally e-mailed secret documents about a government negotiation . . . to a pharma-writer at the New York Times. Portfolio, take it away!
When the New York Times broke the story last week that Eli Lilly & Co. was in confidential settlement talks with the government, angry calls flew behind the scenes as the drug giant’s executives accused federal officials of leaking the information.
As the company’s lawyers began turning over rocks closer to home, however, they discovered what could be called A Nightmare on Email Street, a pharmaceutical consultant told Portfolio.com. One of its outside lawyers at Philadelphia-based Pepper Hamilton had mistakenly emailed confidential information on the talks to Times reporter Alex Berenson instead of Bradford Berenson, her co-counsel at Sidley Austin. . . .
Proving that
- the auto-complete function was obviously designed by Satan (or Microsoft)
- a man should be judged by the quality of his mistaken identity
(hat tip to Pharmalot and S&A)
(UPDATE: Dammit! I knew this was too good to be true!)
, and Osamu Tezuka’s 
, by Carbon / Silicon
and caught 
and half (okay, maybe a third) of 
exists. Now we can find out whether the best way to avoid traffic and still be seen at Lakers games is